Time flies, indeed. Before you know it, we will be counting the last 10 days.
100 days seems like a long time, but it’s not, especially when it comes to keeping this platform running for the purpose of continuing with this exciting adventure for many who love having all the fun at no cost.
In our case, we decided to keep the Forum going when things went the wrong way, we thought that out of a couple thousand visitors, maybe a few would buy a film every week or month. But the baseline fan support here went away.
We were wrong and that’s fine, people make mistakes, make assumptions, make wrong predictions, it happens every day, everywhere.
We don't expect things to change in the next 100 days; what we see is what it is. Our sales dropped at the end of last year and continue to sit at about half of our 30-year average. We saw a small spike in August and hoped it was a turning point, but things quickly returned to a low average.
It’s not that we can’t afford to keep the forum online for another year or two. We just aren’t motivated anymore. Keeping up with the daily, hourly maintenance has become overwhelming, and our team needs to redirect our time and effort.
We are genuinely happy for the members whose posts got great responses, and we're glad that creators who sell their work here found success.
We are exploring possibilities that could make us think that we should continue for another 10 years if not more. We are considering alternatives in how to deal with the forum, how to maintain it, support it, finance it.
However, our team is extremely busy adjusting to the new era, organizing future productions with other markets in mind, exploring new ways of bringing our work to larger audiences. It all takes a lot of work and dedication.
Regardless of where we go, what we find, what we do in the next 100 days, this Forum will definitely stop in its present form.
The link will still exist, but the forum will no longer be active. It will serve as an archive open only to registered members for as long as we can host the data. The main index page will feature links to ralphus.net, our main pages, and the archived forum.
If our situation improves over the next 100 days, we will look into setting up a brand-new forum. The current one cannot be upgraded, and several broken features make it incredibly difficult to handle. If we do build a new platform down the road, we will try to import registration data, though the full database may be too large to move.
Enjoy the time the Forum has left.
