Catster's forums closing

yayi

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I received an email today informing me that Dogster and Catster will be shutting down in March. The reason was they can't compete with FB and Twitter, etc. Guess not enough ads or sponsors to keep the sites up. 
 
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sivyaleah

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Oh that's unfortunate.  For the most part I find Catster a decent site, although sometimes they have things which kind of annoy me.  I guess I'll be getting my email shortly too.
 

jcat

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The Catster and Dogster sites ("magazines") themselves will continue to exist, but the Community (forums, groups, cat pages, etc.,) is being closed.
 
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kms

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I'm pretty bummed. :(   I really used to like the site.    I have been a lurker here for a long time.  It looks like I may become a regular. 
 

jcat

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I can't blame you for being bummed. I know how I'd feel if I were going to lose important threads documenting my cats' adoptions, illnesses, quirks, etc., cat pages, albums, the camaraderie with other cat lovers, and so on. It's a real shame.

Maybe other Catster members will find their way to TCS, too. I'm sure our members will make them as well as their fur babies feel welcome.
 

laralove

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Is it really that expensive to host forums? I haven't done so in many years, but I don't recall it costing much. I'd be concerned that shutting the community down would have a dramatic negative impact on the success of what remains operational. 
 

natalie_ca

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I host with a website that gives me unlimited traffic for $15.00 per month.  I have a website and used to have a forum as well which I closed some years ago because I had some people stalking me on the internet and causing trouble. If it wasn't for that I would have kept the forum up.

I could afford $15.00 per month, so I didn't have ads on my site or forums, and didn't require membership fees.  So I guess it all depends on who you host with.
 

mani

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Maybe it's the upkeep.  There's a lot of work in keeping a good forum running.

And I agree with jcat.. such a shame for people to lose all that history.


Hopefully some will find their way here. 
 

teach bam

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I have been on Catster for several years. They didn't give much warning. I have spent hours printing and saving information on my four cats, two are angels now. It is a wonderful community and so much advice was given. Support was amazing. It started just with a community and then they added commercials and a magazine online. Our community should have left then but we stayed for each other. I will miss the place but we are going to Facebook and other sites.....
 

AbbysMom

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I have been on Catster for several years. They didn't give much warning. I have spent hours printing and saving information on my four cats, two are angels now. It is a wonderful community and so much advice was given. Support was amazing. It started just with a community and then they added commercials and a magazine online. Our community should have left then but we stayed for each other. I will miss the place but we are going to Facebook and other sites.....
I'm so sorry you are losing your community. I can't imagine if that were to happen here.

You are all more than welcome to join us here. :)
 

Anne

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I host with a website that gives me unlimited traffic for $15.00 per month.  I have a website and used to have a forum as well which I closed some years ago because I had some people stalking me on the internet and causing trouble. If it wasn't for that I would have kept the forum up.

I could afford $15.00 per month, so I didn't have ads on my site or forums, and didn't require membership fees.  So I guess it all depends on who you host with.
 
Is it really that expensive to host forums? I haven't done so in many years, but I don't recall it costing much. I'd be concerned that shutting the community down would have a dramatic negative impact on the success of what remains operational. 
I have to say, the $15 gave made me chuckle 
 I can find hosting for $5 a month too, but when you host forums you need a completely different kind of server. Hosting the content alone would have been enough of a challenge, considering the amount of text and images we have (over three million posts last time I checked and that was a while ago). The real problem is that forum pages are created "on the fly" when a user clicks through to a post or a thread. They are dynamic pages and not static pages. This means that every "session", i.e. pageview, requires quite a few database connections to be opened. We have almost a million and a half pageviews a month, so that's a lot of database calls. I'm sure Catster had similar stats. Trust me, the budget for hosting such a website is at the $x,xxx a month range. Low or high depends on how much traffic you're getting exactly.

And that's not the only cost involved. In fact, reading through Catster's announcement, I think they mention there that they couldn't keep up with software maintenance. I can totally see that, since they were using their own software and not something like Vbulletin. Keeping forums software up to date, with all the cool features working, smoothing out bugs etc. is far more expensive than hosting. We're lucky to have that provided by Huddler, basically sharing the cost with other communities.
 
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