Post by RandomMe98 on Apr 13, 2020 11:09:06 GMT
Exactly four years ago today, the RegularCapital forums shut down for good because its owner (regularcapital) thought that running a forum wasn't feasible enough.
But in order to understand this we have to go back, way way back, to 2014.
In December of that year me and artnerfy started a site called RegularTaxi. RegularCapital cried fowl over the name in its first day but later we settled the issue. By the middle of the year there was a series of changes and the forum became more prevalent. Inspired by Toonzone in many ways of its structure, the site ended with about a dozen users, and stemmed from a group of users that was limited to me, artnerfy, zwkl, BlooMac, alfa_alfa, RegularCapital, Moleoman, dclover, MIKLOS96 and a couple others. I got banned due to behavior for one week in what turned out to be the dying days of the forums, but that's another story.
On December 9, 2015 (if I'm not mistaken) we found out the reason why the site went down. Apparently artnerfy was bored and got fed up with it. A few days later RegularCapital started a new forum (13th IIRC) with the same users. RegularCapital's forums would end up becoming a lot more successful than RegularTaxi. Despite my ban there (initially intended to be permanent starting January 6 - zwkl reverted it on February 29), the number of users managed to be higher, having at least thirty users. The forums got a week off for maintenance in its penultimate week to switch hosts, the entire database survived. Before I got banned, I thought of changing my username to GeorgeUnknown (tying in with my now-ephemerous obsession with Teletoon's version of George of the Jungle - glad that stopped) and during the ban, other users stole the George avatar I was going to adopt at Toonzone. Even during those days, some users that were also on Toonzone left the forums (including RegularCapital himself).
Everything was running normally until that fateful 13th of April. I was at school when I saw the last post I got to see: CosmoMattia96Vista saying "What's the best European public broadcaster in terms of channels?". Despite trying to receive news of what was happening during subsequent classes, the Wi-Fi connection was bad and even with mobile data I didn't get there. Once I came home I was in shock. RegularCapital said that he had it with the forums and there was no way to continue. Eventually he had periods where he considered shutting the website down, but without success.
We started a new forum, Loftforums, in August, but it was unsuccessful compared to RegularCapital and RegularTaxi combined. In all senses of the word, it was a RegularTaxi 2.0, more of a downgrade than an upgrade. After a few weeks it shut down and nobody else noticed, interest just stopped.
Today, let's give a little bit of silence in homage to the fourth anniversary of the shutdown of the forums.