TDF is Closing / Up for New Management & Ownership

[GLOC]

To all the TDF members,

Over the near 10 years since TDF was started over the Christmas & New Year at very short notice, we have had some great engagement, awesome story-telling, stunning photos & videos shared, and lessons learned from near misses and accidents. However, it has now come to the point where the current management (Garf, Mal, Wilbo and Gareth) are going to hang up their fins and let someone else take over the role of owning and managing The Dive Forum. Mike Cunningham, who was part of the management team, recently passed away after a battle with cancer

We always said that we would open the ownership and management of TDF to the membership before either selling it on or letting it fold. If you are interested in taking on TDF, please get in touch with staff@thediveforum.com and we will get back to you. If we hear nothing back by the end of this month (Oct 22), we will assume that no one from the membership wants to own and manage it and we will take it from there.

If you have any questions, please get in touch at the same address as above.

Regards

‘The Management’

[Wibs]

You've done well to keep it running. Work, expense and little help.

Would like it to continue as the only UK dive-related (plus a lot of other non-diving things) forum. If not, thanks for your past efforts.

[cazyoung]

Many thanks to the five of you for doing such a good job with the forum. In recent months various members have started re-visiting. I hope someone does step up and takes TDF on it would be sad to see it go the way of YD.

[Paulo]

Wasnt one of the tenants of the forum that it would / could never be sold?

[GLOC]

There are costs and time involved in running the forum. At the moment it is costing the Directors personally to run. If no-one wants to run it, then it will close.

[nigel hewitt]

Sad but it was inevitably going to happen one day.
Thank you for your time, effort and money.
We have all very much enjoyed it.

[notdeadyet]

That's sad but also very understandable. It must be a lot of time, effort and money to keep going something that's now more a social board than a diving forum. It also seems in the world generally the idea of using a forum or posting anything longer than a couple of sentences is a dead concept.

Hopefully someone will continue it but thanks for the work over the years and keeping it going long after the diving discussion ended.

[Wibs]

Same reason the other UK dive forum closed, plus lack of posts.

Could blame it on Facebook. Could also blame it on the decline of diving.

It is possible to have a subscription model; ScubaBoard's "go red" sponsorship seems to work for them. Although SB has massively more posts per day, many even about diving. Think it would be hard to raise sufficient funds from the existing TDF membership for the full hosting and maintenance costs.

A big thank you to the current management team for sponsoring the forum for these past years in both time and money.

[Paulo]

Vertical Scope may want to buy it after their last venture went so hwell

[Wibs]

Vertical Scope may want to buy it after their last venture went so hwell

Obviously nobody wants the forums sold to spammers. There were offers from spammers for the other forum which were turned down.

Given the original reason for setting up the forum it’s clear there’s only two realistic outcomes: either new people step forwards to fund and run the forum, or it’s closed.