Fate of the MSPA Forums

The forums actually never had an automated system which could do that, a couple of people even volunteered scripts that would do it but none of them worked.
The issue was mostly people placing images that were too large in their signatures, and the forum being unable to detect this properly (it could work it out with text, but not pictures). Mods would then repeatedly have to tell people to make them smaller, be ignored, and manually edit signatures, which took so much micromanagement (because so many people were ignoring the rules) that it eventually seemed that it would save more time to just disable images entirely.
If the new forum is running different board software it might possibly have a countermeasure for this, unlike the previous one. Alternately, as Homestuck is now over, there's no likelihood of any further related news for months, and What Pumpkin didn't bother replacing their forum until long after the end of Homestuck, there may not even be enough of a community that manually editing it is a problem any more, because there's nothing for them to talk about.
This forum itself only had ~150 active users in the past day and many of those people just lurk rather than post. The community was already drifting away to other venues and as the delay has been so long (and service so poor), I don't know how many will now bother to return, so that could solve the "too much work" issue.

I was on MSPFA and decided to make an account a few minutes ago. Yeah, I'm really damn late in doing that. I decided to go to MSPAF so I could see if I remembered my username (my username is usually my chumhandle now, but I can't remember whether I used musical or melodic when I signed up a few months ago.) It says the site is down for maintenance right now.
When I'm looking it up, all I see is stuff about the forum being hacked back in March, but I'm not really seeing anything past when this thread was made. Can anyone explain to me what's going on with MSPAF?
And yes, I made an account here just for this question, but I'm gonna stay on for now.

It's nice that the WP staff seems to care so much for the forums and for us when dealing with a hacker.
Well, at least WPs confirmed that they're working on new forums, at the very least.

I'm not sure where you got that impression from, considering the opposite has been said a few times already. Phillip was brought on by WP specifically to work on bringing the forums back, and he was the one who contacted us to help him out with that.

Ahhhh, gotcha. My bad!

Man the adventure subforum always produced like mad. I thought they were the main focus of MSPAF.

It's true that the forum adventures were always a strong subforum, but many of the most popular creators have already moved to other venues. The MSPA forums aren't the only place you can do those, and as their storied history has now been totally lost, there's little reason to pick that one.

Like, I'm pretty deep into the forum adventures community and a lot of them were already very uneasy about what pumpkin, because of the two occasions the subforum looked like it was under threat of being removed.
Now that all of their past work is gone very few of them I have asked are ready to trust that company again.

That's true, the What Pumpkin forums will probably always be the home for Homestuck-themed forum adventures, and there are still going to be some people who said they will grudgingly re-post all of their work just for the larger audience.
But I think it's lost a significant portion of what made that community interesting to me (as in, things that aren't fanworks) and will struggle to get it back.

PW, I think Jac's not really talking about fan artists, though. I guess Cauchemar's counts as fan art but a lot of the "famous" forum adventures in the old forum adventure community, such as K6BD, were only related to MSPA in that they also used a forum adventure format.

These non-derivative works should also crop up on the new forum, though, regardless of whether or not the old community is there? Because after a year or so a lot of people get tired of sburbventures and sburb rps and so forth. The community will be different, but the community of 2010 was different from the community of 2015, too, and non-fanwork forum adventures from both periods are still good and entertaining. I don't think that the continuing influence of a non-fanwork community was the deciding factor in new users making non-fanwork forum adventures - I think there's just an innate desire to create without relying on another author's material. I remember at least a few people whose first post was the first page of their original forum adventure, who wouldn't realistically have been influenced by the forum community.

Anyway, I guess we'll see when the new forum goes up.

Fighting on behalf of someone else is usually considered a nice thing plainWonder, but uh... did you ask whether the people at Eagle Time actually want what you are fighting for first?
Because, I don't think you're even a member of that community? And I can assure you, that this is not something that the site owner would ask for. Because we were literally talking about it days ago.

Pick a community that you are part of to champion instead please.

This post feels odd to me for some reason. It just seems more defensive than anything Jac has posted before.


I... kind of agree other websites shouldn't be mentioned, because honestly, then everyone would move over to those places and abandon the forums, and I don't think anyone wants that.