Fate of the MSPA Forums

We try and keep personal attacks down to a minimum, and soft owl has been out for a while. I understand there is some bad feelings with some of the members but we have tried to stay cordial.

yeah nas has not been listed as an "admin" in his user profile since 2012

As other people have said, considering softowl hasn't been involved in forum business whatsoever in about half a year, this would accomplish absolutely nothing, would be off-topic, and would be more than a little mean-spirited.

Yeah, I wouldn't necessarily take those tweets as bad news--just more of the same lack of news. I don't think NAS has any more behind-the-scenes information than any of the other current or former modmins do (which is to say, basically none at all).

While I totally understand and sympathize with everyone's frustrations at the situation and lack of communication, I can't help but be amused at the idea of wanting to start a boycott to hurt a company financially because they no longer offer a free service (free for us, not for them), but not being able to because you already don't give that company any money. 

The complete silence is definitely not good, but I think it's a bit of an exaggeration to say that we're being treated BADLY. We're being treated neutrally at worst, and at best we're receiving basically the same treatment as 99% of fandoms out there, ones which don't have discussion forums hosted by the company that produces the media and which aren't used to constant communication from the creators. Personally, I think it would be a good idea to at least wait until the current busy period is over before waging any campaigns to try and destroy What Pumpkin. Yes, it's frustrating, but don't forget that they ARE a very small company with a limited staff, during a very busy and stressful time (producing content which is, again, completely free to us but comes at a substantial cost to them). It's entirely possible that they would LOVE to be able to snap their fingers and fix the forums, but are financially incapable of hiring someone to do that right now, or have it on their To-Do list right underneath a big bold bullet point that says "FINISH HOMESTUCK".

Would a simple tweet or newspost from them go a long way? Totally. But also, some of the people in this thread seriously need to chill out.

At this point I've gotten so desensitized to bleak sounding non-information that I no longer feel anything when more of it comes out. :/

There's nothing more to say really. Until something actually happens or we actually get more reliable information, there's not much we can do aside from wait.

Well suit yourselves, I'm just giving a suggestion.

I just mean that it's easy for a company, small or big, to fall into a place they they are just happy that money is coming in so they feel like they don't need to fix anything. If that is the case, WP might never fix the forums at all, and if other stuff keeps breaking, they won't care.

A boycott of What Pumpkin wouldn't really send them any kind of message because, as a chiefly clothing-based store, they can't depend on your regular income already anyway.
Boycotts typically aren't a very effective form of activism, or at least not the "vote with your wallet" kind. They typically don't even merit a response let alone a change in strategy from a company.
If you really want to threaten a company's bottom line on ethical grounds you instead need to set up a competing service, however nobody can sell competing Homestuck merchandise without committing an illegal action, so that's pointless.

I don't agree that we have been treated "neutrally" because there are now incoming reports of people whose passwords from the forum seem to have been compromised, and at this point it is their responsibility to warn people about this rather than just pretend everything is fine (and no, an easily missed message that replaced the front page for half a day doesn't count), but there also really isn't much more we can do about it than we already have.

I'm fairly sure that the MSPA Forums were an integral part of What Pumpkin, especially back in the day when MSPA was essentially founded on them, when the fanventures were started on them, when they hosted the suggestion boxes etc. They definitely always were and still are nominally their official community site as well.

And yes, I don't mind the downtime but I do mind the lack of any official statement, standoffishness of their representatives, and seeming lack of care for the forum community. That's the bad treatment, not the forum downtime. (That said I would never boycott because I wouldn't want to hurt Hussie when this is most likely entirely not his fault).

You want to know the weirdest part of all this?
There's another site called mcmittens dot com, that has the same exact message on it as the MSPA Forum.

Hey guys, I'm just popping in to give my two cents. I'm the one who messaged Brian via twitter, more because he once might have been in the know about these sorta things and might know who to point me to than because I thought he'd really know whats going directly. I've also sent messages to most any additional sources that I could find who might possibly know or is more personally connected to someone who does and thus could possibly relay anything. And the one resounding reply I've gotten or managed to find someone give, has been that not only do many at or close to WP not know if anything is being done, they wouldn't even know who would know. Kinda like a bunch of housemates who left the home and all of them forgot a key, or even knows where else to get another one, but continued to pay rent. From what I can tell, the MSPA Forums became gradually less and less connected to Hussie or What Pumpkin Staff, especially since the end of the Kickstarter, presumably because of the TOG debacle (which you can find a good primer on here.) and then What Pumpkin having to impromptu-ly turn into a game development studio and work off what funds if any were left. This seemingly resulted in volunteer mods and admins being the only ones who even could do anything, but even then they weren't the ones paying for it, making a convoluted mess of who was in charge of what aspect on the technical side of the forums.

Is it just me or does the community feel a lot more... empty without the old forum?

It certainly does. Not everyone knows about this place (although it's on the first page of search results if you google MSPA Forums), the subreddit doesn't feel as big and worked on and it just feels like everyone's apart right now