Mars is retrograde, and I feel it is triggering something in me that needs to close the forum. Honestly, I rarely participate in it myself, and if I only host it for the sake of building up pageviews so I can earn more advertising money, it feels against the values I am trying to live by. I also don’t like comments shared on the forum that bring the blog down to a level that makes me uncomfortable, and even with the help of a user-moderating flag tool, I find that I do not have the resources to monitor all that is being written on the site.
For those of you who are regulars in the forum, I offer my apologies for taking away your home. I am providing a week’s notice so that you can coordinate amongst yourselves if you want to create a forum elsewhere. Ning has a plan for less than $20/year that accommodates up to 150 members, and I am sure there are many other options you can look into. Unfortunately, there is no way for your data or the forum threads to be exported. (For those who are technically-minded, it would just be one big MySQL dump.) So you can use the time before 2/3 to save any pages that are important to you to your hard drive.
What this means for the future: If you are registered on Sasstrology, you will still be able to comment on blog posts, but there will be no private messaging system, no status updates, no groups, no profiles.
P.S. Elsa invites anyone interested to join the conversation at her boards.