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ORIGINAL: Da Boss - Head Honcho at The SP:WaW Depot

Greetings friends and fellow Depot members,

It is with a great deal of sadness that I must make this announcement, although I knew it would have to happen one day. Effective April 1, 2017 this site, the Depot, will be closed down and the SPWaW Depot Association, Inc. will be disbanded. No, this is not an April Fools joke. That just happens to be the day we would have to pay for another year of hosting with our wonderful friends at Geek Storage, making it a natural stopping point.

When I started the Depot on Nov. 28, 2003, never in my wildest dreams did I think it would become as large as it did, and so important to the survival of the game. I certainly never expected us to become the official support site for the game, taking that role over from Matrix themselves.

Thirteen years. Boy that's hard to believe! Some of you were teenagers when we started, and you're now grown adults, with kids of your own now. So much has happened over those years... Unfortunately though, things change over time. We went from thousands of active members to just a handful. Where once the forums were so active you could hardly keep up but are now quiet; I know that I, as Da Boss, sure couldn't, and I had to simply sit back and trust those who took on the role of "Depot Moderator". And what a magnificent job they did! Good lord, in over 30 years of online community experience I never before saw a mod team as good as ours, and I've never seen their equal yet. I hold the Depot moderation team, past and present, in the highest possible regard. You are, quite simply, the best that have ever been.

Of course, it isn't just the mods that have kept this place going all these years, there's also the admins, and the members of the Depot Board of Directors. Oh yes, the Depot, in the form of the SPWaW Depot Association, Inc. is and was a real corporation, with a genuine board of directors that guided it. It wasn't just a title either, these folks did a lot of important work behind the scenes that kept the lights on here.

And last, but by no means least, there's you, the users. Yeah, some of you have been royal pains in the backside, and we've had to ban a very, very small handful of you, but I don't think I could have asked for a better group of nuts and goofballs to bring this place to life and make it into the community it is.

So, getting back to the matter at hand, each year for the past few years I've had to seriously look at the activity of the forums versus the cost to run them. Not just monetary costs, because you folks have been generous with your contributions and we've always managed to scrape together the yearly hosting payment and keep the main domain name registered (though we did have to let go of several other domain names, like spwaw.us because it got too expensive), but the cost in time. It takes a lot of work to keep this place humming, and more and more over the years I was finding I had less and less time to devote to it. Then the health issues started kicking in and my meds started really affecting my attention span and memory and... I just can't do it anymore, and there's no one here in the community who can take over for me because of how customized the software has become. We run this place on a very heavily modified version of phpBB2, which is way out of date and beyond the ability to be updated now. The only way the Depot could continue from this point is with a completely fresh start.


Which is exactly what Falcon is trying to do with his own new forum at http://spwawdepot.prophpbb.com/ and I encourage any of you interested in keep the game alive to sign up for a free account there. Many of the Depot files will be moved there over the next few weeks. He's even asked for, and will be given, a copy of the Depot database, in the hopes that one day all the posts from here can be archived or otherwise put on public display.

So, as things wind down here over the next few weeks I'd also like to encourage you all to dig through our older posts and threads and unearth the treasures you want to take with you, or maybe discover something you didn't even know existed.

The Depot domain name, spwaw.com, I will be keeping for at least the next few years, and will redirect any web traffic to it over to Falcon's site. … … …

To all of you, every last one of you, the people who, for the most part I'll never meet, but whom I consider to be my good, good friends, thank you. Thank you for allowing me 13 wonderful years of being... Da Boss.