To Continue the Site or Not?

[Jubbers]

Hello Huffy Flouncers,

the domain name for this site comes up for renewal at the beginning of January. I know that the amount of posting on the site has declined a ton since Dalty became a dad and Adam became engaged, and so wanted to get a feel for how much the forums are still being used. The last post, before I made this one, was from ten days ago.

Huffy Flounce originally borrowed web hosting space from my dictionary digitization project, but that project has now been transferred to the University of Central Florida, so I am basically paying $12 a month, plus yearly domain registration, for just Huffy Flounce. Since it's not being used very much, it seems a bit silly to keep doing this, but I also don't want to take the site away if people depend on it.

So thoughts? No matter what, I would make a final backup of everything before taking things offline.

[Space Tycoon]

I feel partly responsible, as my participation has dropped greatly over the past few years. I didn't get married or have a kid. I discovered Facebook. Late to the party as always.

Things move in cycles, I'm going to get tired of social media and may wish to return to the good old days of messageboards someday. But whatever you feel like doing is fine by me, for whatever that's worth.

[Mal Shot First]

I agree it doesn't make much sense to keep spending money on a site that's barely used. It would be a shame to lose all the content, though, that piled up over the years. How much space does the entire site take up? I ask because I have a website, too, and a good chunk of web space to go with it. Do you think it would be possible to just dump a copy of Huffy Flounce on my website so that you would just keep paying for the domain name, which you would simply link to the content hosted on my site? Or would there be more to it than that?

[Jubbers]

Switched this post back to a normal post. I looked into moving phpBB forums this morning; it’s not the simplest thing in the world, ha ha. I think I’ll move my blog (currently on Blogger, because it’s not something large or super-trafficked - not the largest of audiences for old, out-dated reference works) to the hosting space I have and try that out for a year. Blogger’s worked well, but 1. I found out I can’t have over a certain number of total characters when applying tags to entries (and some reference works have very long names), and 2. I don’t trust Google not to just end Blogger at some point. I’ve been burned before (RIP Google Reader). So I’ll work on moving my blog over to my current hosting space, and will keep HuffyFlounce going for at least another year.

[Jubbers]

I have transferred the domain registration for this site to Google though, so I’ll save a little money that way (and Google throws domain privacy in for free - so no more onslaught of spam calls from people wanting to sell me website design services). Shouldn’t be any noticeable hiccups here when the transfer goes through, but on the slight off-chance there is - shouldn’t last more than a day. Transfer will happen ~Nov 23.

[Slartibartfast]

I have posted only a few times and I have seen this message very late, but I think that this kind of website is worthwhile, and I think that usage of this kind of website ebbs and flows, and I think that this is an ebb, and I am willing to help shoulder the monthly cost of keeping it running.