The Forum Is Now Limited Access

Update 2023: The Forum was moved to my other website and is still read only. I am moving the most important information to blog posts and will be completely deleting it.

Update on August 14, 2022: The Forum is now limited access. If you have an account, you can use it. There is no way for anyone to register. I am leaving it read-only because there is information I do want to be able to link back to when I write. You are welcome to read it any time. 

I wanted to give people advanced notice that I am going to be removing The Forum from my site. There is a lot of excellent information in there and if you are one of the people who uses it as a reference for various topics, I want you to know so you can grab any links you might want to keep.

This is part of the reason I set up the Culture and Current Events category here on the blog in the past month and have been sharing  recommended videos and such. I’ve been trying to determine the best way to still share information that I think is important without that topic overrunning my entire website.

There are a few reasons I’m removing the forum.

First, it is a massive pain to deal with the fake accounts. Each day 10-30 spammers make accounts in order to post for backlinks, etc. I don’t want to spend my limited life energy and time deleting these accounts any longer. This also ties in with why I stopped sending my newsletter. The fake accounts in the forum would get mixed into the WordPress users on my website and it was all getting mixed in with my email service, MailPoet (which draws on your website’s WordPress users). It sounds complicated which it was.

Second, the reason it’s not worth my time is because the forum simply isn’t used by very many people. I know there are many people who read things that get posted there. Some of the threads rank very well in the search engines. But there is almost no conversation so it’s not worth it to keep it going.

Third, since I removed Google Analytics and advertising from my website there is no real monetary benefit to offset the time I spend on it. I do have some financial supporters of the website and I am so grateful for them. But for the amount of time it takes to keep up the forum, add new content, and deal with the spammers I can’t justify taking that time away from my family and home any longer.

Lastly, my mantra is simplify, simplify, simplify. Trying to keep a forum active in the hope that it might take off some day isn’t simple. So I chalk it up to an attempt to offer something different that wasn’t a success. I move on.

There are some excellent and informative threads over there I am going to make into posts on the blog and set up redirections for the search engines, but I don’t have a list to give you. So, again, if there is any information you want there, you should take note of it now. I hope to finish this up in the next week.

I may try a weekly news blog post that I add information to each day, but I’m still trying to decide on that. I’m not sure if it is worth the time and energy to do so. We’ll see.

Thank you!