Alas, all good things must come to an end.
You know, as an aside, I don’t know why we say that. It’s not like bad things don’t come to an end as well.
Regardless, the Gabfest is going away for good. Some of you who aren’t old school Needcoffee readers might not even know what the Gabfest is. A brief history lesson.
The Gabfest is our set of forums. We were running them directly on the site for a long time before the version of UBB we were running got quite out of date (dangerously, insecurely so). We could have upgraded the program but that would have taken money we didn’t have. So we instead opted to move what forum traffic there was to a new Gabfest on the Ning system of networks. Now Ning is moving to a paid model and rather than pay for the service, we’re opting to close the Gabfest down starting July 1st.
The main reason for this is that there just isn’t a lot going on over there. When you can have a page on Facebook (we do) and when you can hang around on Twitter (we do), the idea of maintaining a separate forum unless it’s for a specific niche interest (we’re not–we’re all over the map) with built-in traffic doesn’t make a lot of sense. For free? Sure. When it costs money? Hell no. But yeah, if we had hundreds of people going nuts on the Gabfest all day long like we did in our halcyon days, I’m sure we’d figure out something.
But for the time being, we’re out of the forum business. Starting July 1st. So between now and then feel free to go to the Gabfest and make your goodbyes, hold block parties, whatever it is you want to do.
Thursday – a fitting day for The End.