Well, as we all know a recently conducted survey confirmed a lot of notions I had for the site. There were many great suggestions to make the site better and to my surprise, very little complaints.

But one thing that stuck out was the ability for everyone to edit and personalize their settings. After talking with some web designers, programmers and information architects, I realized that FactPile in it’s current state couldn’t become what people want.

So, I was left with a choice. Either continue down the path of finding suitable plug-ins to cover for my hack programming skills, or burn the house down and start fresh. While I am a big fan of trying to patch things in order to not rock the boat too much, sometimes you realize that in order to move ahead, you have to take some steps backwards.

Factpile has evolved to into something I never imagined it could become when I launched the site back in July of 2006. But today, in order for it to prosper I must trim the fat at the risk of losing some readers.

So here’s the deal. I have to trash the forum section on this site. It’s a wonky Wordpress plug-in that ever since the day I installed it, has caused more trouble for this site than anything else. Most of the database error messages you see are from the forum. But, I feel strongly that a forum is essential for a site like this.

I knew I had to find a solution, and I believe I have.

Let me introduce FactpileTopia.com. This is a domain and site completely built to run as a forum. It’s using phpBB so it’s got a ton of features that we can use to make all of our lives easier. You should all thank Kenny C. for the suggestion of the name.

All I’ve done is copied the topics from the Factpile forum section and added them. But because of the set-up, I can’t bring over all your posts. So here is the pain in the ass fun part. You need to register at FactpileTopia where you’ll enjoy the normal ways of participating in a forum with all the “normal” posting attributes. You know, editing, signatures and all the bells and whistles. Any forum post on Factpile that you want to take over to the forum site, you’ll have to seed it. I will leave the Factpile forum up until the end of September of 2009. After that, I will erase that heathen from the site.

Factpile will of course link to the forum, and will still have my eye on things. But I’m going to need moderators. There are some who have already shown the ability and willingness to have that awesome responsibility. I hope that they wish to continue on the new forum.

To recap: You’ll need to register at the new forum site: FactpileTopia.com.
If there were any topics you started or wanted to see on the new forum, bring those over as well.
The Forum found here on Factpile will remain until September 30th. On that day I’ll have another message reminding people to grab what they want. At midnight on October 1st, the forum on Factpile will be gone.

One last thing – Factpile is still in the re-design process and is not going away anytime soon. You’d be amazed at how much goes into the thinking behind the site. The goal of the new look will be to make it easier for everyone to find what they want and participate. Give it time, it’ll be here before you know it.

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