I'll post a bit more on this later, but just for everyone who may be wondering:
1) No matter what, the boards are not going to disappear. For those of you who want to "collect your posts," I will give you an opportunity to do so.
2) I'm going out of my way to make sure people who had nothing to do with the real problems are not punished. I am going to work with people running tournaments, etc., to make sure things are still accessible there, if not for forever, then at least for a good while.
3) There is a chance the boards may not go away entirely, but will be altered significantly. Scar and I are still discussing this.
4) Handing over the reins to another user is not really an option. We tried this before, but it really didn't work, and the board ended up being literally dangerous to visit (not the person's fault), due to malware and viruses. I am also concerned that if it's left in that state, eventually peoples' personal information, including e-mail addresses, would get stolen.
5) My metaphorical gloves are off at this point. If you do something to be a dick (see original main rule) from the moment after I hit submit on this post, you are gone. You can whine and send your messages to other people and get people to call my cell phone and try to get people to approach me in bars (yes, people do this), and it isn't going to change it.
6) No one person is the cause of this, so please do not blame anyone individually. The people who told me not to admit certain people to these boards due to the drama they would cause were correct. The irony of the fact that I am the one who decided to admit the very people who ended up being the most abusive, nasty, irritating, and intentionally destructive (to the environment of these boards, and towards me personally) is not lost on me. On the positive side, I at least know the same people cause the same problems everywhere they have ever been, and thus am not going to worry too much about whether we did anything to cause it. I had good intentions in trying to make this open to everyone, but the road to hell and all that. Additionally, PHPBB is a cumbersome environment, and wading through its depths to try to do things (especially upgrading it, given Scar's webhost are a bunch of ponces) isn't really worth it. My frustration comes as much with trying to juggle peoples' reports on posts (which are a pain in the arse to find), approving new members, helping people get their passwords reset, making sure the board doesn't crash (Scar's webhost, again, sucks. Not his fault, they just oversell their services, IMO).
7) Last, do not contact me outside of these boards about this. I have kept most of the BS about running this place to myself, and occasionally to Scar, but it's no longer going to interfere with my personal life, in which I have very little personal time, and I do not want to have to hang up on or be rude to people that I otherwise like.
Thanks,
Dante
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