#Collaborative storywriting online upgrade#

But at the end of it all, I just hope you enjoyed your time here and made some long-lasting connections with other peers, both authors and readers. I hope that you were able toÂ harness a little of the creative energy found here and use it in your lives, both inside and outside of writing. I’m still humbled by the fact that many of you grew to adulthoodÂ (or a reasonable facsimile 😉) here - over the last near-decade, just a few months shy of our 10th anniversary - reading and writing and contributing to our once-vibrant little community. I recognize my mistakes now, and accept that it’s time to close up shop and learn from the experience.

I had aspirations to build a successful business from it, and was encouraged by many to do just that, but it just wasn’t in the cards.

I hope that I don’t come across too harsh in this, and that you all understand that I’ve been (primarily) footing the bill to keep Protagonize operationalÂ since its inception. I hate that this is purely financially-driven, but it’s not a great spot to be in, so here we are. And I need to consider the well-being of my family over keeping our remaining users happy. I feel the need to apologize to you all for the short notice of this pronouncement, but it seems that while the spirit of Protagonize lives on, in its current state and outdated technology stack (developer speak for “ it hasn’t been updated in a while“), it’s just not cost-effective in the least to keep operational. Even then, the costs were not insignificant on a new provider, and the performance of the site may actually have been worse than it is currently. I have investigated moving Protagonize to other environments or trying to get our ISP to lower our monthly hosting fees asÂ the site is running on severely outdated hardware, to no avail (thanks for nothing, Cogeco Peer 1.) Moving to another lower-cost hosting provider may reduce our ongoing overhead, but it would cost us a significant investment of time and money that we just don’t have to complete the migration. I won’t go into it too deeply, but I don’t take this decision lightly, and have likely been putting it off for much too long. Protagonize was a great hope to me for several years. User growth has been stagnant for years and advertising income has dwindled as usage has dropped (not that it was much to begin with, although it did cover our costs.)įor me, personally, this is akin to a dagger in the chest. We can’t afford to keep Protagonize running on our own dime any longer, and donations have dried up in the last few months. We have threeÂ children under the age of five, and live in an expensive city, so every dollar we can save matters. My wife and I came to a decision earlier tonight to shut the site down for good. However, we’ve hit a fork in the road of late, and the auspices are no longer favourable. The site has been kept operational for the last year-and-a-bit partially based on the kindness of a handful ofÂ very generous individual Protaggers (to single one out in particular, Sharon, a.k.a.: moonwalker), but primarily out of my own pocket.

#Collaborative storywriting online upgrade#

Personally, I haven’t been able to actively maintain or upgrade ProtagonizeÂ beyond the absolute bare necessities for the last 3+ years. We’ve reachedÂ a stage where the site’s income has deteriorated to a point where it’s nowhere near supporting the cost of operations. Protagonize will be shutting down - permanently - effective June 3rd, 2017. It’s been a while since we last spoke, and unfortunately, I don’t have good news.