What if EoFF shut down?

[Aulayna]

For the bots, if SEO and user acquisition is no longer a concern (which given the amount of broken frontsite links there are in older articles/pages/posts/blogs etc. that will be tanking the SEO algorithms, I guess it isn't) the bots can be combated using a Robots.txt file to block many of them, and then IP ranges on the server side can also be blocked.

Honestly I'm not even sure why EOFF gets so many bots browsing it, for ex. Zelda Universe the biggest Zelda fansite out there that's still got unusually active forums for 2020 tends to have around 5 bots for every 1 active member, not 100.

But yeah, the bots side there are plenty of ways of mitigating that. Some are quite nuclear, but there are softer ways.

I mean heck the forums are also running on an end of life version of vBulletin which doesn't help things either, and vB4 has always been kind of the Windows Vista of the vB line.

------

Regarding the site BoB. You do you. EoFF has meant a lot for many of us throughout the years but there's no denying the site has been showing it's age over the past few years. The internet is moving on to a place where video is king, and social media platforms have become the new forums (sadly still missing a lot of features) - and heck a decent proportion of the regulars of EoFF have shifted over to the EoFF discord. I know this site meant a lot to you in the past, but I know your life has also changed substantially over the past 4 years or so so maybe that bond isn't as strong as it once was.

Like I said, if it's the financial side that's the main concern - there are definitely ways it that can be cut down. If it's about tieing up loose-ends and moving on, I can fully understand that too, and like Del said, maybe we can figure something out there too.

I'd be sad to see the site go as I have a lot of memories here, but there's no denying it has been on its last legs for a quite some time now. The discord is all well and good but like most social media platforms, it's very in the moment and it's hard to go back and look at this that happened weeks/months/years ago with the same context in the way you can a forum thread.

But whatever decision you make, I'll respect it.