Swedish furniture giant Ikea has ordered a popular fan website ikeahacker.net to stop running advertisements on the site or hand over its domain name, causing some backlash from Ikea fans.

Ikeahackers.net founder, who goes by the pseudonym Jules Yap, said she received a cease and desist letter from Ikea earlier this year arguing that her website infringed on the company's intellectual property.

The popular website was launched in 2006 and serves as a forum where fans send in photos of modified Ikea furniture and tips on how to repurpose the products.

The Kuala Lumpur-based blogger was asked by Ikea to voluntarily transfer the domain name to the company.

After much negotiation, Yap said Ikea agreed she could keep the domain name, as long as there were no advertisements on the website.

"Now by June 23, I would need to take down the ads, not earn any income and still advance their brand on this site. Wonderful!," she wrote on ikeahackers.net last week.

"I don't have an issue with them protecting their trademark, but I think they could have handled it better," Yap wrote.  "I am a person, not a corporation. A blogger who obviously is on their side. Could they not have talked to me like normal people do without issuing a C&D (cease and desist)?"

Yap said without being able to advertise, she wouldn't be able to continue to run the website, which over the last eight years has become her full-time job.

Yap said she planning to move the site to a new domain that doesn't mention "Ikea."

"I was a just crazy fan. In retrospect, a naive one too," she said. "It is not an excuse but that was just how it was when I registered IKEAhackers."

Ikeahackers.net fans criticize company's move

Ikeahackers.net fans took to social media to voice their criticism of the company's decision to go after the fan website.

Many upset “hackers” pointed out that Yap's website promoted Ikea's products for free.

Others said Ikea has managed to alienate some of its biggest supporters.