What happened to the forum?

Is anyone actually asking that question? Judging from the level of activity on the forum in the past year, probably not, but I'm going to answer it anyway.

The forum is gone and has been replaced by this blog. Back when John was entertaining the thought of having a website, he asked me to poke around the internet and check out websites so that we could get an idea of what features we wanted ours to have. So I did and found that some sites had discussion forums. In particular, I like the forums on the Candorville site (Toon Talk) and the Mutts site. So we added a forum. And it began well. Some very cool people dropped by and participated. Then the spambots, the porn posters and the snarky began to show up. Since we were trying to keep the tone of discussion civilized - spirited sometimes - but still civilized, it became a 24 hour job just to police the thing. There are currently over 2000 prospective "members" sitting in limbo waiting to be activated. I can promise you a huge percentage of those are spambots. For a while I diligently sorted through the mess, activating some, deleting others, and I tried to frequently put interesting topics on the site, but I began to notice something else about the activity on the forum. We were getting lots of views, especially certain posts, but very little actual discussion. It seemed obvious that people really liked the posts that described activity behind the scenes, either on the strip or in the industry and that a blog would be a much more effective way to connect with those readers. And I was sick of spambots. 

So here we are. I will do my best to post regularly and include the kind of information that was most popular on the forum, and comments will be allowed so that anyone who wants to chime in or ask a question can do so. Because of the rather bad taste in my mouth from the spambots, and also because we want the tone of this site to be constructive rather than destructive, all comments will be moderated and you will have to fill in one of those nice little boxes where the letters all look as if you were wearing someone else's glasses.

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