Closing the arena
After talking with some of the other staff at athas.org, I’ve decided to close the arena.
The code for the arena is based on a dead forum project; even when it was alive, the hacks that I made to enable single signon made things very difficult to keep up to date. Because of this, it’s become a drain on server resources, and has actually made it more difficult to keep other aspects of the site up to date.
Considering that the traffic on the arena numbers in the single digit posts-per-month range, I think it’s best put into mothballs.
While I’m going to be removing the site soon, I will be saving the database; if there’s a demand for it, I’ll see about setting up a read-only archive of the site.
Once the arena is removed, I’ll be undertaking some infrastructure modernization efforts – Some visible, some behind the scenes. I’ll talk more about that later.