What's going on at CombatSim?

[Moggy]

I see that the forums at CombatSim.com are now not available, and the only things available are some of the forum archives and the site news page.

All of the recent news articles seem to be authored by Donster who I remember well from the hey-day of the EAW community.

Have the forums gone for good? Is the forum archive lost? Be a real shame if the archive of the original EAW board (we all knew and loved from 2001 til the migration to SimHQ) is lost.

Some of the archive has been caught by The WayBack Machine but much of the archive seems to be missing.

The more recent CombatSim EAW forum 2006-2013 appears in this WBM 2016 archive

[mikew]

Yes, the Combatsim forums are gone.
The closure was announced in January 2022 and we were given a year to scrape whatever we wanted before it was shut down in January 2023.
The whole thing was very amicable and I totally understand the reasoning that was given.

I get the impression that the SimHQ forum is on its last legs, hence my presence here.

[Moggy]

Thanks Mike,

Shame the whole original EAW archive is gone. Those were good days.

[rotton50]

Well, we're still here. I'd like more lurkers to contribute but maybe in time they will.

[Moggy]

Lurkers! I see this thread now has over 21,000 views!

[rotton50]

Those numbers can't be accurate. Must be some kind of "bot" thing.

[Moggy]

I've had a look at the site stats now. There was a massive increase in traffic to this board from December last year. Hits went up from some 20k a month to 1.2 million. Monthly number of visits from about 1k to 10k. A great deal of this was over the Christmas holiday itself, and mostly from the US and Canada. It looks like a lot of it is spiders and bots, but not clear why the site garnered so much interest.

[mikew]

I'm surprised that you approved my signup as I use a dodgy gmail account for this sort of thing.

Another forum I'm on blocked all signup requests from hotmail and gmail accounts due to the amount of spam which has increased dramatically over recent months.

[Moggy]

Do you want to change your email address?

Not experienced any spamming here yet.

I have blocked and deleted a number of attempted registrations.