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A few points worth noting: The site's UVP is the incredible game music arrangements. The community has been valuable for many of us, but it is secondary. The vast majority of the users on the site never even touch the forums. I'd imagine most of the people who still use the forums have for years. Those that have left, as others have mentioned, probably just got too old/busy. With that said, most major music sites don't even have forums. Maybe they have a subreddit, but not a forum. YouTube and Soundcloud killed OCR's community momentum, not the changes to the site. Gone are the days of finding MP3s on P2P networks. You don't have to have your own web hosting or submit to VGMix/OCR/whatever to share your music on the internet. The internet is social. A lot of people don't like it, but a huge portion of the internet does. This is where blogs/pages/whatever would need to come into play. If you want to build a large internet community, it has to be a pseudo-social network. The vocal minority will hate it. The top sites on the internet right now are either social media (instagram, reddit, facebook, twitter, linkedin), "video sites", YouTube, which is a mash-up video and social site, and then Amazon, Wikipedia, and search engines. Forum activity has dropped, but Discord activity is booming. "Booming" may be a bit of a stretch, but it's far more active than IRC was when it died. That's because Discord is used by a lot of people and the age range is like "13" to 40. It's just most accessible. And if you want talk about user experience, I can take this a bit further: The web is dead. Web traffics across the board has dropped drastically in favor of mobile apps. This is partly also why social communities and focus'd web/mobile apps have become popular. People do not sit and traverse large chunks of content anymore. People consume content in short bursts, "micro-breaks", on commutes, in shopping lines, on the toilet. It's not true for everyone, but it is for the vast majority of the planet. There's no room for noise and visual clutter. Anything that keep that comes between a user and the content their looking for is noise. Noise makes users go elsewhere.

@The Coop I appreciate what you wrote, because it shows me the diversity of perspectives on the topic; I do happen to disagree, in terms of the timeline, though. Unmod was deleted significantly prior to Balance & Ruin and many other events that to me represent some of the apexes of community activity & engagement. I know Unmod sticks out in some minds as a milestone & harbinger, but my ear is fairly close to the ground on this, and I believe the trend is more recent, and the association is one of conflation. @Ramaniscence As the admin of a site facing similar challenges & the steward of Jake's old site, I feel like we're in this together, no? Door's always open if you want to chat... and/or join forces against.... let's see... the trajectory of the Internet & Capitalism as we know it... and, apparently, removal of forum signatures.

Sure.

I love this so much. I love everything about this. I love that not only did it pick a great source material I never would have dreamed would have remixes, but it also namedrops the title to show it off. And I love that this is just a totally sweet wicked awesome killer 10000/10 funkalicious discothon MASTERPIECE.

One day and 8 hours left.

It's funny, forums seems to have died out but nothing really replaced them. Reddit-style commenting makes it impossible to discuss things in a conversational format. Discord is a throwback to old internet chat rooms, where it's incredibly difficult to find old comments or discuss more than a handful of topics at the same time. I for one appreciate the old format.

Rama is on the ball here. Look, I'm one of the oldest members around here, been using the forums since they were a thing. But things are changing, and just like physical letters, forums are very niche nowadays. And even the forums that are still up with a strong community, have streamlined things a long time ago, so forums themselves are a different beast than what they were a few years ago. I'm hoping the admins can still find a way allow for personalization of their posts, or some way for people to show their art that fits better with a modern design. Even though forums are largely dead, I still appreciate that we have them here still, and I appreciate also any attempt at streamlining/modernizing them.

A thread stating that sigatures are gone, with people agreeing with and not agreeing with the action taken, and those people discussing it within said thread. Madness! As for options, you're pretty much looking at them already, DarkeSword. If sigs of any kind are gone forever, then that means posters here have posted-remixer pages with links to their Facebook, Youtube, etc., user profile pages (same links potentially available), or a forum to pimp their stuff (which we basically already have with the Workshop forums). Not sure what else someone's going to be given beyond that outside of a personalized OCR-user blog (which if I recall, was something that was being considered at one point).

I'm submitting an unfinished WIP, unfortunately. Illness has got me all messed up again so I've not been on top form.

Yep, you really nailed it there. Way too close to home. When I read your post, I spat out my yerba mate and dropped my artisanal scone on the ground - "They're on to me!!!" I thought, as I frantically started shredding documents & eliminating any hard evidence of my "post-modernist" UX/UI plot to monetize OCR by getting rid of forum signatures. No one can ever know... My entire business model is in shambles because I was banking on getting rid of forum signatures leading directly to the vast, untold riches that have thus far eluded me in twenty years of running this non-profit community. This was it, this was the moment, and now it's been shamefully exposed... Ahem... at any rate, in my experience you get respect when you give respect. Making relatively outlandish, bad faith accusations is not giving respect, nor is calling anyone elitist, nor is assuming that because you're not being agreed with, you're not being heard... As @Ramaniscence alluded to, the paradigm of the online forum itself has eroded a bit, and while I've never felt pressured to follow every last design fad, I also feel like we - along with everyone else - are competing for the time & energy of human beings that are increasingly being bombarded with information. In the context of a thread, the additional secondary/tertiary, unstructured text & visual information provided in signatures is a bit distracting. Since we plan on leaning on the (streamlined) forums more in months to come, this is a preparatory step to make them not just more "modern" or "post-modern" but more focused, plain and simple. The purpose of this post was largely to explain the rationale & get ideas for equivalent functionality, and not to debate the decision, and we appreciated the good faith comments we received and will keep them in mind for profile enhancements or other ways of letting artists & contributors showcase their works, talents, & availability.