All the Good Things

... come to an end.

Well, not really. We hope that the good stuff never end. Still, we're all humans, and we grow tired after a while. For all you guys from the boards reading this, you guessed it.

We're shutting down.

Now, that doesn't mean we're gonna quit the forums or remove our title.

We've already messaged the admins, letting them know our situation. We just can't continue with our schedule. We've got 14 people working on it, and lately, all 14 of us are just hoping that one of the other 13 would do the edition.

We dislike Blogger's interface. The HTML is kinda tough for most of us, save our resident Tech Guru, who created our template. Thanks for all the help, Dave!

I guess, all I want to say is that we are still among you guys, hiding in plain sight. Our title, from hence on will be "Ex-Reporters", instead of the current one.

We've decided on a course of action. We'll retire permanently. The admins and mods will lock down our archives.

We trust you guys enough to let ya'll take our name (we haven't trademarked it anyway). Go ahead, make your tributes. We've got enough in our treasury to reward those we liked.

As a final parting gift, we've decided to empty out our first treasury, Dave's one. All 3 million. Go into the comments, and tell us your favorite moment. Could be the time we featured you for being crazy/bold/suicidal. A joke so lame, it became funny. A shout out I made which you liked. An interesting thread.

Whatever.

Just go ahead and make our day. It's time you did so.

We need a break anyway.

Or at least, the senior editors, who started this needs a permanent break.

Who knows, we might return temporarily if there's something interesting.

The whining you guys did the last time only works once.

There are some kinks we have to work out at time of MY writing.

Who's gonna post it?
- Dave, for now. He did write up the goodbye letter. He wants us all to contribute, with 100k going to us all. It's not much, considering our seniority in the community, but eh. I'll take it.
- If Dane can't post it, I might post it. Still, I doubt my style would be appropriate to the event. Perhaps I could link it to TvTropes. One of the tropes. DissonantSerenity, perhaps.

What are our plans?
- The current consensus is that we'll post our profile links on the very last edition. Anybody that wants a reason, can message us, and we'll do our best to answer all the queries.

And of course, why? Why shut down?
- Simple. We love it too much to see it falter. We'd rather go out with a definite edition, rather than stop posting for a month, and make people speculate why we stopped. We know from the first time we paused that nobody wants to believe we quitted. For the last month, all the editions were put together hastily.

You might not have seen it, but believe me. It was a complete shitstorm on the IRC channel each time we put together something. And when the formatting gets FUBARed, that's when the Cluster F Bombs start flying around. It's not pretty.

We've got everything ready. We've got a countdown timer ready. Once it's up, we'll all put up our blogposts, get the link, get Dave to put it in, and we'll hit the deck before the bullets start flying.

As for all you posters who submitted, don't worry. As of writing, we're putting up an edition to clear out everything. All 3 of ya'll would have been posted. There's one last one left. It belongs to an admin.

Personally, as much as I want to believe with a bang, we're going out like a whimper.

Feel free to friend us on Facebook, but do tell us that you're from the forums. Some of us are notoriously stingy with the F/Rs, myself included.

One good reason to add us is that we've all got one thing in common. We're all geeks.

I'm an otaku, and an expert on tropes.
Dave's an expert at programming and Settlers of Catan.
Jessica's an expert on 1970-1990s music.
Jeremy's an expert on internet memes and image macros.
Doug's a part-time musician.
Karen and Chris are the people you go to if you want grammar nazis. That's why we usually don't let them proofread.

Etc.

We have no idea what to do with our IRC channel. Should we open it up to the community? Should we close it down? Should we keep using it for our own purposes?

We're still mulling over the final details, last time I checked.

What we've confirmed:
Layout.
- We clear out all the backlog up to 3 days.
- We post up our closing letters.
- We put in some news, because it's what we do.

Our baby's fate.
- Euthanize it. 'Nuff said.

Treasury
- We clear it all out with contests and stuff like that.
- Some money will be split among ourselves to thank us for our work.

Title
- Honorary Reporter. This will be permanent, unless we get banned or we're promoted to admin. Technically, we're mods for our forum anyway. 14 mods for a single board. I think that's the highest. 2nd place has 6 mods.

And... that's all!

Mabel, the Reporter.
Signing out.
Permanently.

Edit:

Mabel, the Reporter.
Signing out of the Summary.
Permanently.