Hey guys. So, we need to have ourselves a little chat.
I am dirt poor. I have been dirt poor for a while now, but have scraped life together through various means and such. I have continued to pay our annual billing for this place on my own, to the tune of a little over $80 a year, for a long time. But I'm at the point where I just can't afford it. I got a notice that billing was coming due again, as is our domain registration (which Pyro has taken care of, I believe with some donations from others), which is obviously a lot less. Either way, though, our frequency of use here has dropped a lot. A bunch of us have moved to the Discord channel (which replaced the IRC channel that a lot of us used more often as well), and yet despite that, we sort of like having the boards around as a place to touch base, make community announcements like this one, and give our infrequent visitors who just like to drop back in now and again to check in and see how life is going.
So how are you all feeling about the boards? We may potentially have another hosting solution from a friend, which would reduce us to just having to pay domain costs, and we're looking at seeing whether we can migrate things so that we don't lose all our post history here. Idol checked around and it looks like The_Minds_Eye is no more (thanks to a buyout or some such), so this is really all we've got.
How are you guys feeling about the boards? I know not everyone comes all the time, and some people post more than others. Not everyone necessarily wants to be part of a real-time environment like Discord, but that seems to be the way a lot of online communities have gone.
So I really just wanted to start this post and see what you all think. We love our community and don't want to lose it, or fragment it, but the boards have declined more and more as time has gone on, though there are still enough people who come by consistently enough to make me think that totally deep-sixing it would be a bad thing. Then again, it doesn't seem worth nearly $100 a year to keep running either, so something's gotta give. I can't keep paying for it, and hopefully we'll be able to come up with a solution that will alleviate that. But do you guys think we should keep it going? Should we transition to something else? Do you think having a real-time thing and a more traditional message board or something similar is good, or is it unnecessary?
Just want to get your thoughts. Thanks guys!
UPDATE -
To let you all know, the boards have officially moved hosts, thanks to one of our core members on the Discord (thanks blues!). So things should be able to continue to operate as normal at this point, with only the usual domain fees. But of course we might still have a conversation about the state of things around here. More than happy to hear any thoughts you have.
