MacWereld.nl was one of Apple’s largest news websites in the Netherlands from 2005 to 2012 and was published at a time when Apple’s products were not yet mainstream. Apple fans in the Netherlands each had their own favourite fan site and rivalry between websites and forums regularly occurred.

In addition to the news, the website offered the second largest Mac forum in the Netherlands, a second-hand Mac market and a job site with Apple-related vacancies.

Founder and editor-in-chief Martin van Spanje focused the news pages on “less-mainstream” topics, including technology, privacy and security, Apple’s policies and other underexposed issues.

Modpoints and karma

The website had a unique moderation system where users could give each other’s comments points, called “modpoints”. This allowed “karma” to be increased, but also to be broken down. With negative karma, posts were automatically hidden or the user could not post anything at all for 24 hours. With positive karma, a reputation was built. Thanks to this system, virtually no manual moderation was needed and almost no users had to be banned.

The forum was also equipped with the same system, and was a unique and “self-cleaning” forum. For example, signatures were not possible (due to being annoying) and posts older than two years automatically disappeared, simply because information and tips about technology are quickly outdated and there was a preference not to show years old, irrelevant information.

There was also the “Ball Pit” in which everything was allowed. In this forum section, the posts disappeared after a month of inactivity. This started users to bump their own topics to prevent their old posts from disappearing. This sometimes led to bump matches, but in the Ball Pit this was allowed.

Competitions

MacWereld.nl sometimes held competitions where prizes could be won by viewing rows of mysterious search pictures, each with a multiple choice answer. However, the answers were sometimes vague or there were several good answers possible, or there was only one answer that was “the least bad” which gave rise to huge discussions on the forum.

Sometimes the prizes to be won were so popular that some users created hundreds of new accounts just to enter the competition. Each account could only submit their answers once.

Further

The site was discontinued when the editor-in-chief started his own business and had no more time to put into it. It was also very difficult to find other editors who could use a matching, neutral, factual writing style.