What? Arocalypse will soon be approaching its 4th birthday on April 3rd, 2016. Unfortunately, its not quite going to make it, unless you decide to take over. I am stepping down as system administrator as some annual fees are due in soon, and Im ready to hand it over to the next enthusiastic perso...
I wanted to put out the word about this - as of now (March 8, 2020), Arocalypse (the main/only independent aromantic forum site) is facing imminent shutdown by around the end of the month unless volunteers can be found to take over the technical implementation and running of the site, as well as the day-to-day moderation.
Ideally, it sounds like volunteers should know at least a bit about domain registration, website hosting, and using forum software (currently invision power suite) - or at least be willing to learn.
There are some volunteers willing to provide financial support, but there’s still an urgent need for a lead technical support admin, and I’m guessing there may also be need for day-to-day moderation support soon as well.
Why should I care about Arocalypse?
As it stands, arocalypse is currently the only well known, fully independent and community-led and maintained public discussion space for aromantic people, in that it is independently hosted, run, and moderated, by aromantic community members instead of relying on unrelated third-party platforms like tumblr or reddit or facebook.
With other sites, like tumblr, aromantic users subject to the whims of non-aromantic staff, with little ability to moderate or control their own spaces. There’s little to no transparency around site management and updates, and little to no resource if content is removed or censored - and at the same time, no way to remove or hide content that is problematic (like anti-aro trolls).
As an independent hosted and managed site, Arocalypse provides a space where aromantic community organizers and members can give and take feedback and provide what the community actually needs, not just whatever bare minimum is profitable for some tech company.
For another example, consider the fact that there’s no way to remove spam or mistagged content from tumblr tags - a community-owned space like arocalypse, on the other hand, is able to develop and enforce it’s own community-driven guidelines to ensure that spam gets removed and that misplaced content gets shuffled to appropriate subforums as needed.
In additional, forum-style communities like arocalypse are also important for their general ease of use and navigability for a wide range of users, which makes them accessible to larger parts of the community than more niche and sometimes confusing platforms like tumblr. Plus, it’s centralized, and has been around long enough to have fairly good SEO, which makes it a much better landing ground for new aros who are just starting to figure out what aromanticism is, let alone how to find other more obscure community spaces and resources.
If you’ve ever thought to yourself “I want to help make more spaces for aro folks, but I’m not sure how” - this could be a great opportunity to get involved in real hands-on aro community organizing.
And even if you don’t have the time or skills to take on this position (I know I’m in that boat right no myself), if you can at least take a moment to signal boost this it would be much appreciated!
Once again, here’s a link to the relevant announcement and call for vounteers >>
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