SFF.Network Thank You and Goodbye

Happy New Year to all!

It's become clear that SFF Network, as is, is not sustainable. The continued decline of readership of written content - the 10 minute summary clickbait YouTube videos that other content creators put out are far more desired - as well as many significant changes in my personal life have led to the following decision.

Going forward, SFF Network will no longer publish news, reviews and editorials. I'll be adjusting the DNS settings so that the SmallFormFactor.net and SFF.Network domains point to the forum. The community and Discord will live on for perpetuity!

I've made significant efforts to reduce costs and increase revenue, as well as significant efforts to focus time and energy on content and community, but alas, SFF Network still operates at a massively unsustainable deficit - half the operating costs are funded out of my pocket on an ongoing basis. Keep in mind our team, and myself, are volunteers - so this deficit is without even taking into account value of time spent!

With the loss of my long-standing "day job" employment in May 2024, and my move to night shift work with a significant increase in commute time and significant decrease in flexibility, the time and energy I have spare for the content side of SFF Network is minimal.

I thank each and every one of you for your support of SFF Network through the ups and downs we've had since we launched almost 10 years ago. I'd also like to thank our team for their support, even though I don't (can't) pay them a cent!

In short:
Community forum and Discord is business as usual.
No more reviews and news.

 

[confusis]

Copied from discussion in Discord:

To be fair, I'm not asking for anyone to subscribe/donate/etc, I'm just winding down the content creation side of things to reduce my monetary and time costs to a manageable level.

I'd rather spend time working on my car and other hobbies, than write about PC hardware at the moment - kinda burnt out on the PC industry as a whole.



Hosting is the biggest cost, I've reduced as much as possible, but I _think_ i can knock 20% more off, but need to make sure dropping that server doesn't break any bridges/links we have going on between platforms. We're built on a fully custom platform , so it's not as easy as just moving to a different host.

I don't mind continuing to chip in to the costs so much (once shrunk down), it's the front page with news and reviews growing stale (and thus likely driving away new community members) that is the main gripe point for me.

 

[Arboreal]

Thanks John for all your doing and have done for SFFN, it's somewhere I come most days and it's good to read interesting stuff and not be assailed with videos and ads.
Long may it last, the decline of forums is sad and you're not alone in that.

 

[Revenant]

It's been rough for the SFFN volunteer staff. We've all been hit with life issues, some rather tragic, that has severely limited what we could contribute. I wish we all could have done more. However, I take solace that the history and resources in the forum will live on.

 

[confusis]

It's been rough for the SFFN volunteer staff. We've all been hit with life issues, some rather tragic, that has severely limited what we could contribute. I wish we all could have done more. However, I take solace that the history and resources in the forum will live on.

I almost wonder if being staff here is cursed >.>

 

[Revenant]

SFFN content creation is coming to an end and the site is returning to being a forum of passionate users and designers; what it was always best at. I wanted to post a thank you to everyone here. It’s been a true joy being able to fulfill a life long passion for tech journalism. The support from SFFN has been nothing short of amazing. Through SFFN I got to talk to engineers from major companies like Zotac and Asrock, review products long before they were public, and try to give a little back to the SFF community.
Unfortunately, like most SFFN volunteers, life has gotten complicated. After a concerning medical visit, I stepped away a few months ago to focus on my health. I’m happy to say my health improved substantially when I turned off the SFFN test bench pictured above, and started living a more active lifestyle with my...

Continue reading...

 

[SFFMunkee]

These are the decisions we all have to make, especially as we get older, glad to hear your health is improving!!
I still hope we'll hear from you on the forums time to time

 

[MarcParis]

Most important : enjoy your life!

 

[confusis]

Threads merged (announcement in forum and Revenant's news post)

 

[svedel77]

Thank you for your big work. You will be missed.

 

[mpalen19]

Sad to hear. It's a good site. Wish there was more interest / readership.

 

[Revenant]

Sad to hear. It's a good site. Wish there was more interest / readership.

Thank you. It’s bitter-sweet. I’m happy that John won’t have the burden he’s had for a while now, and I look forward to just enjoying tech again. However, I will miss the media stuff. It was neat getting to talk to engineers and play with hardware early. Though that wears off too after a while.

 

[Arboreal]

Thank you Chris for all your work, it's sad to lose the hardware part, but your health has to take precedence.

Like my other tech community, Bit-Tech, we are a small and supportive community in a world where forums are in decline and people are getting their info and interactions in other less thoughtful and engaged ways.

Look at the C4 SFX thread, it must be coming up to it's 8th birthday, and is still active on one level...

I do think SFF has changed and small PCs have become more mainstream since I started dabbling 15+ years ago when mini ITX boards were low spec and hadn't graduated to socketed CPUs.

Here's to another year of small stuff and all the SFF friends out there