If you’ve stopped by HillRunner.com this week, you may have noticed some things going on. Believe me, they have taken up a significant portion of my attention this week.
I just wanted to take a moment to share what’s going on and, as much as I can, why.
If you visited early in the week, you may have seen some error messages or run into other issues. By mid-week, things were mostly stabilized but not always running as fast as I’d like.
I still don’t think I’ve been given a full explanation of what’s going on but I’ve known since bringing the forums back to the site with almost their full history that they have been a load on the site’s server. For some reason, the tipping point was reached this week and the server just couldn’t handle the load.
I then had to make a very difficult decision. The forums were the heart and soul of HillRunner.com during its most formative years. Without the forums, I’m quite sure HillRunner.com would not be what it is today. However, as I’m sure you are quite aware, they have received very little attention in recent years. The number of posts there has been minimal and traffic to the forums has fallen to almost nothing.
As difficult as the decision was, I had to accept the fact that the negative impact of the forums on the rest of the site and the amount of work I had to put in to keep them going just wasn’t worth it. They offered little to no value to the site anymore. So I pulled them down and am in the process of cleaning up the significant amounts of data that was stored in them.
I still have a backup of the forums data. If it seems feasible and worthwhile, I’m not ruling out the possibility of bringing them back at some point. However, as of now, it just doesn’t make sense to keep them going.
I’m not happy about having to make this decision but I am confident that it is the right decision for HillRunner.com. I hope you understand and can appreciate the decision I had to make. Hopefully, we’ll see far fewer problems once the cleanup is complete.
Thursday evening update: I’m about to finish the amount of forum cleanup I’m going to worry about for now. I also did a bunch of database maintenance. We should be in a stable position on a newly streamlined site. Hopefully, all will be better than ever. Again, I apologize for having to take the forums down and will consider options for bringing them back. However, don’t count on it happening.
To the Club HillRunner.com members: I was, of course, using the forums to post the tip of the week for those who didn’t want to go to Facebook. I will be exploring ways to get that back on here, hopefully with history. I might roll them into members only posts on the blog. Whatever happens, I will do something for you and I’ll keep you updated.