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I had recently tried to move operations to a new blog, but I had some issues with it so I’m resuming posting here. Sorry if that has caused anyone following the blog any problems.

The Swords & Wizardry forum I created over two years ago has been a bit light on activity lately. This is partly my fault for not posting there more, but it also may be a reflection of the Swords & Wizardry community itself, which has coalesced around other venues, including G+ (and now MeWe) and Eric Tenkar’s blog and associated media outlets. No sour grapes, I created the forum for the Swords & Wizardry community and would love for it to be used as a community hub, but I don’t think it’s in the cards.

That said I have no plans to take down the forum, but I am morphing it into something a bit more general, a place for OSR games discussion and play-by-post. There are now dedicated sub-forums for Swords & Wizardry and it’s associated games, and all the old content is preserved there. But I also have another motive. I’d like to experiment with using the forum to have more in-depth discussion of posts. In my opinion forums are a much better place to discuss gaming than blogs, or social media. For me and a lot of other privacy-conscious users, blog commenting seldom works due to our use of ad and third-party content blockers. Social media like MeWe is convenient but is a walled-garden – even in “public” communities, content is hidden from non-members and not searchable by the greater internet.

The forum, on the other hand, is open for anyone to read. To take part in discussions you just have to register once. It’s secured with https, and it has a mobile interface, and it’s searchable. I also administer the forum, meaning it will be around as long as I am, and even after that, it will at least readable at archive.org. The registration method I use has been very effective at preventing spam posts – I have not had a single spam post since I switched to that system two years ago.

I’d also like to offer the following to OSR blog authors who don’t want to deal with comment spam – I can give you a sub-forum for your own blog that you moderate and curate discussion on. I would encourage other forum owners to do the same with their own forums. If you want a sub-forum of your own, let me know by email, or post to the forum.