Almost there. One more post after this one and I will have finished all 5 of the response posts! I really hate that I had to break it out like that but with how complex many of these topics are there is just no way I could have done so otherwise. For any of you who need a refresher this is the 4th post out of a series of 5. This post is an open letter to the community and the one after this will be a detailed plan of what is coming next for Weight Gaming.

You may also notice I have locked the other posts. This is mainly because I want to draw focus to this one before the final post. What I am going to be doing here is really uncomfortable for me personally so I can hope you all can bear with me as I work through this. I think overall it would be nice for everyone to give a bit of a peek behind the curtain per se.

So with that said, let’s start from the beginning…

How & Why I Took Over Weight Gaming

A Quick History Lesson

So we are going way back to 2017-2018 for a quick history lesson. I just met who would become my amazing wife Kira and she told me about a website she found called Weight Gaming where people made weight gain fetish games. I was really surprised to hear that as I gave up looking for such a thing after my College years where I tried to join some DeviantArt fetish game groups only to see them dissolve as fast as they tended to pop up.

I always wanted to make a Weight Gain game so Kira and I decided it would be fun to try one which is how our first game/prototype The Farm was born. This did not last for long though as the site suffered a major failure soon after one of our first releases.

The service provider Kilif was using had some sort of meltdown which not only trashed the servers WG was running on, but also the backups for those servers and the site. Kilif was beyond frustrated at that point. Between the loss of the servers and the fact he felt there was not a lot of interest in the site anyway he wanted to shut it all down. When I heard about this in the Discord I couldn’t let it happen.

This site was special to me and Kira and I didn’t want to see it shutdown. Also, I was tired of seeing dev groups after dev group shutdown. I wanted to finally see fat fetish games have a place they can call their own, and with that I reached out and volunteered to take the site over from him.

What Was My Original Idea

At the time I took over it felt like there was a large migration of artists from the community in general, especially on the non-anthro side. This was mainly due to real life catching up to people with many stating at the time it was to focus more on their job and making rent. I hated seeing so many artists that I grew up with having to move on.

Some found success in Patreon but that was the exception not the rule, and frankly the commission market in general makes no sense. Artwork is an artisan craft but due to the race to the bottom it is treated more as a bulk market which is not sustainable. While this is controversial with some people, I thought (and still think) at the time that games could be a viable alternative, offering creatives in general a livable wage.

The data we had suggested that conversion rates for fetish games could be as high as 10% (though I assume 5% in any of my estimates) which is insane. To give context 1% is considered really good in most industries and conversion rates on steam are less than a fraction of a percent. And while there are issues with handling payment processing, these can be solved using a high risk payment processor.

One of the main hurdles was the question of, were there enough people to make it viable? At the time I estimated if we could get ~100,000 unique users per month that could make a large enough market size to realistically support 2 to 3 person teams and right now we get ~130-150k users per month.

I know some people may think I just have my head in the clouds but I do really think it can be feasible. If you really think about it, the general indie market is really competitive and depends a lot more on being noticed than really the quality of the game. But in a smaller more focused thing like expansion fetish indie games its much easier to get noticed and quality can be a much larger driver.

That is until something I never thought would happen threw a wrench right into my face…

An Ever Darkening Forest

The sad fact of the matter is the internet is entering a dark age, though this has been happening slowly even before the rise of AIGC. The issue at play is communities (not just ours) are fracturing and reforming in smaller, more private spaces such as discord servers or telegram groups. This is not on its own bad, but it feels like it is having a noticeable influence on reducing interaction between people not in these smaller spaces and over all collaboration.

Weight Gaming is a good example of this. When I first took over the community had a problem where it was actually many smaller groups that mainly just stayed in their own subsections of the forums. This is one of the reasons we switched to discourse from phpBB (I think that is what WG used to use). This worked originally and we saw an increase in people from different groups interacting and coordinating with each other.

But then I started to see things start to degrade near the mid-end of COVID lockdown. General interactions looked like they were slowing down and more and more people spent their time interacting in a handful of project threads.

This is important because there is one more hurdle to devs possibly making a living selling fetish games, and that is collaboration.

I can rant on this topic for hours but to try to keep it short, quality needed to improve and the likelihood of a project being abandoned needed to go down in general. In order to achieve this collaborations (specifically between different skillsets) needed to increase, and for the most part I did see this happening more and more after I took over. Now though it feels like a lot of people are now so suspicious and scared that the overall willingness to try to work together has been vanishing and more devs just choose to work alone.

I can’t begin to describe how sad this made me. I don’t use the term depression lightly but I can say seeing this did make me quite a bit depressed. It felt like all those years of work were being washed away and was for nothing.

My Trip to the ER

A lot of people I don’t think know about this and I think many more forgot this even happened. Around 2021 I was working on pushing out an update to the forums ahead of one of the Gain Jams. If you ever worked in IT you know how stressful it is to do an update on a live site, but we couldn’t afford to do proper staging so it was just how it had to be done.

As I started to run the DB migration something hit me and I didn’t feel good. I got up from my desk and went to the bathroom and then the next thing I remember is waking up slumped on the toilet and unable to see out of my left eye. It’s still a bit fuzzy but I think Kira found me after she heard me fall in the bathroom and I was then rushed to the ER.

The doctors were worried I had a stroke (especially with the partial blindness) and I was kept overnight for observation. After that came months of tests and monitoring to see if they could find what caused me to faint like I did, and what they found was it was due to all the stress I was under. I have a really good poker face and it can be hard for anyone to see when I am in pain much less when I am over-stressed, and in this case the stress of my work and Weight Gaming finally caused all of that to rise to the surface and they told me I needed to find a way to reduce my stress or it would be only a matter of time before I suffered another episode or worse. Unfortunately, they were right and I suffered another episode in 2022.

You might be wondering why I am talking about this, well this event is one of the biggest reasons I started having to pull back from the community as well it is one of the reasons our operating costs are as expensive as they are. It’s even why I ended up quitting my Job at the time, which was the first time I ever left a job without another lined up.

While most of the ~$800 a month we pay comes from our database and bandwidth costs, a fairly large portion of it (~30% I think) is mainly because my health couldn’t afford me taking the short cuts I was taking to try to save some cash.

Due to this it really hurts me anytime I see someone saying we are spending too much on the site and we could run it cheaper if we wanted to. This is because they are right, but it’s not a matter of want, it’s that I can’t. I really have the site at about the bare minimum I can. And what throws more salt onto the wound is that some of the people who say it were around when that happened, so either forgot or just don’t care.

I No Longer Look Forward to Gain Jams

This year I think was the first year we really didn’t do any sort of Gain Jam, and I think it’s a bad sign when I say it was one of the best Falls I have had in a long, long time.

When I first started the Gain Jams (known as fat fortnights back then) I looked forward to them. I love seeing all the creativity on display and seeing everyone play each other’s games and provide feedback! But after those first two years I started seeing things take a turn for the worse in the background.

Starting with the 2020 jam a growing number of devs were becoming more and more focused on it as a competition. This led to me getting spammed with DMs from people looking to get me to change our scoring to be more beneficial to them, complaining about overall judging, and even trying to get entire types of games like VNs and Text Adventures banned. This specific behavior came to a head in 2022 when a small group of devs severely harassed some of the judges over their scoring of the games and accused them of fixing the jam.

On top of that in 2021 we saw another group come out of the woodwork when we did the Hands Off theme. While most devs really liked the theme another group of mainly non-devs started screaming and yelling about how it was a bad theme. This confused me as many of the people DMing me about it were not participating and this is a fairly standard theme for a game jam, but then I found out they were worried that such a complex theme would cause less games to be submitted and didn’t see the jam as a jam, but as a way to get more fetish games.

And now the most recent group to get thrown into the mix are the people who want AIGC banned from the Jam.

Year after year the jams have become near constant arguments and people messaging me and demanding X be changed, and regardless of what we did we still always ended up doing something or other wrong. Eventually I began spending more time prepping for the flood of demands I was going to receive than for the Jam. And even as I tried to move away I always found myself getting pulled back in.

While I felt bad about having to cancel this year’s Jam since I know so many people look forward to it, I can not lie that once I did, a massive weight was lifted off of my shoulders. I was even able to participate in a Jam myself this year which was so much fun! It makes me sad though as feeling that way is not a good sign.

I Almost Shut It Down

The Gain Jam of 2024 really tested me. Seeing people behave the way they did, especially when I thought some of them were better than that, really hit me hard. Even after the Jam I still had people messaging me and arguing with me until after January. All the arguments and attacks were getting to me, but none of them hurt me as bad as when I saw other users going after each other.

I don’t remember what triggered it, but I remember reading something and for one of the few times in my life just completely losing my temper. I got up from my desk and decided to go upstairs to try to calm down when Kira asked what was wrong as I was standing in the doorway. I turned around and just broke down crying. Kira and I have been together for around 8 years at that point, and never during all that time did she see me ever have a breakdown like that.

Everything just finally came to a head at that point, the depression of seeing how everything was going, the anger of seeing everyone at each other’s throats, the ever building financial pressures, but most of all the feeling that I completely failed everyone. I was angry and so upset I wanted to pull the plug on the entire thing right there and then. Shut it all down and let it fade into memory just let all those other groups I saw all those years ago.

There are only two reasons that did not happen. First, I don’t like to act when I know I am emotional so I try to force myself to stand down and take some time to think. Most of all though, I was working on the Big Pal Project with ExtrudedSquared at the time, and getting to work on that with them and the small group we put together reminded me how much I enjoyed making games and helped calm me down and even me out.

Being completely honest here, that mod and working with them is likely the only reason the site survived the enshitification post. If I was still anywhere near the mental state I was in when I had that breakdown and I saw that post I am sad to say that Weight Gaming would have been gone by morning.

This incident made it clear to me though that I was already past my breaking point and considering shutting it all down like Kilif was all those years ago.

Something Needs to Change

Kira pointed out a post recently made by the person that runs sheezy, and I really feel for them. Hosting sites and communities like this keep getting more expensive and harder to do every year. It’s even harder when you have another person you also need to support.

Weight Gaming for the longest time has been feeling more like a second job that I have to pay $5000 a year for. Even when I am at work I am checking the forums and keeping an eye on things and once I am off I always have the discord and the forums up. I am so thankful for Krod being such a big help as without him I don’t think I would even get a chance to sleep.

It may be selfish for me to say, but I want to find the fun again. I want to get back into making games. I want to feel that if I am putting this much time and money into the site that I am also getting something out of it as well and not just paying to work. The only thing that is for sure at this moment though is if I want to keep this community going I am going to have to make some big changes.

I know a few of you may read this as the site is going to get shut down, but I am not planning on going that far. I do have a plan that I am personally happy with, but it’s going to be some big changes. I hope once I am done I will be able to refocus the forums onto discussion and help deal with some of the curation concerns people seem to have, but the details on that will have to wait until the next and final post next Monday.

I’m sorry to hear that things are going poorly for you. But hold strong. I used to lurk around this site because I was eager to see what new fat furry game was going to be announced or developed on. I get that you need a change if you want the magic of seeing new ideas to come again…
You ever heard of SAGE? (Sonic Amateur Games Expo) It’s a sort of annual event when a bunch of game devs come together to show off their projects. It’s not a competition, and it’s not a way to show off how good you are. It’s a way for passionate game devs to unite and show off their vision of what they believe is fun.
I think a game jam was a good idea at first, since it motivated people to make games and get them done. But with people treating it more as a competition than a way to show off the BEEG and FAT, I agree that something has to change. So why not we try something like SAGE?

If you aren’t having fun anymore, close it up. Seriously. It’s not worth the seven thousand words, 20,000$ or your health.

Big Ladies are culturally in the spotlight now, there’s isn’t a big of need for a home as there was when it was niche seven or eight years ago. Things are good and its probably because of you.

If you think the new plan will work out, go for it. But if it doesn’t work out, ending things isn’t giving up, it’s finishing the story.

Hey, I’ve been lurking on this site for years now. I always appreciated having a central hub for the things I like (large women). I made an account just so I could say thank you for keeping the site up. As much as it seems like things aren’t great right now, there is a lot of people out there who do care and have an interest in keeping the site up. I truly wish you the best and I hope it all works out for you.

Burn out is real, insidious, and hits harder than you’d think. It can suck the passion you have for something straight out of it, and leave you feeling hollow.

How things sit right now? You need more help than you have. You talk about wanting games to be a collaborative process, but how much of the upkeep and operation of the site is collaborative at this point?

This is not a rhetorical question. I’m honestly unaware. As far as I know, it’s basically you and Krod and… those are the only people I’m aware of who are actively involved at this time. And if that’s it? Frankly I’m amazed that this place is running as decently as it happens to be right now, even though it’s nowhere close to great at the moment.

Offload some tasks. Not via paying people, but via distribution. If you want to make tutorials, one of the first should be “how to use the self-service moderation tools on this site” - because a lot of users seem to be actively unaware of them, having not engaged with them past the “get your username allowed to post” walkthrough on first making an account. Heck, I’ve had to dig and Google myself to find things like how to mute particularly obnoxious users in the past, and you seem like the sort to know about how users are increasingly likely to lose interest the more things they have to click through to find/purchase something. This applies to things like “curating own web experience” too, which puts additional burdens on moderation.

Hell, I’ll go one step further - ANYBODY who reads this, if you think the flagging and content-curation and muting tools on Discourse are both easy to understand and underutilized here? Please, if you have the couple hours to throw together a simple guide with walkthroughs which can be readily pointed to for those who struggle with it - do so. I wish I had the time to do so myself, but this is the only Discourse forum I use and so I honestly don’t think I’m versed on it enough to actually know all the ins and outs.

But Grot, you need to pass things you can over to others. Obviously you can’t exactly outsource moderation of the site wholesale, but you can promote the tools others need to make your job easier. And you can do what you did this year, which was offer up the forum as a platform for a third-party jam instead of directly organizing one yourself. There could easily be MORE JAMS if you basically just went “yeah, you can run one and we’ll provide the space as long as you abide by the following guidelines” since you won’t be dealing with the organizational and PR mess of it on your own. You’re now officially just the venue.

This is seat-of-pants brainstorming here, I don’t know the effective logistical side of it, but… realistically? Collective, collaborative brainstorming is a good idea! It’s what you’re wanting! Put it towards the site itself, too, not just the games the site is facilitating the creation of.

You don’t need to solo-dev the whole site. Talk about what you want to see people do, then put it out there on the floor for people to chime in about. People will have ideas, they can bounce them off one-another, you can find edge-cases and problem points before the implementation actually comes into play. The people who use this site, regardless of other differences of opinion, at the very least have a common interest in seeing it stick around in a usable state. Work with that. It’s a resource, and where people don’t have money to contribute to the hosting they may still have ideas or time to contribute different skills or knowledge-base aspects which could prove beneficial in the long run.

You need to unload some of this. Perhaps nobody has the full schedule time to devote to any large task, but maybe some people do? And even if not, maybe people have ways to distribute the task in a way that it’s not quite so burdensome to any singular person.

Seeing such a revelation is a little scary, but at the same time inspiring. I’m truly sorry you had to experience all of this, but now I know more from history and realize that I should really try to choose my words carefully and think about what I write here, not just to avoid offending anyone, but also to avoid destroying this community (where would I go if not for it?)

Even though I’m not having any success in game development right now (not creatively, not financially (it’s a sin to ask for money for such scraps)) I just understand that these are temporary setbacks, you just have to give yourself time and work little by little to improve.

I sincerely hope that everything will be fine for all of you connected to this community. Just treat everyone with respect (I don’t like AI things either, but if they haven’t been banned, then let them A) not stifle those who create content manually and B) not harm the community. Be mostly peaceful, after all. You’ll always have time to fight, but not to talk.

I sincerely wish you good luck, both here and in your personal life. Thank you for the work you’ve done and for putting up with us.

This thread from an electronic music forum (which is NOT AT ALL fetish or game-related, pls be cool, y’all) has a ton of good tips and tricks for using Discourse

I would just add that being a part of this site under your leadership is uniquely delightful. You have sacrificed so much for this site and it goes unappreciated a lot - even if it was always obvious, from your financial transparency to your genial attitude during general site discourse to owning up to when you’ve been wrong to your core values as a person. It doesn’t - possibly can’t - get said enough, but YOUR genuine heart for others and level-headed decision-making are qualities of managerial excellence, even when you make mistakes. That’s something most of us are bereft of in our daily lives. Who knew we would have gotten it on WeightGaming?

Whatever you need to do for your health and well-being has my full support. One thing I don’t know if you’ve heard before is that I think you’ve done a great job protecting this forum’s inclusivity. Regardless of skill level, gaming preference, handicap, fetish, etc. This is my opinion of you and will probably always be my opinion of you - not at all that you’ve “failed”.

I’ve frequented this site for a while, though I’ve never felt there’s been a moment to communicate my appreciation in a way that feels relevant. I think now might be the time and place.

I’ve always been grateful for this website’s existence. I have nothing but respect for your own and the staff’s efforts. It’s down-right admirable how well you’ve kept this place running, especially considering the expenses. Please don’t be so hard on yourself!

This site has allowed me to find and collaborate with other creators, I can say for certain that it wouldn’t have happened otherwise. I can only speak for myself, but I’m sure many others can attest to how much of a net-positive this forum has been, even if they don’t post directly.

I’m regretful that all I have to offer in return are my personal experiences, but I hope they provide at least a little solace. You’ve always taken a level-headed, fair approach to things. Going forward, no matter what the plans are, I have trust in your judgement.

This is honestly heart-breaking. I forgot about your trip to the ER, and I didn’t realize the extent of your stress for both episodes you had that made them happen. And I’m glad you’re getting more help in moderating the site, the mods you’ve got have been doing a pretty good job since Kilif and Juxt both stepped down. It’s always felt like you got more on your plate since they did, but life happens and it’s not their fault. So seeing more support in at least helping to moderate is a relief.

What’s really hurting is seeing how much it’s worn you out and, frankly, burning you out. As someone who’s been wanting to (and because of LIFE and burnout, severely underperforming) in making some kind of gaming content I haven’t participated in a Jam for a while now. As a player, I’ve been feeling distant from them because of so much harsh criticism and complaints for games being made that it just doesn’t seem as fun as it did back in '19 and '20. People getting more aggressive, demanding, and generally rude as time passes is just soul draining. And on top of that, now knowing how much bullshit you’ve had to deal with people demanding making changes because they don’t like one thing or another, and more recently the brigading over a game that had AI art is just…

It’s understandable why you’ve felt so much better not organizing a Gain Jam this year. I don’t blame you for it, and I get the feeling organizing one for the site is not something that can reasonably be expected for a while again. Especially because of the sole-focus on you with arbitrary (and some, depending on your perspective, less-than-arbitrary) demands only for tempers to be be out of control and tantrums and whatnot to happen when someone doesn’t get their way.

Reading the fact, mentioned in your AI post, that someone truly and said with their full chest that it was “our moral duty to tell our communities what to believe” is mind-boggling to me. I’m not a big name in the weight gain community, and I doubt I ever will be, but I’ve never ever thought I should tell other people what to do in terms of how they consume or enjoy content such as AI.

I’ve got a lot of respect for you not only how long you’ve kept this forum running, Grot, but also how well you’ve done it. Recent events haven’t helped the stress factor, of course, but you deserve recognition for the job well done. Even with the criticisms you’ve had thrown your way, legitimate and otherwise, you deserve a tip of the hat for a job well done.

But like you said, this has been feeling more like a 2nd job than the passion project it’s been. So changes are necessary. I’ll look forward to your 5th and final post, and hope it’s not too disappointing

Thank you for being open and honest with us, Grot. And for keeping this community going, hardships and all.

As one of those people who’s been around since the old days and still has a lot of fond memories, I just want to say it’s not worth it.

This site is precious to you and you’ve put so much of yourself into it, but even if it was the best site on the internet it wouldn’t be worth risking your health or finances over.

I want to caution against taking actions to try and make your sacrifices feel justified, especially since that way lies even more sacrifice and suffering.

The only way forward is to do less to a point where you feel like it’s no longer weighing on you, not to try and get more.

And if you can’t find a solution that lets you look after yourself, then you have to let it go. The world will go on and people will still make games about how wonderful fat people are. Hell, you can join their forums when they do.

I’ve been an official member of this website for less than a month, but I’ve lurked for a few months, and because of that, I know my views are new and don’t have the history and understanding of this community that others have, but my experience with this community and website has been enjoyable. Seeing the discussions that have been held on this website has been quite eye-opening to other perspectives and has helped me view things more healthily. And seeing how you respond to things, always being helpful, or trying to understand others’ perspectives, has made me look up to you. And seeing the stuff you’ve been through for this website is truly heartbreaking.

I am just a random stranger on the internet, but as others have said before me, like @kestrel . If this solution doesn’t relieve any pressure off your shoulders, it may be time to retire the site. You shouldn’t have to suffer for this site to exist. Prioritise your health and wellbeing; we all only get to live once, and you should be able to enjoy this community as much as everyone else. So whatever you have planned, I’m fully on board if it means this site continues to exist and you get to be happy.

This site was never going to last if it was up to having one person designated to bear the brunt of the whole thing, as kata (and kilif) can probably affirm. For one thing, having scrutiny for every decision fall on a single person makes it a lot harder to have actual community cohesion.

I don’t think that kind of nuclear option is necessary, provided there’s an actual effort to both downsize and switch to a more sustainable platform. Yes, that will mean giving up on the pipe-dreams of this ever becoming a platform for hosting games.

However, if that DOES seem likely to come to pass, I strongly suggest talking to the communities that people here will be moving into as a result. Eka, F95, tfgames, etc. Of those, F95 is probably the most likely to be hostile based on what I’ve seen thus far.

FWIW, this place has lasted far longer than any other attempt to create a space like this and that counts for something, even if choices made at the start of it all may have made it far more troublesome to keep going in the long run.

I prefer not to talk nor get involved in discussions because I often feel that I can’t add anything meaningfull to it. But I’ve been following a little the current events on this site and could only imagine that for many and specially you it has been stressful and depressing.

When I joined this site not too long ago, I was very happy to find a place like this where people are sharing and talking in a very healthy and positive way about fetishes like weight gaining and fat in general and sorta motivated me into working on mods for my favourite games and while they aren’t by any means perfect, people seem to get interested in them and thanks to this site, I was able to find some pretty good games and even try ones that I would never think about playing them. One of the safest and healthiest sites to find and talk about this kind of content (compared to places like “the purple site”)

However, this year has been quite difficult for everyone and we can’t deny that many posts and discussion have brought a lot of heated arguments, bad manners and a tense atmostphere. To be honest, all of this has been really sad for me because
while I don’t know how it this, I can imagine how it hard and stressful must be to people like grot to run a site and having to endure and mantain it alongside their personal life. All of that can break a person.

While I do want and hope that Weight gaming to stay forever, I can and will understand and respect whatever you want to do @grotlover2 from now on. Just hope that you care for yourself first and to be happy. Be safe.

I’ve given glances to the big budget writeups now and then, and always been amazed someone could be so selfless to give so much of themselves to a site like this. I (and as seen in this thread many others) am grateful for the work you’ve done setting up this community.

Still, as others have said it isn’t worth that level of stress. Especially if it’s caused you to lose sight of your old spirit, and especially if it’s causing you medical emergencies. From the sounds of things you’re already well aware of that and have a plan of action, so I’ll just say I hope whatever comes next I hope it’s what you believe is best for you.

I think that’s partly why some issues have had the most heightened discourse here of late, since there’s a desire to have this place remain a more welcoming and tolerant space while also holding it to a higher standard in order to at least appear less informal and for better or worse, act as a ‘positive role model’ for this fetish community. I think both are important, but attempts to message over how to balance the two fell flat due to poor delivery and failing to recognise that there are limits to that balancing act.

If staff act aloof when dictating the terms of the site’s existence (even if their personal contributions can justify an authoritative attitude), it’s highly likely to backfire, as it has in the past as well. Even so, I think that the immense outpouring of emotions in varying directions has done more to justify the utility of the forum, even if that passion might also hasten its downfall. People really do care about the existence of spaces like this one, and I think that there are definitely steps that can be taken to reach out now and figure out how to bring a sense of community back into weight gaming.

Probably best done off-site, or at least within a smaller grouping of people.

If there’s a real desire to make this work, I can help with that process, even if I am not in a fiscal/temporal place to bankroll or be a full-time mod. However, that would mean rolling-back on some aspects of the commercial approach that have been undertaken thus far and coming up with a clearer and less timid stance on a few pertinent issues. Doesn’t mean being dogmatic but I think that there are things we can do to rebuild respect and mutual understanding before taking the site out behind the shed and talking about the rabbits.

Grotlover, this days it is very hard to deal with people when your heart is so kind. If I were you, I would have given up and closed the site a long time ago. A hero we clearly don’t deserve. I was going to write that you should get rid of the burden because your health is more important, but since you wrote about a plan at the end, I’ll wait for a new post on Monday.
P.S. I don’t know anything about sites and how to earn money from them, but if there was a button which I can push to watch some ads every time I open forum I would be glad to do this knowing that I help admin to earn money

Wow… Im so glad i found this website for starters and i wish you and many here to best regardless what happens in the future

Know i appreciate everything you have done within your position and ability

I just want to comment specifically on the splintering into private discord servers because I was in one (actually 3 different servers that were created and then abandoned for one reason or another). Even while the Sims subcommunity here was dealing with discord drama and technical issues, this forum was always a consistent line of communication for us to use and host download links because discord kind of sucks at that. However since I think January the discord server vanished with no explanation, no one has stepped up to make a new one so the entire sims weight gain modding community has been in limbo for almost a year. Now, most of our mods are broken and I’m procrastinating on fixing them. (sorry sims fans I didn’t expect to be one of the only two people making these)

Don’t starve yourself or endure any undue mental distress for this forum, but just know that a lot of us almost need this consistently stable platform to express creativity and find community. I and many users will be sad if it gets shutdown but something else will come, should that ever happen.