It's been obvious to me and I'm sure all of you that the site has had a pretty big drop in activity, starting about 3 years ago. Each month it dwindles a bit more, not because the Quake community is dying -- it's thriving -- but because it's moved elsewhere. Places like discord, quaddicted, slipseer, and twitter.

It seems that at this point, Func_Msgboard does not need to exist anymore, at least in its current form. I've been thinking of what should happen to it, and my current though is to turn it into a read-only archive for people to continue to reference when needed. There's no timeline for this and it will probably be a while before I pull the trigger, so until then I'm happy to hear other suggestions. 

FYI... if your curious about activity over the years, here are some quick ugly graphs I made.

This first one shows posts per year. This query excludes spam posts if you're wondering.

https://www.celephais.net/stuff/func_posts_per_year.png

The second graph shows unique active users per year. This means the number of registered users who posted at least once. This also excludes spam posts and spam accounts.

https://www.celephais.net/stuff/func_unique_active_users_per_year.png

The last graph shows spam posts per year. It really was that bad for a while.

https://www.celephais.net/stuff/func_spam_posts_per_year.png 

What "could be advised" about the future of Func_: good question. I think it is up to the owners to decide what to do with this giant database. Nevertheless, I think it would certainly deserve to stay alive: it has always been a great place with tons of information, point of views, with inspiring gamers/mappers, and that would be a pity to close it.

I cannot deny its current form is outdated (when compared to new places such as Discord, etc..), but I think it's hard to tell which way is better to make it evolve without breaking its awesome" old-school/old-fashion" look that reminbd all how Quake was awesome (and still is) when released in mid June 1996.

I sincerely hope a nice solution will be found to keep the Quake spirit alive ;)

Anyway: whatever will be decided, I just want to say a big thank for all these years supporting the Quake community, and keeping the Quake spirit alive.