chainbb.com - going offline

It's a hard decision, but at this point I feel it's the right one to make. As I alluded to in my potential witness roadmap, I'm currently focusing on other needed aspects of the ecosystem and haven't given proper attention to chainbb.com or it's users. This has been a constant source of stress for me, as morally I feel that I can't just ignore problems when they arise with the site.

Today, after running into issues with chainbb's servers and the steemd node powering it, I decided to shut down the site and refund anyone who's actually sent any funds to create/fund a forum.

If you're one of the chainbb users who has created a forum, you'll find a refund transfer for each transfer you made to the Hive account@chainbb account with a memo explaining what it was a refund for. These refunds were sent back to the account sent the transfer, or in the case that it was sent from an exchange, sent to the owner of the forum.

All pages on chainbb.com now display a message about the site shutting down, and I'll very likely shut down the servers in the near future (before the next billing cycle).

The code for it's backend is open source as well as the frontend interface. I'd welcome anyone to use it to learn from or build something with it!

To date it's still my favorite way to interact with the Steem blockchain and while I'm sad to see it shut down, this will give me breathing room to move onto other priorities while not feeling a sense of neglect towards a platform that I feel I should be maintaining better. I still believe the chainBB model is a solid concept and may revisit it as some point, but I make no promises. If and when it is revisited, I imagine the next version of it will end up using the tools that I am creating today, which will allow it to do all the things that I wish it could do today.