norbs wrote: ↑Tue Mar 21, 2023 11:09 am
God knows how many hours Kev has put in over the years.
It's not a huge amount of my time to be honest. Just updates when I feel like it. The last time I did serious work it was 2 hours but that was because the hosts updated the minimum php version and it broke the board version we were using but once I'd updated it was fine.
I'd be sad to see it go (it's the first or second page I look at every day!) but I can understand the cost implication for a relative handful of posts a week. The number of active people has dropped off a fair bit in the last couple of years. Having said that, 41 different people have visited this month alone. A lot of forums would kill for that!
Posting is largely in off topic, real racing, cars, air, tv/film, cycling and occasionally music, racing games and hilariarse.
None of the racing team forums have been posted in for at least 2 years (I guess that's all moved to discord).
We could maybe 'archive' all the forums with nothing new since, say, 2020 by moving them to the bottom of the index page and then just bunch the active ones together at the top. That might encourage a bit more posting. Could do a mass mail 'calling all ARSEs' to see if people want to come back but sometimes real life gets in the way and people move on, that's only natural. I'm sure we've all drifted away from forums we used to read all the time.
I've never used discord so I can't comment on how the site would look and work with that but I wouldn't be averse to signing up to it if we could keep the chat going.
We're only about 18 months away from this thing running for 20 years. That's quite an achievement for a few blokes racing pixelated 60's F1 cars around old tracks with dodgy physics and big lag times! Jeez we could gradually morph it in to a pensioners forum
But if we did decide to shut down, I would absolutely get a database backup and have a local copy so that if anyone wanted a reminder of an old topic I could dig it out and send them a PDF or similar.