So, before it gets too late, here's the announcement:
I'm pleased to announce that effective immediately, I am stepping down as Administrator of the forum.
No, wait, that's not very upbeat. Try again:
I'm pleased to announce that effective immediately, Stuart Crawford (stuartcnz) will assume the duties of forum Administrator.
Many of you have been wondering what the future of the forum would bring, and I'm happy to say that Stuart and I have reached a gentlemen's agreement to turn the day-to-day activities of the forum over to him on a permanent basis. Stuart has the technical skills to keep the forum running, and he also has a strong desire to see the community here build and thrive. He has plans to - well, I'll let him tell you about that.
I'll be working in the background to help with coding and getting Stuart up to speed on forum technicalities, as well as see to it that many of the features you as users enjoyed on the "old" forum are returned to working order.
I do have to stress that the recent changes to the appearance and functionality of the forum has NOT been the fault of Stuart. Seven years of code changes to install features and spam prevention had made the software become unstable, particularly on the admin backend. The only reasonable method of transferring the forum database over was to do a clean install of stock-standard forum software. Now that the most recent and effective spam preventions work so well, the bits of code that were making the forum a bit wonky will no longer be needed, and they will not be replaced in the new modified code.
Also let me make it very clear that NO FORUM CONTENT HAS BEEN DELETED during this process. Well, except for those thousands of topic posts and threads that got bombed by Osama bin Moderator, but those are going to be restored, per the results of the poll that was conducted. Some forum categories (Buy/Sell/Trade, Guest Book, etc) have been moved to a non-public area, but the information is still intact. The posts contained in those forum categories will be reviewed for relevance and perhaps some of it moved back into public view.
Hopefully, these changes will appeal to all forum users and maybe even entice some of those who recently left to come back and be friendly again.
As for myself, I'm going to spend my ever-frequently-less time online posting the "Best Of" my own forum posts up as weblog entries on my web site. The process is barely begun, and probably will be ongoing into the winter months. You can find the start of the process
here.
Finally, I hope that all of you will welcome Stuart as the new Administrator, and give him some slack time as he builds the forum and moves it forward into new greatness. Although he's probably sleeping as I write this, perhaps after he has had his toast and Vegemite, he'll step up to the microphone to say a few words, then wield the awesome power of his new Administrator's wand and open this topic for comments.
Or not, I can't say that I know much of anything useful anymore.