The Last Post

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ANNOUNCEMENT -- PLEASE READ
Subforum: Site News & Updates
Pinned by: Jericho (Admin) -- June 3, 2016, 11:42 AM
Replies: 143 | Views: 2,307
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Jericho | Admin | Member since founding (2003) | Posts: 18,441 Jun 3, 2016, 11:42 AM

I have been putting off writing this for about six months.

The forum is shutting down. July 1 will be the last day. After that the domain will expire and the hosting account will close.

The reasons are the ones you would guess. Hosting costs $80/month. Ad revenue covers about $15 of that when it covers anything. Donations dried up in 2014. I have been paying the difference out of pocket for two years and I just cannot keep doing it. I have also been the sole active admin since Dave stepped down in 2013 and the sole moderator since Phantom and Axiom both went inactive last year. Running a forum alone is a job that does not pay, and I have a job that does, and the job that does is now taking 60 hours a week.

I tried to find someone to take over. Nobody wanted it. I tried to sell the domain and the database. Nobody wanted that either. I contacted three different archive projects and one said they would “consider it” and never got back to me.

I am sorry.

This place has been running since March 2003. Thirteen years. That is longer than some of my friendships and most of my jobs. I started it because I wanted a place to talk about this stuff with people who knew what they were talking about, and that is what it became, and it was better than I thought it would be, and I am going to miss it more than I know how to say without sounding like an idiot.

If you want to archive anything – threads, posts, PMs – do it before July 1. After that it is gone.

If you want to stay in touch, I will put up a page at the domain with my email and a Discord link. It will not be the same. I know.

– J

SleepyProfessor | Senior Member | Member since 2003 | Posts: 9,217 Jun 3, 2016, 11:58 AM

Shit.

I knew this was coming. I think we all knew. The numbers have been obvious for a year – five active posters in a good week, and three of them are me arguing with myself.

Jericho, you carried this place for two years on your own dime and you do not owe anyone an apology. You owe us the opposite of an apology. Whatever that is. A reverse apology. An apology from us to you for not stepping up when we should have.

I have been here since month two. My username is a joke about my first job out of grad school and I never changed it because you cannot change usernames on phpBB and I was too stubborn to make a new account. Thirteen years. My daughter was born in 2004. She is twelve. She has never known a world where this forum did not exist in the background of my life. That is insane and it is true.

I will be on the Discord but you are right, it will not be the same.

Axiom | Moderator (Inactive) | Member since 2004 | Posts: 6,802 Jun 3, 2016, 12:14 PM

I am here. I am reading this. I do not know what to say that is not going to sound like a eulogy so I will just say what is true:

This forum is the reason I work in the field I work in. I came here as a college sophomore who did not know anything and I left knowing enough to get my first real job, because the people here taught me things that were not in any curriculum. Dormouse answered a question I posted in 2005 with a three-thousand-word explanation that was better than anything in any textbook I had been assigned. I printed it out. I still have it.

I am sorry I went inactive. Life happened. That is not an excuse, it is just what happened.

Jericho – thank you. For everything. For thirteen years of keeping the lights on.

n0b0dy | Member since 2005 | Posts: 2,118 Jun 3, 2016, 12:31 PM

I have lurked more than I have posted. Probably a 10:1 ratio. I just want to say that I read this place every day for eleven years and it was part of my morning the way coffee is part of my morning and I do not know what I am going to read at 7 AM on July 2.

This is a stupid thing to be sad about. I am sad about it anyway.

dormouse | Senior Member | Member since 2003 | Posts: 14,891 | Location: Glasgow Jun 3, 2016, 01:03 PM

It is not stupid.

I have been thinking about what this place was and the closest I can get is: it was a room. Not a chatroom. A room. A room with a door and a window and regulars who sat in the same chairs. You walked in and you knew who was there by the style before you saw the username. You knew SleepyProfessor would be in the middle of three threads simultaneously. You knew Axiom would have flagged anything that needed flagging before you got there. You knew n0b0dy was reading everything and posting nothing, which is its own form of participation and a valuable one.

A platform is not a room. A platform is a corridor. You walk through it. Things appear and disappear. Nothing accumulates. You do not know who is in the corridor because everyone is walking the same direction and nobody is sitting down.

This was a room. We sat down. Some of us sat for thirteen years.

CyberVex | Member since 2008 | Posts: 471 Jun 3, 2016, 02:17 PM

I met my wife on this forum. Not through the forum, ON this forum. She corrected my terrible opinion in a thread in 2009 and I PM’d her to argue and we argued for six weeks and then we met for coffee and now we have a three-year-old.

The thread where she corrected me is still in the archive. I go back and reread it sometimes. It is embarrassing and it is the most important thing that ever happened to me.

After July 1 that thread is gone. The thread where my marriage started. Gone. Because the hosting costs $80 a month.

I should have donated more. I should have donated at all.

Jericho | Admin | Member since founding (2003) | Posts: 18,441 Jun 3, 2016, 03:45 PM

I am reading all of these. I do not have replies for all of them. Some of them I do not have replies for because I am at work and I cannot sit here crying at my desk for the obvious reasons.

CyberVex – I will pull that thread as an HTML archive and send it to you before we go dark. PM me the thread URL.

Everyone – the Discord link is in my signature now. It will not be the same. None of us are pretending it will be the same. But the people will be the same, and maybe that is the part that matters.

I do not know. I have been running this place for thirteen years and I still do not know what the part that matters is. I just know it mattered.

[Guest] Jun 3, 2016, 09:14 PM

I used to post here under a different name. Have not logged in for years, could not remember my password, and the email I registered with is dead. So I am posting as a guest.

I just want to say that I learned more from this forum than from my degree. That is not a figure of speech. There was a thread in 2007 where four people spent two weeks solving a problem that my professor said was unsolvable. They solved it. I brought the solution to class. My professor asked where I found it. I said “a forum.” He said “what forum?” I said the name. He had never heard of it. Of course he had not. Thirteen years and 18,000 members at peak and the whole thing ran on the dedication of one guy and the spare time of a few dozen regulars and it produced knowledge that a university could not.

Nobody will remember this place existed. There will be no Wikipedia article. There will be no retrospective. It will vanish the way ten thousand forums vanished before it – not with a bang, not with a whimper, but with a lapsed hosting payment and a thirty-day notice and 143 replies that nobody outside this thread will ever read.

I am sorry I left. I am sorry I forgot my password. I am sorry I am saying this as a guest.

[…]

[94 more replies]

Jericho | Admin | Member since founding (2003) | Posts: 18,442 Jul 1, 2016, 11:51 PM

Last post.

Thanks, everyone. For all of it.

Lights out.

503 Service Unavailable

The server is temporarily unable to service your request.
Please try again later.

There was no “later.” The 503 was a courtesy. The server was not temporarily unable. The server was off. The domain expired thirty days after that, and the registrar reclaimed it, and by September someone had parked a page of pharmaceutical ads on the URL, and by December even the pharmaceutical ads were gone. The Wayback Machine has eleven snapshots, none after 2014, none of them capturing the shutdown thread. Google’s cache held fragments for a few weeks. Then the crawler refreshed and the fragments dissolved. By 2017, no evidence remained that the forum had existed except the memories of the people who had been there, and memories are not searchable and memories are not linkable and memories are not evidence.

Eighteen thousand accounts. Fourteen years. Two million posts. Eighty dollars a month.

A civilization at the price of a utility bill, and nobody paid it, and now it is gone.