Sorry to say that our days are indeed coming to a close in the near future.
I was able to talk to Taylor a few days ago about our fate.
Even though he hasn't visited the DRC in several years, he's been paying the bills for us and hasn't really minded it. (Call it old times sake or whatever.)
It's not really about the money, but more that it's become a hassle for him. He keeps getting emails from some loon that got banned for registering multiple accounts, and all kinds of other bogus messages.
He doesn't have his tech guy that took care of the server side of things for us to help with transferring accounts and whatnot either.
Our call got cut short, so I didn't get all of the answers, but it's clear that we need to find a new home on our own and pretty soon.
The last thing that he said was that he'll just let the current payments run out and not renew. I've been meaning to check back in with him, but I've been swamped lately.
From my side, I spend a lot of my time here screening spammers and foreign web traffic.
Only 5 of the last 100 people that have joined weren't from Russia, China, India, Vietnam, or the like.
We get so many bogus new accounts that I've had to shut down registrations.
With all of those things in consideration, and knowing that (IMHO) we don't have a chance at crowd funding for more than a few months before someone gets stuck footing the bill on their own, we're better off making other plans.
So......either we find another forum fast, someone starts up one of those free forums, or we say goodbye. Aaron and I could continue to moderate a new site, but neither of us can handle the server side of things. (Neither of us will moderate a forum with politics.)
It seems to me that there must be a couple of music or pop-culture forums that have decent activity. We really don't need the satellite component anymore, but I'd think that those conversations would fit in nicely on one of those forums.