Hello All,
I have to do quite a lot of UNIX work to maintain this site, and pay for the services, with kind financial assistance from serveral mambers. Unknown to the ordinary user, there is quite a lot of work to keep the VPS running and healthy, Discourse updated, and bills paid. Unseen things, such as I had to spend a week with Amazion AWS support working out a failed billijng issue for all of USD$0.29 cents, with them threatening to disconnsct our service over that amount, which would have killed this forum dead. [Turns out Amazon AWS has been used in Australia for large fraudulent transactions recently and the banks have blacklisted them.] Things like these background tasks take quite a bit of time and effort to sort.
I am reluctant to say this but it seems this forum is completely moribund. Given the effort required to maintain it, I question the worth, yet again. I am having difficulty seeing why I should continue running it. We get one or two posts from time to time, that’s it. Here are the usage graphs from the admin dashboard.
Last time I asked several members requested to keep the forum going, which I did. But I can’t see that there has been worthwhile activity since then. The very few posts we have had are of course very interesting and valuable. But we have not had a new member for months and months, and the usage graphs are sitting at zero, with huge peaks of 2 daily engaged users.
I am sorry to raise this again but I think it is possible to see why I doubt the viability of this site. I suppose I am asking for some sort of encouragement to keep it running. About time somebody at least started a good argument, like the good old days of the Great Glue Debates.
Andrew