Phased shutdown of SBZ

[skugga]

The time has come..

StompBoxZone was founded 7(!) years ago as a lifeboat after the collapse of BossArea. At the time BossArea was already in decline and I never expected SBZ to be running for as long as it has.

Forum participation has been slowing dropping for a long time. Not really a surprising in the era of social networks and the consolidation of mega sites. Along with this the time taken to combat spam has increased drastically.

In the next few months the backend of the forum will need a massive overhaul if it's to stay current as a public forum. Going forward HTTPS will eventually become mandatory for websites and SBZ will start triggering security warnings in Chrome and other browsers for not having it. I don't see the time cost to implement this as justified given the current engagement of the site.

With that in mind I'll be slowly transitioning the site into a read only site, and potentially fully shutting it down.

The first step was taken today.

New user registrations have been turned off. This should in theory cut the spam off, but it will also cement the decline of the site.

SBZ doesn't cost me anything apart from time to keep running, it's piggy backing on hosting for other projects. So it'll probably stay in this mode for a while.

Special thanks to natthu and Laurie for all the help fighting the spam hordes and the rare times we've had to moderate post. As well as Pepe for tirelessly running the CPEWT's

Feel free to comment or ask questions.

skugga

[Pepe]

Whoah! That's tough. Are there any hardcore programmers around who know how to handle all this stuff and convert the forum to the new specs?

[skugga]

[Mark123]

Fully understand. Thanks for all the work! Bummer though.

Verstuurd vanaf mijn D5803 met Tapatalk

[FastEddie]

Could kinda tell this was coming, I don't log in a week and there was four new posts and this was happening over several months.

[BearBoy]

Really sorry to hear this but understand that the backend stuff is often a lot more complicated than users like me appreciate. Would really like to see the community continue in some form or other - happy to help if I can.

Quite staggered that SBZ was started 7 years ago Time doesn't half fly.

[Gasgano]

Thanks for the memories. I definitely had lots of fun and wish I had known this before.

Who will I share my pedal enthusiasm with now...

[Dirk]

Darn, that sucks! But I understand.

Maybe a dedicated members only page on one of the social media platforms is the way to move on?
Although I know especially Pepe isn't particularly fond of the one I have in mind...

[skugga]

[Gasgano]

Nobody won Jon.

Everyone lost, that's all.