Forum Shutdown

[Koroush Ghazi]

Well unfortunately, after thinking about this issue for many months, and of course especially over the past 24 hours, I've come to the conclusion that I just can't keep the forums running any longer. Changing the rules or procedures any further is not going to do much in the end. For one reason or another, the vast majority of readers simply do not seem to be interested in the type of forums I want to provide, and I'm not interested in diluting my personal philosophy and vision of what my forums should be just to accommodate them. This inherent conflict between what readers want and what I want makes keeping these forums running untenable for me.

I don't have the time or the patience to keep investing many hours each week into Admining the forums, especially as they provide no income and simply sap the time I could be putting into writing guides and doing other work to actually help pay my bills. I've tried to have a range of people assist me in moderating the forums, but ultimately for one reason or another the bulk of the work falls to me to perform, and it is particularly unpleasant work at that. As a result I regularly receive abusive emails from people who don't make it through the Introduction system, as well as the usual excuses and argumentative messages from existing members who breach the rules. The entire process now leaves a bad taste in my mouth, making it an absolute chore that dogs me day after day with no break. It also brings out the worst in me, and in turn only negatively affects the main site.

I am genuinely surprised that despite the many prompts, obstacles and stickies clearly pointing out the way things work here and explaining the rationale behind the rules, most people truly don't seem to want to understand that the TweakGuides Forums were designed as a niche high quality forum targetted towards a particular audience and with particular aims - they just want a free tech support forum so they can be spoonfed answers, or a place to perpetuate the usual mindless drivel that is on display in most forums these days. Neither of these reasons are acceptable to me as a basis for a forum. I was never interested in replicating the many existing forums already on the Internet, and I don't much care about being popular; I wanted to provide an alternative for people like me who were fed up with those other forums, a place shielded from the lowest common denominator garbage prevalent around the Internet. In the end, as I've said, this has proven unviable with the resources currently at my disposal.

In any case I make absolutely no apologies for attempting to do something different, but I do want to apologize to the key members here who have contributed a great deal to the forums and have provided interesting discussions and useful information. I won't name them as I'm sure we all know who they are. Thank you to those individuals and I wish you all the best, it was a pleasure interacting with you, and I'm sorry the forums had to end this way.

I don't want to draw things out any futher, so I will effectively be shutting down the forums permanently within the next hour. However rather than closing them completely, to allow people to continue to potentially benefit from the information already posted here, I will make the forums 'read only'; no new posts will be allowed, but everyone will still be able to browse the forums.