its all those damn eoff nudes
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its all those damn eoff nudes
i no longer speak to most of the people i met here, mostly due to my own terrible ways of interacting with people. i look back and see a lot of sadness.
there was a really good year or two (for me) and it's all the past so its not like im looking at old posts from the good-old-days. its all locked away in my brain.
if saving £40 a month makes your life easier, then let's have a nice wake, some beers, then throw the server into the sea.
I post maybe once a year now, but I show up pretty frequently to just look and see who is still around. This place was a fun place for me to hang out well before I even joined. This may even have been the first forum I joined. It's got a special place and I would be very sad to see it go, but having closed down my forum after the 10 year mark I know how even though it's not a significant cost, it is still a cost. I've been coming here for 14 years now and I'll keep coming back as long as it's around.
I have been an extremely sporadic poster here so I am not nearly as attached to this place as some people are however during the times I have checked in at this place I notice now that this site probably gets about 5% of the activity that it did ten or fifteen years ago (maybe even less than that).
Loony Bob you should never feel obligated to keep a forum up and running in this day and age if you yourself are no longer that interested in it. Probably pretty much every one here has a facebook, twitter, or instagram page that they could continue to talk about video games if this place shuts down. And there are also many other online avenues for people to socialize if that is what they are interested in. Gone are the days where message boards like this were about the only option people had to talk about their fandom with people that had similar interests or make friends around the world who had similar interests.
What I think you should do Loony Bob is open up the option for other people to take on the costs of keeping this place running. If there are people willing to carry it than great but if there is not interest in carrying the financial load than the place probably does need to be shut down. 40 a month is a lot of money. That is almost 500 a year. You should only invest money like that if you are still enjoying the place.
:eek:Dropped in to just randomly post in a couple random threads and was not expecting this...
This place has for me like so many others a lot of fun memories of great times in the past, but at the same time I have not been really active for years, purely as a result of simply not having the time like when I was a student in my early 20's. I just happen to have overslept this morning and can't fall asleep that I'm even here right now. :sweat:
What would be nice to see as a last song of the site is another mass email to see if anyone from the past wants to return for a final reunion. I can think of a few people from here I would love to try and reconnect with.
Echoing what most people have said here - I have a lot of memories of this place and it really helped shape me in my formative years, but I don't really have a leg to stand in saying I'd be sad to see it go, seeing as my last active postings were a good 5 years ago, and they were few and far between.
I'm pretty sure that would be a great laugh, and frankly a pretty fitting send off.
I think all the legal nonsense Steve was talking about is a bigger issue than the cost to keep the place running. If it was just pricing that could be easily fixed.
Legal nonsense and forum software. We've had at least one member concerned about the unsecure login!
This summarizes my feelings pretty well. To be honest, for a number of years now, coming here has felt a bit like going to my home town over the holidays and running into people from high school. Some people stuck around, some people are just passing through. But ultimately, all of our lives have moved on. Even though it's *really* nice to see everyone, and to know people are doing well, it's not where my life is now.
I saw this thread on Friday and actually tried to use the weekend to collect my thoughts. Obviously the way people use the internet is very different nowadays. There's modern, self-hosted social media software - I suggested something like an EoFF Mastodon a while back, but there wasn't a particularly enthusiastic reception, which I think is just because people like the forums. Which is sort of an impossible catch-22; 99% of our online lives now are on Facebook, Twitter, Reddit, etc., all of which have been modernized and streamlined to integrate into your life as easily as possible. But the magic of EoFF as a message board is in a format that is just clunky relative to those other monolithic platforms. So in a lot of ways, the EoFF that we all remember and love is something that *only* could have existed and thrived in the time that it did, and that time seems to have passed.
The saddest part of realizing that is knowing that what remains of the community would scatter to the wind without this central location to tether us. Obviously there will still be clusters that keep in touch, but it will always be fragmented. People who want to keep in touch on Facebook might not want to use Discord; people who use Discord might not want to exchange phone numbers, etc. etc. (Personally, I don't even use Facebook, Twitter, Discord, etc., simply because I disagree with the way they run their businesses. I also think moving the community 100% to them is a bit short-sighted, because you ultimately cede any control to the company. Zuckerburg is never going to post a heart-felt thread asking for direction.)
To me, it's not that important to keep the content of the forums itself alive. Realistically, you could probably figure out a way to throw the whole thing into archive mode, zip it up, and share it around as a torrent if people wanted to be able to still browse it without dealing with the hosting costs. But still, there's value in having a central meeting ground for all of us to at least be able to keep in touch. Maybe that's a forums v2, where you just start from a blank slate. Just throw up a phpBB on a tiny Linode plan. Or set up something like Lemmy for EoFFers that keeps the discussion style but modernizes it. There are options. You do seem a bit weary about dealing with new platform migrations - and I completely understand that - but for what it's worth, I'm willing to lend a hand as much as I can if you want to do something to keep the lights on without maintaining 20-some-odd years of post history.
Just my thoughts. I might have too idealized a vision of how much technology could keep us all together. I'm ready to acknowledge that the era of the EoFF forums may have reached its end, but it'd be a real shame for us to lose this place as a central hub. Like I said above, even though I'm usually only passing through, it's still really nice to see you guys.
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i came back here after many years because of the FF7 remake, but in all honesty: it feels a little dead here.
it had been great discussing ff7r and bringing back some memories but by now i'm already noticing that i'm here once a week tops, and not finding anything to respond to.
The discord channel on the other hand, i really love and use alot.
if the forum would shut down it would definitely make me sad for nostalgic reasons, but at this moment that is the only reason.
delet this (website)
Add me to the list of people who stop by every once-in-a-while and would be saddened if this place went away for good. EoFF was a big part of my life for a number of years, starting over 20 years ago. Even if I don't post much anymore, it's nice knowing this place still exists.
That being said, it's your life, your money, and your website. I will say that, while I know nothing of EU law, I'm skeptical some largely-inactive fansite would be required to do anything preemptively. From what I've read of the EU's "right to be forgotten" regulations, you may just need to delete someone's posts if they request it (again, this is not legal advice).
My days of spending all my waking hours on forums are behind, but it's still nice to check this place once every few days or so, occasionally drop some incredible, world-changing opinion in a thread. A lot of EoFF frens I chat to on discord everyday (we'd still keep that, right?) but there are some who don't use it that I'd never talk to again if this place shut down.
That said - it happens. FFXII.net, FXN, all returns to dust eventually. I can't exactly pretend a grand revival with dozens of daily active users and lively 'keep refreshing the page' discussions are just around the corner. It would be a shame but I would understand and support you if and when you choose to close the doors.
I think you'd be hard pressed to find anyone who wants to see EoFF close up shop, but it was always going to be an eventuality. It's not that I'm not sad about it—it absolutely does leave me melancholic—but it feels a lot like one of those growing up losses, you know? This place and all the people here have played an unreasonably integral part in my life and growth, so leaving it behind permanently is tough. But, well, as with all things, this too shall pass.
I would feel sad for the regulars and the people who would miss it, but honestly I don't think I would. I never visit anymore unless someone brings my attention to it and I think I mourned a while ago.
I got a lot from this site including a husband but, I don't know, I associate this site with a part of my life that I'm through with now. A period of painful and uncomfortable transition before I became someone who is still far from who she wants to be but is finally okay where she is instead of working from a place of fear and self-loathing. None of that is this sites fault but coming here feels like going through a photo album of a point in my life that was necessary but not something I'd like to revisit. Like puberty
I am glad to have met the people here and am forever grateful for my husband and the wonderful life that opened up for me