What Happened to The Few Good Men!?

I need to start with an apology for what happened to our previous forums and the loss of 22 years’ worth of posts. Looking back, this was entirely my responsibility. After nearly a quarter-century of running this community, I’d become complacent about the constant maintenance required, I wrongly assumed we could keep using the same software indefinitely rather than staying on top of regular upgrades.

This complacency meant I stuck with the same hosting provider for too long. Eventually, they took advantage of the situation (and our Patreon supporters), extracting monthly payments to prop up an increasingly outdated system. The software had become so bloated and expensive to maintain that the whole operation was barely holding together.

Some of you might remember last year’s outage, when our forum software became incompatible with the PHP version on our servers. An upgrade attempt broke everything, and while engineers managed to patch things together, the site never ran smoothly again. Worse, security vulnerabilities began appearing.

These vulnerabilities became critical in October when a routine server upgrade failed catastrophically. It opened the floodgates to hackers and malware, and the site essentially collapsed. Because of last year’s makeshift repairs, fixing the problem and restoring the forums became incredibly complex,the engineers were working with a patchwork system rather than a clean installation.

That’s my understanding of what happened, anyway. I kept pouring money into the problem until the hosts finally told me I’d need to hire an outside expert to fix it, they were out of options. At that point, I’d lost all faith in them. We were overpaying for outdated infrastructure, so I made the call to cancel our account and walk away. That left me facing a choice: shut down the Few Good Men permanently, or rebuild from scratch.

Since you’re reading this, you know which path I chose. For me, these forums aren’t really about the games, tournaments, or banter, though those matter too. What I couldn’t bear losing was daily connection with a bunch of cantankerous grognards who’ve become genuine friends. Even though I don’t post as frequently as I used to, I’m here every morning with my coffee, reading, laughing, and shaking my head before starting the work that actually pays my bills.

I consulted some of the longtime members about the future, and we agreed: plant a new acorn and rebuild the club from the ground up. The Few Good Men don’t walk away.

Running this still costs money, but that burden was significantly eased by generous donations from a couple of members who covered much of the initial setup costs. That took an enormous weight off my shoulders. I’m deeply grateful, thank you. If anyone else would like to contribute towards the future of the site, please check out the Patreon link at the top of the page.

So here we are. I hope you join me and invest time in reconnecting via the forums, are patient as we find our feet again and hang around to become one of those old cantankerous bastards that I realised I couldn’t be without in my daily routine.

Thanks for reading

Shane (Bootie)