I want to start a discussion about the future of this community and site.

Legitimate traffic has been on the decline for a long time. Attempts to spam the boards also continue to increase.

Up until this year, it hadn't really become a big issue. But earlier this year, use of the report post function ended up resulting in GMail blocking a lot of mail from both this domain, and my personal domain used for email. Basically since the report post function includes the spam, their servers legitimately saw it as a spam message. This is due to many current and former moderators having gmail as their provider.

The other part of this is tied to users using the "notify me of a new post" feature, and also many users here using GMail.

My personal life has also been a roller coaster of stress for about 2 years now. I don't really have the time to try and dig deeper and fix this issue, and have no idea when I will have time. The impact to my personal domain though is getting worse, to the point I couldn't email a friend today. I have no idea how much it impacted my job hunt earlier this year either, but I fear it may have contributed to a few possibilities getting missed.

So I want to figure out how best to handle what is here and how to move forward.

Random ideas, tossing these out to seed more possibilities in the discussion:

Set an end date for the board, and switch it to read only mode after said time. Continue to host it for a number of years to keep the information available.

Upgrade the server to adhere to modern mail practices that help establish more trust between mail senders. I'm not sure if this is going to clear up my personal domain issues with GMail.

Have someone else take over and host the community. I'd probably still be willing to keep ownership of the FAQ hosting and such on the riocar.org side.


Curious what others have as ideas as well. This community remains important to me, but I'm feeling it may be time to fade into the background as many others have already.