[tijer]

As HK says we noticed the forums were down about 3-4 weeks ago, i emailed Icculus to ask if this was a permanent thing, and got a reply saying it was, and that due to the lack of new posts he was closing them. Quite why he chose forum software that he had to pay for, i am unsure. Far better way wouldve been to have left the forums up, with no active moderation, as now we have lost tons of interesting posts (with lots of trolling in between). Losing the TMC forums is a loss to the entire mud community, as they were one of the longest standing forums online along with the archived original forums that were ported across to the SMF software.

[Fizban]

Yeah, I mentioned to Hades on discord that despite me not having used TMC regularly in the past couple years that checking in and seeing that its forums were completely gone saddened me.

I spent 10-15 years posting on the forums nearly daily, so it's really not an exaggeration to say that it's like driving by a home I once lived in and witnessing it being bulldozed.

[Newworlds]

I can tell you why. No posts. I would post with roleplay events on Ateraan periodically but I never saw anything substantial or important very often, maybe once a month since it went to discord. Couple of reasons why I think this happened:

1) You had to have approval for every post. That was insane waiting for days for a post to be approved so I'm guessing most people said "Screw this".

2) I asked for authorization for an entire year to post without approval like all the moderators and some others had. Never happened. Again another reason why I'm guessing a lot of people who would post dropped off.

3) Without posts and interaction you get lack of visitors.

4) The Discord forum system and connection to TMC really sucked compared to the old TMC forums. I couldn't figure out how to get there half the time and when informing the player base they responded with answers 1 to 3 above.

It is very sad because I loved TMC and its whole setup as a 2nd location with TMS. The two best locations for MUD information on the net.

[tijer]

Wrong, if you had the required "badges" from your time spent on the site your posts no longer required approval, the more you connected to the site the more "badges" you were able to obtain, the more you obtained the more features opened up, you just had to be be very active to get them. I managed to get to almost moderator level by just visiting daily.

[Daurven]

I was wondering that myself, seems like it would be cheaper to self host Discourse or even better, NodeBB which doesn't require the use of docker.

[Newworlds]

Wow! Had no idea, I would swing by once every week or two but definitely not daily. I got a bunch of badges, wrote the moderators, but never knew I had to visit daily. I had been there at least 100 times though and posted 15 or 20 times.