They didn't, obviously.  But I'm here anyway.  My e-mail address, for anyone who wants it, is fosse8 at gmail point com.

(I actually didn't realise it wasn't publicly available... I do kind of miss the old days, back when my inbox used to be full of spam and loads of people asking, rather rudely, for tapes of things I didn't have.  Ironically, I only got to hear most of the then-rare Pulp stuff by e-mailing people and asking, rather rudely, for tapes of things I didn't have.  But I digress.)

So, yeah.  I'm not really a very good administrator; the forum was only ever meant to add a bit of interactivity to the old site, rather than me wanting to run a community of hundreds of people or anything like that.  But, well, Something Changed; it's not that I don't still love Pulp (I do), but it's a different kind of love.  Every time I chance across anything I wrote for the old site, I feel... not embarrassed, but just a bit weird, really.  The endless delays trying to get the new site up and running, as weeks turned into months turned into years turned into, what, decades? Have we had a 10-year gap?  I don't think I got to post my review of "Last Day Of The Miner's Strike"... or did I?  I've totally lost track. 

There really was a new site, I'd written heaps of updated reviews, corrected information, agonisingly cross-referenced everything manually for new indexes - it's all still on a couple of my old hard drives, a few PCs ago - but the fact of the matter was that when I started doing my own label, club nights, DJing and all the rest, I felt like this site, or the person who wrote all that stuff, wasn't really "me" any more.  Also, I threw a couple of public tantrums and got into a couple of stupid arguments over absolutely nothing, which was fun at the time but made me take a long look at myself afterwards.

The first time my PC broke down and took out all my latest data, I was devastated, and spent months painstakingly piecing it all back together, rewriting stuff from memory (anyone who's ever accidentally deleted anything will know how shitty that is, the inescapable feeling that it was better first time round, the overthinking of jokes you'd have posted without a second thought, that sort of thing).  But I never got past the finish line, never felt satisfied with the end result; kept tinkering with things, deleting things, getting embarrassed by things.  I know now that it was because, in my heart of hearts, I didn't want to put it back - though I didn't realise it at the time.  The second time it happened, leaving me with various files of various dates all over the place on various computers, I kind of gave up.  The band themselves seemed to have done that, so I didn't see where the harm was.  It's on it's way, I'd kid myself, just a few more days... but there was always something else to do.  With Mark's book, and then the wiki, I assumed nobody would want to read it (I even posted a thread to that effect here, and was rather surprised when people said yes, they actually would.)  It was never likely to happen.  And in time, I stopped pretending to myself that I was going to get my arse in gear and relaunch.  A few years ago, the hosting package for the site expired, and I deliberately didn't renew it, just keeping the pulp.gb.com domain name and pointing it here.  With Mother, Brother, Lover now available, it would feel totally wrong to resurrect the old site.  I did flirt with dusting off all the old "new" reviews in a song-by-song blog - I like blogging - but Mike's excellent project made that pretty much redundant too.  In the end, I don't think I've got anything interesting to say about Pulp any more.

I stopped posting regularly, and then stopped posting altogether, and then eventually - seeing as how this place runs itself so well - after a while I stopped visiting regularly too.  I do check in here and have a great long reading session from time to time, and it's always excellent, but honestly I just don't have time to take part in forums properly any more*.

Well done to anyone who's made it this far down! And now: an actual answer to the question

It does seem crazy that the forum continues to rack up giant bills.  I tried blocking scrapers' IP ranges, but that doesn't seem to have helped, except to make the site vanish from Google.  It's certainly an eye-opener when I get bills asking me for hundreds of pounds, which previously would obviously have come off my credit card! 

I don't really think of this place as "my" board any more (except that it obviously is in a legal sense, in that it's my door the burly Sparklit bailiffs will eventually come knocking.)  Rather stupidly I always thought the moderators had the same powers I did - I never realised there were things you were waiting on me for!

In as much as my opinion counts, I'd be happy for the board to go ad-supported, or to go to a different provider or location, provided that - and this is the kicker - we could definitely migrate all the posts, user accounts etc over to a new board.  In the past, this has been the biggest hurdle; it seems very difficult to switch to a free account from a paid one (doing it the other way round is easy!) Sparklit/Activeboard never answer my questions, but then in all honesty I don't chase them particularly hard.  If anyone wants to take over the harrassing of Sparklit, or the administration of the board full stop, please e-mail me and we can sort out details.

Peace, love and radiation.

Steve

* (What have I been up to? I graduated from university in 2000.  Me and a friend started up a tiny record label.  We did OK, too; a couple of good reviews in the NME, some decent sales, one of our bands (originally "Polanski", later "Ghosts") ended up signing for a major label and scoring a smattering of top 40 hits.  Our main success was our regular club night, Emerge, which was voted one of the top 5 nights in the country by the aforementioned NME.  But the music industry is a shitty place (yes, yes, nobody else has ever made this astounding observation to the best of my knowledge, shut up), and having been stabbed in the back with serious financial consequences not once but twice, I sold out (in every possible sense) and went to law school instead. I qualified as a barrister, my speciality is criminal prosecution, but I never got a pupillage and so I've never practised; instead, I'm currently marketing and IT director for a firm of solicitors.  I'm 33, married, and I have a son - his name's Robert and he's excellent.  In my spare time, I write an insanely popular blog about Motown, which will almost certainly make me cringe in a few years' time, but I have to write SOMETHING.  To that end, I'm also still working on my first novel... I'm sure it'll be finished any day now, etc.)