Hello, one and all. Yes, even you there in the corner, covered in cobwebs.

This site is rapidly approaching its 7th birthday and I'm sad to say that, in it's current state, it will be its last.

I'm sure this comes as no surprise to the few of your who find yourselves drawn back here every couple of days. The sad truth is that the community here has evaporated, and I can no longer justify the expense of hosting and maintaining a graveyard purely to satisfy my own sense of nostalgia for good times which are firmly in the past.

The reasons for this are many and varied, but I'll primarily lay the blame on three things.

First: The way people interact online has shifted dramatically over the past five years, with instant interactions on closed networks such as Facebook, Twitter, and WhatsApp now the norm. There is no longer the patience or inclination to use a "traditional" - read "antiquated" - message board system that is distinctly non-mobile friendly.

Second: I built ReadAndFindOut to be a copy of Wotmania, for reasons of comfort and nostalgia - to try and capture and preserve something which meant a lot to me personally. I was proud of being a prominent part of a caring community (and, particularly, of having met the most wotmaniacs in real life - a title which I think I still hold, though Tim may have snuck past) and I didn't want to lose that by messing with something that was worked. This was shortsighted. I had in my mind at the time that the site would evolve to become something like Goodreads is now. I should have just built that from the start.

Third and finally: I simply do not have the time or resources at this point to take what little traffic and audience ReadAndFindOut has left, and turn it around into something which is modern and capable of surviving further. I've not announced this to very many people yet but I am in the process of starting up my own company. I've dropped down to part time hours in my regular job in order to get this going, which still receiving some income, but as you might expect I am now squeezed for both time and money. While I've made optimisations and adjustments over the years, the £50 a month I pay for hosting this site is no longer justifiable, purely from a practical standpoint. That's, like, food for two weeks

This isn't to say I want to shut down ReadAndFindOut - simply that I don't have time to take it forwards, or the cash to maintain the status quo. I would be happy to consider offers from anyone who wants to try their hand at developing the site, or wants to contribute to server hosting in order to at least keep the site up. Failing this, though, I am likely to look at shutting down this site within the next 6 months or so.