Regarding the closure of SB.org.

Our system, up until very recently, helped run a forum for soulbonding located at Soulbonding.org. In recent days, we and the rest of the admods decided to close the forum.

We needed a few days off to process everything, but I think it's time our system came forward with our reasoning for closing the board. Though all three of the primary admins of the board okay'ed the motion to close it, the reasons we present here are our reasons alone, and are not necessarily the reasoning of the other admods.

First things first--our group had actually been planning to step down from the board for a while. We created the board years ago with a misunderstanding of soulbonding, thinking it wouldn't be that different from moderating a tulpamancy space. Over time, as we learned more, we realized that wasn't the case. We had no conflict with what was being discussed, but we were profoundly unfamiliar with it and did not feel qualified to moderate the space. And when our own soulbonds decided they would rather not talk about their personal experiences and withdrew, we lost yet more of our connection to the forum and the soulbonding community overall. So we posted a notice in late June explaining that we would step down in October, after ironing out technical issues that the board was facing and helping appoint new mods.

Several factors pushed this to deciding to close the board instead. What sparked the discussion that led to the decision was when certain topics began emerging on the forum. To protect the privacy of the members involved, we will not elaborate on what those topics are. But we will say that, for us, they pushed "things we are not familiar with at all" to "things that are actively, acutely distressing to be around". They are not things we are comfortable attaching a moral label to or cleanly judging as "right" or "wrong", but we did realize that we could not be around such discussions, or stay on the forum any longer.

We discussed this with other staff about the possibility of us leaving early, and about the possibility of appointing new mods right away to cover our departure. However, the following issues were present:

- Overall admod activity. All of the staff had either left or gone mostly inactive due to a lot of life happenings. None of us felt like we were able to oversee the board anymore.
- Difficulty communicating with the people who hosted the forum/managed the server. They also had gone mostly inactive due to life happenings, and we'd been unable to get ahold of them.
- Difficulty training new staff. We'd implemented a bunch of usergroup stuff to control privacy levels across the forum--only members with X amount of posts could see this subforum, and so on. Even after looking through the settings, we couldn't remember ANY of how we'd done it, much less teach someone else how to alter and manage them.
- Lots of technical issues. The site was missing some important security features, like https, and had various bugs regarding logging in, recovering passwords, even registering. We found that we were unable to budge them at all.
- Other, more personal factors that we aren't comfortable discussing.

Some of these we probably could have overcome, but it would have taken time, energy, and resources we didn't have. Others, we could see no good solution to. And no one felt up to managing it all.

So with all of that in mind, we decided that it would be better to simply close the board entirely. We arranged it so that if people had accounts there, they would still be able to view their old posts and save things, as well as message each other for contact info, but no new posts or registrations will be possible.

We've heard that the old members of the forum may be starting a new forum, which we will admit to having banked on--that people would be able to pick up where we stopped and begin anew. If any of you are reading this, you have our full permission to use and adapt the site rules and other resources we've written for your own forum. We're unable to give you the domain name since it doesn't belong to us, just the people who oversaw the server--that decision lies with them, and we're not sure of the best way you can contact them. For practical reasons, we would recommend starting with a different domain anyway, to avoid confusion from dead links to the old forum that might be scattered around the web. Likewise, our system has neither ownership nor jurisdiction over the Discord associated with the site--the decision for what to do with it will lie with whoever owns it.

Please take care. We're sorry it had to end this way, and we wish you the best of luck with your future endeavors.