Closing down? Maybe…
No longer the Mecca that it once was, the New Wolfs Howl Forum is becoming painfully neglected; moss is growing in the cracks between the paving stones, the paintwork on the windows is cracked and peeling, the shingles on the roof are loose and several are missing. The once busy house is empty and quiet, a patina of dust lies on everything and if you listen closely you can hear something scurrying in the crawlspace. Rats? Maybe. Ghosts?
But the place had a heyday, when it was the place to be. The social venue of choice for the great and the good, where intelligent conversations took place between intelligent people and everyone got along. The heady days before familiarity set in, before the next big thing came around the corner, before everyone became too busy to stop by anymore.
So now the New Wolfs Howl Forum is dying. Like a leaf at the end of summer it’s drying up and turning brown; losing it’s vitality and returning to the earth from which it sprung. But it is not too late. This particular leaf can be saved if we all believe in it enough, if we wish and wish and wish…
… and if we visit a bit more often and actually start some conversations. Left in its current sorry state and given no life-saving sustenance, I fear the New Wolfs Howl Forum will be gone forever very soon.
Something happened on the way to the Forum
Eagle-eyed readers may have noticed a new link in the sidebar - The New Wolfs Howl Forum.
This is something that I played about with before, when I was just starting out with my Wordpress.com blog. At the time, I used a free service at freeforums.org. I’d been a fairly heavy user of Teh Soapbox and I wanted to see how easy it was to set up a forum that used PhpBB. As I didn’t have any hosting available, I went with a multi-user service.
It was easy to set up and administer, but once that was done it just sat there. I didn’t visit very often and nor did anyone else. Eventually I disabled it.
But now that I’m all self-hosted, I thought that I’d have another go - especially as a new version of PhPBB has just been released; version 3.0 is a much improved experience both from a forum user and forum administrator point of view. I’ve set up various categories and subjects and it’s all ready for some visitors. Take a look and let me know what you think and feel free to start a topic, comment on the couple of topics that have already been started, or just laugh at the amateurish way I’ve gone about it!
Wolfs Stuff
Wolfs Helpers
