[skyhawk133]

Hi Everyone, I started Dream.In.Code 21 years ago when I was in high school. Since then the site grew to be one of the premier programming help sites on the internet in the mid-2000's being the #1 site on google for dozens of "[Language] Help" and "Programming Help" searches with millions of visitors a month. We've had an incredible team of moderator and admins over the years that have kept the site clean, organized, and helped with thousands and thousands of questions.

Dream.In.Code was originally just me learning how to install a forum and it turned in to a thriving community. Over the years, other sites have grown and changes in search rankings have seen traffic decline which also means advertising revenue has declined. For the past few years Dream.In.Code has broken even or lost money. There have been a folks interested in purchasing the site, but nothing came to fruition and as we enter 2022, I'm at a deficit on the hosting bill. As my life and focus has evolved over the years, I've admittedly neglected the site infrastructure with the software being outdated and running on old versions of PHP, etc. This has opened the site to vulnerabilities which have been time consuming or nearly impossible to patch.

With the site losing money, I've come to a point where I need to make a difficult decision. Continue to lose money every month, or sunset the site. Our current hosting bill runs around $1,500/mo, with the reduction in traffic, I've been trying to reduce that to $600/mo or so but consolidating the site has proved difficult with the outdated software and special configurations of the server to run some of that older code.

I've lost about $5,000 over the last year keeping the site running, it still generates revenue, but only about 50-75% of the server bill, so getting the bill down to $600/mo or so would be break even or profitable, but it's going to require some work that's beyond my ability.

So with that said, I need to make a hard decision. Shut down the site, or if someone wants to take over the server, it would be possible to upgrade the software with some help of an Invision Board expert and the site could continue on under new ownership.

Either way, I huge thank you to all the members, moderators, contributors, admins, and everyone else that has helped millions and millions of aspiring programmers over the years. I'm proud of what Dream.In.Code became and sad to ponder the end of an era.

[NeoTifa]

[Skydiver]

Going to miss this site and the regulars here.

[NeoTifa]

Y'all know my Instagram, and if you want an invite do my Discord lmk. It's not coding related at all, and it's kinda dead, but hey, if nothing else, we can be Discord friends. neotifa#1808.

[bingy]

I'd add ya on discord but it is saying you are not accepting friend requests

[NeoTifa]

Oh, I did that because of all the bots recently. Stupid honde. Try now.

[h4nnib4l]

Thanks, Skyhawk. I think you've probably had a really good reason to shut this place down for many years, and I really appreciate that you kept it around as long as you did.

I'll definitely miss this place. I've been on this forum since I was learning to code in school after fighting in a war and not knowing what the hell to do with myself after. That was a with a different account that I abandoned after school and forgot the password to, only to come crawling back in my first real programming job because apparently the problems only get harder when you're getting paid for it. StackOverflow usually had the code snippet I needed, but the surly salts in the C# forum here *cough* tlhIn`toq *cough* downvoted my dumb replies and sent me to the docs rather than writing code for me, and that made me a better developer. I won't say I learned to program here, but I did learn to ask myself the right questions when I was stuck on something, and that has been invaluable. I owe a lot to this community, and regardless of whether or not DiC manages to move/re-platform/whatever, I'll be paying that forward for the rest of my career. So...

So long. Farewell. Maybe I'll run into some of you again on the next run through the sim.

-h4nnib4l

[ArtificialSoldier]

Have we agreed on another forum to descend upon and start shitposting helping people?

[jon.kiparsky]

Some folks have started hanging out on a slack workspace - invite link


There is some talk of porting the data to a more modern forum platform, and it sounds like Chris is willing to work with folks on that, so I think at the moment it's a bit of a wait-and-see situation.

[sparkart]

What's next for you? Any new projects you are looking to start?

[calvinthedestroyer]

Thanks Skyhawk! This forum has been a great place to hang out and to learn at.

Be sure to let the internet archive save what they can.