OK. I usually refrain from posting here (recent exceptions aside) for a variety of reasons. Initially, I greatly respected the Story Forums—who wouldn't?—but when few people seemed to care what I had to say, I moved on. That's not much of a problem, really; I kept reading for a while after I stopped posting, and this served me well enough. But when the forum turned into the Eternal Mailing List, I began to have my doubts. This is what caused some people to dub this page "ESB"—the Eternal Story Board. I have the feeling that much of the inactivity being fought by members such as ukimalefu and Marathoner325 stems directly from the ESB period.
Now, look what this board has turned into. The people who apparently can't let this site die are making it worse by spamming useless garbage onto the front page in the hopes that discussion will arise (which, I suppose, has worked, if only temporarily). When that isn't the case, the forum activity results from status updates for Pfhorums, which, while flawed, is sadly far more interesting and worthwhile than this place is now.
I recently bought my own meager space on a Web host and have toyed briefly with the idea of creating a forum. My administration of the collective "Just Found Out" blog has only increased the desire to run an interactive site that can combine the youth and energy of Pfhorums with the solid discussion that we once knew here. I even launched a private test forum with limited success. But now I am advertising here, hoping that maybe we can recover the Marathon community from the mess all of you have caused.
The new message board runs on simple, text-centric software (Vanilla) that still allows a more vibrant graphical theme than this place while encouraging well-thought posts. I've got persmissions set up for moderation, if sparing, so that we can get rid of spam (both advertisments and user-generated), not to mention keep flame wars under some form of control. Right now, I'm the only person with these powers, but anyone who proves himself in the early stages has a good chance of being part of the team. And no, this isn't for CLIQUE; I have kept all of them in the dark about these plans, and so everyone starts on equal footing.
So please help support this new site. What can you lose? This ancient dump? The Pfhorums hellhole? That's about all you need to worry about leaving behind. Let's start again, and let's do it right this time.
