Topic: Old Groups

Hi there,

I've just returned to the site after a 4 year hiatus and I'm trying to find the old groups that I used to belong to so that I can reconnect with old friends again but it looks like most groups have been removed. Is that the case?

If any of my old reviewing buddies are still out there, I'd love to connect again! :-)

Quote Post 1

Re: Old Groups

Hi Suin.

Welcome back. Yes, we did a group cleanup after the servers were restored following the crash in October 2023. One of the steps we did was to request input from everyone on the site as to which groups members were still using and wanted retained. The final list of groups to be deleted, merged, and retained was then announced repeatedly well before any changes were made. The groups you see in the system right now are those that survived, give or take any one offs anyone may have created in the meantime ("The custom Military velcro Patches Group" is probably spam and will be removed; the creator was a trial member who never became permanent).

Dirk

Quote Post 2

Re: Old Groups

Thanks for letting me know! I remember there were loads of redundant groups so it was probably a big undertaking! I have to ask though, what happened to this site? I saw about the crash but this place is a shadow of what it used to be! Is that all because people lost some of their work or was it just fizzling out anyway?

Quote Post 3

Re: Old Groups

Quite a bit of fizzling, and then a lot of people didn't come back after the crash, so we're on life support. I'm looking at Booksie (our sister site, also run by Sol) to see if it could be a viable alternative for us since the New Books (chapters) section on the home page here has come to a virtual standstill. Booksie is very similar to TNBW, but is actively maintained with new/more features, minor enhancements, bug fixes, etc. And more users! TNBW, while still a great site (I prefer the look and feel of TNBW over Booksie), has been mostly in maintenance mode for a couple of years. Sol simply doesn't have the time to keep both sites going indefinitely. I'm going to be taking over some of the easy admin/support tasks later this month from him to give him a break. I'd love to revive this site, but it would remain in maintenance mode since Sol simply doesn't have the time to build features for both sites.

Quote Post 4

Re: Old Groups

Dirk, can you keep the site moving forward while Sol focuses more on Booksie? Is maintenance mode good enough for us?

Quote Post 5

Re: Old Groups

I don't know how much effort it would take to keep it running in pure maintenance mode, and I don't have the required skills for development of bug fixes and minor enhancements for this site's technology. We would probably need a small number of minor changes to make the site more likely to attract and keep new users. And those would have to be done quickly, before we lose any more members.

Plus, I'd rather write. smile

Quote Post 6