[coreyman]

With respect @coreyman  When last have you posted at FreeVPS?  And here at post4vps?  And you're an expert on Ignis's posts at FreeVPS?  And also an expert on the membership?  I was posting my heart out at FreeVPS and was online a number of times day and night.  I was completely dedicated to FreeVPS way beyond the number of posts that were needed for my container.  I really liked the community there. They were very special.  Like there were some amazing characters posting there. I wasn't the only one feeling that way - there were a very large number of regular members who were logging in all the time however not posting as there were no threads to post to.  I had to battle to find materials to post to myself. I made suggestions to the staff how we could get some activity going, but there was no response to the suggestions - they must have already given up on FreeVPS and they weren't really interested in the members' views.  SLC and Monad (Hidden Refuge) were trying to get traffic going, but they were the only ones. 

I can't understand what you mean about Ignis not making a large number of posts any longer - like can you explain that to me.  I've never seen him as a high quality or a volume poster.  Maybe average and occasionally above average if he put his mind to it but since he became Mod mostly moderator type posts and when he became Admin only staff related posts with the odd contribution now and then. I've never seen him as a main player in making posts in the Forum.  Hidden Refuge and SLC were.  They posted right to the very end. 

When Ignis became a Giveaway Manager FreeVPS suffered for it  Right from the very beginning we heard excuse after excuse why he couldn't do this that and the other - not as an exception but as the rule.  You weren't there.  I was there. I marvelled at how understanding the membership were when he was slow to respond to their support requests.  And the staff were even protective of him.  But for me it showed lack of integrity.  If you say you're going to do a job, you have to have the time to do it.  If you don't, you should give someone else the opportunity to do it. SLC would have been a much better candidate for the Giveaway Manager.  For me he was completely wasted as a Moderator. His technical contribution to the Forum testifies to that.  As well as his level of energy.  He'd have blown us away I know.

What irks me the most is that I was still posting when the staff must have known what they were going to do. They knew a long time before the Announcement what they were going to do - the Announcement was just a mere formality on a to-do list.  You can't imagine how much it hurt when I realized FreeVPS is no more. I invested hours of my time and so did many of the other members who had been part of the community many more years than I'd been.   I personally don't see any good reason why the Forum should have closed.  Maybe FreeVPS could have worked out a different way of posting for hosting - it was a great opportunity to reinvent everything instead of just giving up.  A good start would have been for the staff to come down from their Ivory Tower and bond with the membership for a change. They could have posted an announcement for assistance to help them with the theme of the Forum, another announcement to donate to the upkeep of the Forum, they could have put up an announcement about sponsors - they could have talked to us.  They never did.  They only talked to one another and never asked us for our feedback. We weren't included in the decision to pull the plug on FreeVPS.  We didn't count.

You are a rare beast. I'm speaking from my general knowldege of running http://freevps.club, and lurking all the other forums, the normal member that pops up there or at any of these communities is exactly how I described. I don't care about getting a free vps, but I do enjoy helping people out to get their own. Not every member of a community is obligated to post. I have been around lurking. I have my own obligations and do not have to defend myself for not posting at freevps.us. Back to Ignis. Ignis had several different screen names that you may or may not know about.... and used to post TONS when his screen name was different, and he was also more active in communities too. I've done my fair share of posting in these communities. Do you think this is the first iteration of post4vps.com or any of the other 50 that popped up? This site has yoyo'd up and down a lot, whatever posts I had here in the old days is long gone by now, as well as all the other deadpooled communities. 

"- there were a very large number of regular members who were logging in all the time however not posting as there were no threads to post to".

There is always something to post about, so if there are no threads to post to, you create your own thread about something you are interested in. This is part of the issue with this niche, everyone always thinks that someone else (staff or moderators) should be starting the interesting threads that get responded to. Interesting threads should happen organically, not forced. The staff shouldn't be required to make any bonds with community members for the members to make up the community that they so desperately desire. You do count, the members of the forum a big part of the decision to pull the plug on FreeVPS.us whether you knew it or not. I've thought about shutting down http://freevps.club before because it was a lot of work for me alone and the members spoke up and said 'oh we will take care of the site and containers we dont want this to go away'. None of those people did jack shit (excuse my language as I'm not really familiar with the forum rules here) to help one time with much(with the exception of a single person that still helps today). One member even attempted to take down freevps.club by exploiting his administrator credentials and deleting all members to funnel people into his own site. 

TLDR it's a lot of work to find trustworthy people to manage a site that big. I'm sure the admins had all been tired for some time and didn't want to spend sleepless and frustrated nights recovering backups and fixing things because a new guy they thought they could trust did something stupid. They have graphs on their end of traffic statistics and new post counts over time and even post quality over time. They knew exactly what they were doing when they announced the shut down.

As I may have mentioned before: Members need to speak with their actions and words in these communities and make the communities a better place for everyone involved.