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Posted by: LS Support Oct 16 2017, 05:20 PM

With all apologies to our remaning members and with lengthy consideration I have decided to memorialize the Lightning-Strike Forum as of September 2019, roughly 2 years from now.

Why?

• Traffic (for sign-ups) has dwindled to a couple or less per month since I launched this site in October 1996 (21 years ago!), which is way beyond the typical lifetime of forums like this which tend to start decaying after 5-8 years. And the very few that do get approved to use the forum don't even post.
• Trump this up to the rapid proliferation of media-rich social platforms as well.
• It takes time and effort to run a forum, from checking new registrations daily to weekly data backups to fixing hacker damage and more. Unfortunately my time is becoming more limited nowadays and I forecast time will become more "needy" over the next year or two.

So what does this mean?

• For now the main website and this forum will keep running as-is during the 2 year sunset process, during which time new people can still register and our current members can continue to post as usual.
• Once the final days near, the website and forum will memorialized in-place. Meaning there will no longer be updates, new sign-ups or the ability to post.
• This forum contains volumes of useful information and support vehicles for pet loss...85K+ posts created by more than 5K guests...so its original purpose will continue to serve people who have loved and lost their pets and other animals.
• The L-S facebook page will continue to operate as it does today. Though i realize it could never replace this forum, we are close to having 10K members, so there are plenty of people out there who will find even the restricted forum to have benefit https://www.facebook.com/pet.loss.grief.support/

The members here helped make what L-S is today. For that, I thank you all! I would also like to take a moment to give kudos to the few forum moderators who helped keep the forum under a watchful eye over the years. I'll admit that I sort of burned out on my personal pet loss support efforts about 10 years ago... so everyone's help is also greatly apprecicated!

Two years is still far away, so please continue to use the resources provided by this website and forum. There's plenty of time

MD Cohn