Dear UMSF Members,

It is with a heavy heart that I share the news that UnmannedSpaceflight will go dark at the beginning of January 2025.

Some of you may have seen this note from Nick just over a year ago alluding to long term challenges The Planetary Society had shared regarding the maintenance and hosting of the forum in its current form. Since then we have taken a close look at the technical state of the server and forum hosting software and have not been able to find either a technical or financial path forward to keep the forum operating.

For context, the Invision software itself is over a decade out of date and no upgrade path exists to either upgrade to current Invision board software, or migrate to other hosting platforms. Plans of migrating to a more inclusive URL have been on the backburner for over 10 years. Even if a path were obvious - finding new affordable hosting and migrating to run the forum independently of The Planetary Society would take a talented web developer a significant amount of time ( and thus money ) and admin team time to manage it ( which none have )

After talking with other veteran members of the admin team, we have therefore decided the better path forward is to give members 3 months notice to take copies of their attachments, discuss places they might like to hang out together in the future, and reminisce about some of the highlights of 20 years of stitching, mapping, discussion and adventure before bringing things in for a graceful landing on Jan 1, 2025.

I had no idea when spinning up a forum back in 2004 that it would last so long or that the breadth, depth and quality of creations and discourse would be anything like as incredible as it has been. For some, this place has literally been life changing. We’ve seen spacecraft, and people, come and go. Entire careers have sprouted from some of the out-of-this-world-ideation right here on these pages.

I want to once again give a huge thank you to Nick for being the de facto admin for more than a decade - without his care and attention the forum would have collapsed many years ago. Emily too deserve special mention for chaperoning this place when it became part of TPS. Jason, Ted, Dan, Glen, Stu, Bjorn, Mike and others have also been a major part of the UMSF story.

Further - I want to credit folks like Steve Squyres, Jim Bell, Alan Stern, John Spencer, Ralph Lorenz, Paolo Belluta, Mark Lemmon and others for sharing their time as part of this community or being pivotal in its origins and in doing so, inspiring others to keep the level of discourse as high as it has been for 20 amazing years.

So what’s next?

• New registrations are no longer being processed
• We will attempt to archive the forum as best we can around the beginning of December and upload it to archive.org (and will update this message with a link when it’s done )
• New attachments will be disabled at that time.
• For those that want to continue hanging out together - we’ve spun up a UMSF discord server ( https://discord.gg/hp3g3TKVRW ) - still an empty work in progress, but maybe folks might congregate there. Use the Ideas & Feedback channel there to discuss.
• A thread "Greatest Hits" has been spun up for people to share their favorite creations or discussions from the last 20 years.
• Another thread "Find me at...." has been spun up for people to share where they can be found moving forwards.

In closing - thank you all for being a part of this adventure....we’ll see you around the solar system somewhere.

Doug Ellison
Founder, UnmannedSpaceflight.com

Well that's a damn shame - this site is a unique treasure, and discord really can't replace it.
If it was a financial question, I wish they had started soliciting donations for keeping the site operating a long time ago (I've seen it done with other sites).

It's far more than that. UMSF has asked for, and raised, donations in the past. Several key donors ( and I was one ) have each put four-figure sums of money into keeping the place alive in the past. I'm sure something could be raised if the cap was handed around. However, there is no financial structure in place to collect, manage and spend that money outside of TPS which has said it's not in a position to support the forum anymore. I can't blame them...in terms of traffic and frankly, ROI, UMSF is long past making sense. Back in the peak of '05-'09, USMF was getting 2-4,000 posts a month. Now, it's 200-300.

The real problem now is the state of the forum backend. I've only recently taken a look at it ( I've been away from UMSF moderation for over a decade ) The Invision board is about 15 years out of date, the server is so full it doesn't have the space to take a backup of itself without crashing the forum. I tried a few months back and it broke the place. How much would it cost to fix that, convert the database to something newer, find new hosting, move to that, set it up and maintain it. That could cost thousand and thousands of dollars if it's even possible at all. There's nobody here with the time to manage that entire effort either. It would be irresponsible to ask for money without knowing how much is needed and there's nobody with the time to manage it and nothing in place to properly maintain the place moving forward.

It's been a good run - 20 years is far far longer than most communities like this ever last. There's nobody to blame - it's just outlasted its own ability to be maintained. To ask for money would be dishonest...because nobody can promise how much it will take to do the work to fix the place, and there's nobody to maintain/moderate it thereafter either.

It's far better to give people a heads up and have an orderly close out than to ask for money pretending there's a clear path forward to keeping the place alive.

I'm certainly not proposing discord replace it - I just offer it up as a place where people can hang out afterwards if they have nothing else.

It is a shame, very much so, but understandable. As the sign in the Shuttle Processing Facility said before the last STS flight: Don't cry because it's ending, be happy you were part of it (or words to that effect).

I'm not sure what new version of UMSF might be possible in future, I am not really up to date on things like that, being a bit fossilized. But I would sign on. Meanwhile I will be posting other space-related things on Mastodon:

https://mastodon.social/@PhilStooke

I have found that quite useful. I am doing a long series on Apollo at the moment but will add other things.

I see a few discussion threads opening up on Discord already and I will put some things in there too.

Phil

Sigh. I'll miss this place very much (though I, too, understand). It will be great if an archive is possible- there's so much history here. Thanks to all, especially Doug, for making it happen.

John

Let me know if there's anything I can help with in that regard. AFAIK archive.org can't/doesn't crawl into any forum topic so everything currently there is pretty useless (top-level topic links you can't navigate into.)

I hope people saved files they found interesting. I have been saving files forever which is why I now have about a gazillion gigabytes of stuff on assorted external devices.

Phil

Doug and others, it has been an honor to be part of this adventure. I apologize for not being an active poster for several years. Health issued forced me to leave driving rovers and leaving Mars. That was a *very* painful decision and since then I cannot even look at images from Mars, either past or from current missions. I have very fond memories of our discussions, collaborations and the people I met, either in person or virtually. I will leave a note of my wereabouts at the Find Me At thread.

20 Years. Wow.

Thank you Doug for all the memories.

Paolo

At the very least, a dump of all the attachments and the fairly modest sized SQL DB that drives the place are easy 'gets' which I would zip up and throw on archive.org - you're right that their waybackmachine snapshots are marginal at best.

I'm trying a few web-crawling-download tools to see how well they do....if anyone has recommendations in that area, that would be great.

I have so enjoyed this forum. Thanks to all of you for making it happen.

I really liked this forum. I think I found it when I looked for info on space probes as when I was still a kid. This server was full of info. I checked up on it, and then I left again. But when Perseverance landed, I remembered this forum and began looking it up daily for updates. I mostly kept that up until now. I never joined, never really had anything of value to say, but mid 2023 I had a change of hearth. I joined. The place was already pretty broken when that happened. It accepted no gmail address, I had to use my high school one which I no longer have access to. And even then, no mod would see my request to join, so I had to DM Paul on Lemmy to get in.

That was over a year ago. Technically others have joined after, but none of them ever posted anything. So basically I'm the newest member, despite having joined over a year ago. That also kinda makes me the last member. There were many signs. Only one guy left moderating everything. The site looking its age. And all the broken stuff, with the lack of an https certification and all. Plus the lack of new members. I can't say I didn't see this coming.

Sigh This site did a lot for me. It informed me about space for many years, and without it I would have probably never be as interested in it as I am. When I had to pick a topic for my Pre-scientific-paper for my high school final exams, I picked Curiosity, inspired by this very forum. And while I could not use it as a source, it is after all just a forum, it gave me the base knowledge to build on. I got an A. I owe you all that. So I'd like to say thank you. Thank you all for this wonderful forum, with all the wonderful images and information about the wast world of robotic spaceflight, and let's make the most out of the discord server.

This is Wikimapia and Google Earth Community all over again for me! It is a shame especially with Europa Clipper and Hera about to launch in the next couple weeks. I joined back in 2009 when I went by "antdoghalo" on the internet. I have always been interested in space. I used to have a huge collection of space books as a kid but overtime they got torn and I really got into space back in 2002 when watching BBC The Planets and seeing news on Space.com. I joined here, followed Spirits misfortunes and watched as images came in from Dawn and New Horizons years later just months apart.

Thanks Dj for creating a discord! I hope y'all join it even if many of you are older "boomers" who may not be into that stuff. Its super easy to post into once you get the hang of it even when compared to forums. (Discord itself works a lot like a forum) Just avoid any random accounts offering "free nitro".

Thanks for all the great memories in space exploration!!!

"To the Moon, Mars, and Beyond"

I almost couldn't believe the email, when it came, but then I saw the post and it was true. I have been reading this place since 2004, and registered 6 years later after finally getting the courage to post. Apart from some (very gentle!) moderation reminders, it has been smooth sailing every since, on this journey through our local cosmos.

A shame that so many exciting events won't be covered here, but it was too much to hope it would last forever. Another casualty of the social media era which swamped the old forum system of the 2000s, though caused just as much by the general decline in activity as in the wealth of other places with which it competes. I have certainly stopped myself before posting many times, since I felt it couldn't possibly compete with the contributions of the experts. The emphasis here has always been on quality, not quantity of posts, and the ways in which drama was avoided has always struck me as another success of this place. Other places used upvote/downvote systems to do this, but UMSF has always done it manually to great success.

I don't know if I can replace it; I have never touched Discord up to now; still a few months to decide.

One final question; what will happen to the domain name now? I hope it isn't given over to a squatter like mer.rlproject! A fate worse than death....

Thank you very much for the kind words, Doug. When I first found UMSF while looking for thesis information & ideas back in (egad) 2005, I was dazzled by the sheer scope, and depth of discourse. After decades as a solitary space nerd it was literally a Finding My People experience. I would never have dared to dream that someday I would be an admin here!

And that was literally true. I have made IRL friends here--you among them, proud to say. I have learned and beheld with wonder SO much more than I ever had before in the dark days of desperately searching for images and information beyond just 'gee whiz' pop media articles about planetary exploration...and shared that indescribably great feeling with others who understood that too. There was nothing better than landing days on Mars on UMSF!

Of course, one of the best things the Forum did was transform the lives of some in a dramatically positive way. As a direct result of UMSF becoming a true pro-am community, JPL picked up some high-powered talent from our membership (including our founder! ) UMSF also transformed how the interested and engaged public interacted with the professional space community. The Juno mission approached the Forum to process JunoCam imagery, and the efforts of our imagewizards (shout out to Kevin Gill!) have become internationally iconic.

I could go on and on and on, but so could a great many other people...and that's what counts the most by far. UMSF was an exceedingly rare example of the Law of Unintended Consequences breaking good in all ways, and I will forever be proud of being a small part of it all. Thank you for creating it, Doug, and my deepest thanks to all of you for the knowledge, the dazzling imagery, and the pervasive sense of wonder over the years.

I really want to thank you all. The follow-up of several missions was fascinating and very informative.

Thanks!

This site and its incredible community has been a place I visit daily (often more!) for more than 15 years. I've gained many fond memories and much knowledge from this forum and its community. I will be sad to see it go, but I understand the reasoning. I want to give special praise to the moderators / admins / staff for keeping this a high signal-to-noise environment where nonsense was not tolerated. It made this a place where I looked forward to visiting and knew that when I did so, there would be something of value to read.

50% of the MSL ECAM PUL team is UMSF veterans. There's only 4 in the team....but it's still 50%

Of which 100% now have successfully managed to miss a frame of a 12x1 upper tier

Every Thursday afternoon, the MSL Project Scientist Ashwin Vasavada does a ~25min science update for the team - and I don't think there's been a week I've ever seen it without Ashwin including a least one creation from here....usually Nev or Jan.

And we have absolutely put observations into plans knowing that this place would get their hands on it...and it's incredibly rewarding to see if happen when it works out.

Infrequent poster, but avid reader for pretty much the whole time. The forum has led me through a golden age of
unmanned interplanetary exploration, one that is still largely ignored and poorly reported by MSM.

Its very sad, although the reasons outlined are perfectly understandable. I have found that well moderated
forums are some of the most sane places on this increasingly balkanised and chaotic place we call the internet.
Sadly they are slowly going away.

Huge thanks to Doug and all the moderators over the years. I will pay special attention to the next three month's posts
and hope the quality and volume continue unabated until the end. I will also be following this thread and furiously
bookmarking new and alternative places to go

P

I've asked TPS if I can have control of the domain back and I'll setup some static page with links to whatever archive I can wrangle and maybe the discord server if it takes off. I'm sure there's be a dead period once the current USMF hosting expires - but fingers crossed we can at least not let the URL fall into evil hands


Fun fact...that orig rlproject.com URL I bought because of a then work-in-progress racing game called 'Racing Legends' and I was hoping to setup a community for it.

The racing game was never finished and I let the URL expire a long long long time ago....BUT....weirdly.....the devs behind it also made a 3DS Max plugin for making 3D terrain models from Google Earth data which I used when I started at JPL to make the terrain models that form the background of the realtime dish visualization in the DSN status screens in the JPL dark room and the static images on the web DSN Now page.

So.....the middle screen with the dish on it...that background terrain is derived from a mesh made with a tool made by the devs who were working on a title that inspired the original URL of this place . (And because the awesome guy who manages the Spaceflight Operations Facility here at JPL likes to troll me...yes...that's a picture of me on the right as well)

This really is a very high quality forum in terms of signal-to-noise ratio, with a real emphasise on discussing actual science. For that alone it should be sorely missed - the world needs more such discussions, and more of the attitude that leads to them, not less. For myself personally: I have learned so very much from reading the content here, and have had the chance to talk with people working on the projects which I otherwise only know from space news websites. It's given me a chance to engage with exploring the solar system in a way I probably wouldn't other wise have gotten. I earned my PhD while a member here, via a good many long nights sat up starting at either a vacuum chamber or a spreadsheet of results, and this place and the people I could speak with here, waiting in a tab down near the bottom of the screen, helped me to keep that passion for real investigation going. It is an internet forum that has actually been credited (along with many of its members) in real papers on planetary science - so I can say with evidence behind me that it really rose far above even the best expectations for a science forum.
As Doug says: Better to be happy to have been a part of it than sad it's ending. Thank you Doug, Nick, Emily and all the team.

See you all out there I hope,

Marsbug AKA Dr John Freeman

I came here in 2005 after the egroups lists "ISSDG" started dying (presumably after Yahoo bought them). Just for fun I tried to see what I could find from that list on archive.org, but since it was private there's no content, only metadata, even if you look at CSV and tar files. So all of that content is presumably "lost in time, like tears in rain."

It'd be nice to do better than that, but these forums that have dynamic content are typically hard to archive.

We can now add UMSF to the list of things that the Voyager space probes have outlived!

I came here in 2005 after the closure of rlproject.com. The sense of adventure during the MER days (then weeks/years/decades) is something I will always cherish, Mars now will always be a place I can visit in my mind as a result of the trip to the Columbia Hills and journey to Victoria then Endeavour.

UMSF has spent two decades as a favorite in my browser, and with few exceptions, I have checked in daily for 20 years.

"Till there are boot prints in the wheel tracks" keep on roving!

The closure of UMSF brings me bittersweet feelings. Sadness because of the end of so significant place but also happiness while remembering the 'journey' during all these years.

I still remember the times when I was looking for information about the MER Rovers Spirit & Opportunity back on 2005 (Wow! Almost 20 years ago!) and had a feeling like being 'alone in the universe'. It was a great pleasure to find UMSF and just realize that there was a significant group of people with similar interests on space than mine. At the beginning I was just in 'lurk mode' or ocasionally posting a comment or two but later on started collaborating to the forum with the route maps for both Spirit & Opportunity.
Times go by and other priorities appear, finally I went back to lurk mode but kept reading the forum almost daily.

As already said by others, "Don't cry because it's ending, be happy you were part of it". It was a privilege for me to have been part of this journey.

I joined UMSF back in 2004, a few months after Spirit and Oppy landing on Mars. It was like entering a candy store, with all those stunning image processing and unique details and discussions about the rovers missions. As Nick already said, I really felt a Finding my People experience.
This forum has brought me so much, from the desire to process Martian images myself to very valuable advice about image processing and the feeling of walking next to the rovers sol after sol. I have checked UMSF almost every day since 20 years. I'm very happy to have been part of it and a HUGE thank to Doug and Nick and all the team!

I've no idea if this is helpful, but other web forums of a similar vintage which I visit are running Simple Machines Forum v2 [0], which is still being maintained.

As djellison mentioned earlier[1], raising funds for developer time is not out of the question. As a long standing member of the Planetary Society, I would welcome discussion of the Society adding some funds as well.

Just my 2¢.

Edit: this may be useful for converting to SMF [2]. Note that I'm not attached to SMF in any way except for the fact that I've seen it in current use

[0] https://www.simplemachines.org
[1] http://www.unmannedspaceflight.com/index.p...st&p=264632
[2] https://www.simplemachines.org/community/in...php?board=132.0

I too joined in 2004, jumping over from Doug's original rlforum site- I always wondered what the "rl" meant, and now I know. I'm a professional outer solar system guy, but just an enthusiastic amateur when it comes to Mars, and have loved sharing this enthusiastic exploration with all of you for the last two decades, visiting almost daily. Oh, the places we've been!

The forum may be ending, but the exploration continues.

John (Spencer)

I come here daily, some days twice or more. I've been posting for 10+ years, it took a few years after joining to gather the courage to do it. From the warm welcome I've received with my first post to the subsequent encouragement throughout all these years, the large amount of information I've obtained in this forum, the sheer pleasure of the images our wizards continuously provide, this Forum has been very important to me and an excellent way to live a part of my life.
Thank you Doug and everyone else here, UMSF is unforgettable. I'll keep posting as usual, and search for a way to continue to contribute. I'll let you know about it on the right thread.
All the best
Fernando

Well, that's something !

It's been years since my last message here (yup, May 2022). I stopped posting along to stopped working with martian imagery just after that. And you don't want to know why.

Since, I've been visiting UMSF from time to time, as a guest. To see what I've been missing. Always a pleasure

This is sad, but I can see that UMSF would not be forever. I just hope we can keep some memories of this place, a place that was big for me growing up. Hell, I could spoke to THE Olivier de Goursac (aka @vikingmars) and it was awesome and lifechanging ! I owe so much UMSF for this ! That was just great !

I think I will hang out here a bit, to be present for the last hours of this magical place (this is not TAHITI).

Sorry to hear about umsf wrapping up. Haven't logged in in years but I still browse thru the topics a couple of times a month. Will miss the in depth discussions.

Thanks Doug, Nick, and all the contributors who have made this forum great.

I'm one of those infrequent posters but so grateful to the knowledgable members for so many interesting posts over the years. I always found this forum the first place to come for mission updates and images over the official NASA/JPL/etc. communication channels, though admittedly they have got better over the years, thanks to the sterling efforts also of some UMSF users (e.g. Doug)

It's a shame that traditional moderated forums are dying, I remember when they took over from usenet newsgroups and we thought it was such a great innovation, given problems with flame wars/trolling. Many similar interested groups have moved to big platforms, Facebook, Discord etc. but they are never really as good, and you are subject to the whims of their algorithms and feature creep timelines.

Hopefully a solution will emerge.

- Michael

Interesting - may be worth a try to migrate to this.

There's no shortage of available forum software and hosting services, it's the porting of the existing content that's an issue. Using another obsolete system doesn't seem like much of an improvement.

My impression is that there's no interest in setting up and moderating a new forum, regardless of platform, even if the existing content is not migrated.

A new forum could be made, however, the old mods are tired, and there is only really one active one left anyways. And there still is the issue of the age of forums being over. Any one of us could make a spiritual successor if they so want to, would even be the perfect time for the rebrand to robotic spaceflight, however umsf is as a project itself is over, even when there can be a new beginning for a new successor project, made by any one of us.

I joined this forum just over 19 years ago (does time fly or what?), mostly being interested in Cassini, but also being amazed at software you folks developed for MERs.

This forum was literally the first thing I would check up on when I woke up, for years, until Cassini ended (I got kind of depressed after that). I would still check up after big events like Juno's flybys to see what the image processing wizards cooked up, but would rarely post.

Anyway, I don't think I've ever run into a forum with such a high signal to noise ratio and quality of discussions as with UMSF.

I'm sad to see it go, but am very grateful for it ever existing. It's been a big part of my life, talking to like-minded individuals with interests similar to mine. I can only hope my measly contributions over the years have at least kept the S/N ratio positive.

I joined back in December 2005 and have been an every day lurker and very rarely posted. Thanks for the great ride, and hopefully we'll find another hangout. (NASA Spaceflight.com is there but it doesn't have the quality or the standards we have here.)

Thank you to everyone who helped maintain and support this forum over the years, including all the posters. I started reading it as an undergraduate, am now tenured professor (and MSL science team member). Time goes fast!

Been lurking here since around 2014 when I was in highschool. The wonderful MSL images posted here inspired me to learn about geology, I'm now an m2020 collaborator. Sad to see this forum go. Thanks to the moderators, mappers, and image processing geniuses who made this place so special.

I have been lurking for a very long time, perhaps posting a question here or there but generally just watched the experts with great interest. I was the aerodynamics lead for the MER, MSL and M2020 entry vehicles. This has been such an amazing resource to see what our payloads have been up to for over 20 years. Very sad to see this forum close. This site is truly the best way to keep tabs on Mars activity and all the other robotic missions. Many thanks to all who have contributed and shown us the solar system every day.

Well I guess all good things must come to an end. The forum has been a font of knowledge for decades and survived when many others fell by the wayside. I hope and trust that our image processers will continue to post to the end. I check in every day to enjoy their offerings with particular thanks to Tau and Neville Thompson. To be candid at my age I never expected the forum to end before I did. Great kudos to djellison for establishing the site in the first place.

Long time lurker here, with no expertise other than a deep love for everything unmanned spaceflight, planetary science related and a deep respect for all the astonishing talent on display here day-after-day. It's no exaggeration to say this is one of my very favorite places to visit online and I will deeply miss UMSF and all of you. Happy travels, all.

I've found a couple of forum scraping tools, https://nrsyed.github.io/proboards-scraper/html/index.html and https://github.com/mikwielgus/forum-dl , that seem to be able to read this board's format. But for various Python versioning reasons I haven't been able to get either of them to work on my system. What are the prospects of doing a forum backup looking like?

I've not had any total success yet - I'll absolutely take a look at what you've linked to - thanks for the pointers.

I'm also going to reach out to the server hosts to asks if they can snapshot the entire system and send it to me in some way come the shutdown at the end of Dec.

Thanks, Doug.

For what it's worth, if you want to archive everything that a particular member has written, you can search for that user using "find member's posts", take the resulting URL, and write a simple script to guery for the URL with an "st=N" at the end where N=i*25 (since the search only shows 25 items at a time) over as large a range as you need. For example:



That gets you every message in HTML form with a whole bunch of extra stuff, but it's better than nothing if you want to save someone's pearls of wisdom for posterity.

Thanks a lot Doug and for the other veteran planetary scientists for having keeped alive this outstanding Forum for such a long time. And with heartful congratulations!
And I've just joined your nice UMSF After Party Discord website! (as VikingMars).

I will miss this forum. Thanks and congratulations to all the people that have kept it running for so long, and to all the contributors, for their excellent work.

Guillermo

Bariloche, Argentina

I came over here from the "yellow forum" 20 years ago - the increase in S/N was like night to day. I've always been into the more technical side of imagery - night imaging, pulling out subtle DDs, triangulating few-pixel-tall features on the horizon (and that's with Phil-o-vision!) as Oppy made her way to Endeavour. What a blast it's been working with people like Tesheiner, Phil, James Canvin, to name just a few, on all that. And to get the technical insights from folks like Paolo and mcaplinger. I sure hope I can find somewhere else to do that kind of stuff.

And how cool it's been to see the infectious enthusiasm of members like Stu and ustrax!

And endless thanks for all the work from the moderators who kept this place so fantastic for two decades.

It's a real shame we don't have the people to migrate to and maintain phpBB/simple machines/whatever. I would've been willing to help out, though I'm not a (real) web developer. Is such migration possible without continuing maintainance, ie converting to phpBB and throwing the forum up somewhere, but in a frozen read-only state, ie no new posts, for the sake of historical record? Presumably that would be a lot cheaper than migrating to an active forum.


I'm curious - what roughly is the total size of the forum, obviously mainly the attachments?

Thanks to all for your passion. It was a great pleasure to read this forum and admire the results of your work.

I hope we will meet again somewhere, someday.

Good luck.

Some of the historical record can be seen on the Wayback Machine. Still trying though to get the links to paste in properly, though I could do it in the Discord thread.

https://discord.com/channels/12905249076244...162225895903242

With all due respect, or perhaps lack thereof, the discord site is absolute rubbish,

I moved your comment from where it didn't belong, to here.

I setup a discord server as a place people might want to congregate after this place closes. Not a replacement.

For what it's worth - most of the regular contributors from this place are already posting on that discord server regularly, and the breadth depth and quality of discussion is already at or above this place. Maybe it'll stick longer-term, maybe it wont. Who knows.

A few people have mentioned maybe setting up a new forum elsewhere - you should feel free to do the same. I wish you well if you choose to invest the time and money to do so.

Just complaining is neither constructive, nor welcome.