Because, if we are honest, the kind of serious in depth discussion, and even personal connections, people loved and miss about wotmania were neither "killed" nor "replaced" by FB, because it DOES NOT HAVE THEM. They remain mainstays of MANY sites with traditional, even antiquated, formats and HIGHLY active MBs. There remain myriad vigorously active sites using a score of MB softwares , a dozen of which have released new software versions within the past half a year. Even my own limited online involvement can attest to that from here and here, not to mention the comment sections on each post here.

The problem is that RAFO has nothing with either an NFL teams broad appeal nor OotS' deep appeal. As Ben himself noted, there are plenty of generic book sites; there are even a number of sites dedicated to self/community-publishing, so it is very hard for any one new site to stand out among them, even if it still had a Writers MB. The big change in the 21st internet is not the format, but that every sites survival depends on being the exact opposite of generic. I thought about doing a survey asking the (remaining/returning) community what specific subjects and themes RAFOlk are individually and collectively interested in, because I am convinced any continuation needs some particular unifying bond.

That is one reason I also agree with The Shrike about ditching the MB divisions. They were necessary when wotmanias single MB was so active dozens of threads were hopelessly buried in under an hour, but now they only further dilute what community participation RAFO retains. Even the most devoted members will not stop by daily just to verify there is nothing new to read, consider and possibly respond to with their own contribution. YES, we need more people creating new threads worth joining, but expecting people to look through each of half a dozen MBs to find a single new thread is expecting too much. I do not know HTML nor mainframes; my coding experience is nothing more advanced nor recent than BASIC and Turbo Pascal (not even the most recent versions of those.) Yet I must believe turning the links all but one MB into a remark statement that does nothing would be far simpler, easier and quicker than retrofitting a 6-way MB split was.

All of which is to say: WHERE we go from here is inseparable from WHETHER we go from here. If individual webcomics like OotS, and even somewhat obscure ones like SatW, can maintain rich active forum communities with multiple MBs, I am certain even the rump wotmania community can maintain one on a single MB: But it needs something very distinctive and/or wildly popular to not only draw newbs indispensable to robust indefinite participation, but encourage existing members to resume being more than passive spectators contributing nothing to encourage participation from ANY members, new or old. Even fractious political sniping is more engaging than dead air.