This is something I’ve been considering for quite a while, and I want your opinion on it (whoever actually checks this place out every now and then)
I opened pangya.community quite a while back, pretty much in the beginning of 2019 (or, just before New Years in 2018). I wanted to bring Pangya players together in a forum, without specific ties to any private server. I also chose a forum instead of a Discord server, because it’s easier to find us through Google searches, etc. pp.
The thing is, running a forum, and especially Discourse (the software this site is running) is expensive. I pay about $28/month to run it, do updates every now and then. I work full-time, so it’s not much, but it still ramps up for the very low usage this forum actually gets. That’s also why I haven’t been taking donations for the upkeep.
Pangya is kinda niche, and we have people come around and ask about stuff every few months or weeks, but as the game is somewhat dead (except for private server activity), there isn’t a lot of stuff to actively converse about.
So, what I am thinking about is sunsetting the forum and either leaving it be, or opening a Discord server, if enough people want that, to offer the remaining community a place to be at.
I think it would be a great idea to open up a Discord server, just in case the site can’t be maintain. It’s really sad that there isn’t a lot of activity in the entire pangya fandom, I wish there were more people who would find and love this franchise. Maybe if this game was shown to more people it would have been more popular and this community wouldn’t be dead. I just hope that this site won’t go down.
I’m saddened to hear that, though it is understandable given the low traffic it is getting in the last years. For what it’s worth, I have always felt this forum as a home, a sort of refugee for all us remaining Pangya players. You have surely noticed that I have been posting here a lot lately, and I’d still love to make new posts in the future:
I’m giving the final touches to a new scanlation of the first missing 4koma panels (see the screenshot), with a plan to work on the untranslated ones once I’ll gain enough confidence with the process (it’s my first scanlation work!). A forum like this would be for me the ideal place to release them, since here I can open a thread on my own which would be visible to everyone. I’m also planning to someday scan the two mangas I own, and to post a link to them here. Then there are some tutorials I have found on the old Pangya Celebrities forum which were preserved by archive.org and which would be better to preserve here, to make it easier to google them and to avoid to lose them in case archive.org decides to delete them. I also like the thread with the updated list of all the servers, which can’t be found anywhere else.
I have just recently posted links to the Thai server tutorial and servers’ list on the Facebook PangyaFriends page, asking people to add here any missing server they might be aware of.
Unfortunately this forum doesn’t have any real alternatives: there’s a Reddit Pangya subreddit, though its moderator is not answering to any post request, plus Reddit is more social oriented, so you don’t have subforums there for example. Same about the PangyaFriends page on FB, I have managed to join it only after three join requests, though it has at least some active users.
The decision for the closure is of course yours, pixeldesu, I’d gladly offer to cover the forum expenses myself but unfortunately I won’t be able to afford them. In case you’d decide to close here, I’d welcome a Discord server, so that we’d still have a global Pangya community where we could meet. I’d only like to ask you the permission to repost all the threads I’d like to be preserved on either Reddit (if I manage to have it again moderated) or to a blog I’d open for this.
Thanks for all your work during all these years!
Varthall
