Itty Bitty Rants

Infrequent posts about stuff.

Change happens.

Posted to L-Space:

For the past 6+ years I have spent time, effort, electricity, and bandwidth on what has been overall one of the most fun little projects I’ve ever had. A little BBS with a stable user base, interesting content, and lots of friends. It has not been without some occasional trouble, whether social or technological, but on balance it has been well worth the effort.

Over the past 10 months I’ve been doing some extensive analysis of the message traffic on the board. It had seemed like things were quieting down, and I thought that I was hearing my own voice a bit too loudly against a lowering murmur of other voices. Sifting through the numbers suggested it as well and after 3 months of tracking I had a pretty solid and steady graph that said overall public message traffic was dropping at a fairly steady rate and that my personal posting frequency was increasing rapidly. So I decided to put together some projections and over the last 7 months, the decline in traffic has fit it more accurately than I had thought possible.

I’ve talked with a few people about this and thought about it for a considerable amount of time. And while, as one person said, it is good for a board to have the voice of it’s owner, I’m not comfortable with how much of my voice has been here. A BBS should be like a choir and not like a soloist with some backing vocals. I would also prefer to take the board down while it is not yet a chore to maintain.

I want to thank all of you for your time and your thoughts, and in many cases your effort to help make this a nice place to hang out on the net. It has been a singular honor to host such as you here.

All things must eventually come to an end and as of Monday May 22, 2006 at 9pm CDT, L-Space will be shut down permanently.

In the intervening week I would exhort you all to get a hold of people you may only know through this board if you want to maintain contact with them. An unsurprising majority of users here have LiveJournal accounts, and some of them and the rest of us have blogs of one sort or another, that can provide a somewhat similar way of keeping connected if you are interested in doing so. In the same way, you may wish to update your bio with current contact information if you want other users to be able to get in touch with you easily.

Thanks. - The Management