>>57944366
Believe me, it feels even worse on my end. Even before that happened I've noticed how much people have come and gone, how poor our retention rate really is. I've witnessed the appearance and disappearance of OCs like specters in the night. That day we lost five notable users, three of them quite active, and while I'm glad one of them is gone and I might not have paid attention to the rest (besides Archivist), that was the time that cemented that this thread is not what it used to be. There is no way of going back and the future will simply NEVER be as good as the old times, and anyone who thinks otherwise is delusional. I am the only person still left from that era who still visits regularly, the rest have either left or come once or twice a month. I used to be so ambitious, planning to write out Alex's entire life up until like his 20s, now I just want to get this shitty side project and the three chapter fanfic over with. After then, I don't know what I'll do. My motivation to remain with Pokemon has long been waning and I might shift afterwards to Genshin fanfics or something else that has recently piqued my interest.

On the bright side, I have finally finished sorting everything into folders. Now here comes the part where I have to sort things into the subfolders of each character within each anon's folder. You can just dump the images from last thread into the archive and I'll sort them later. After that, we'll archive the images from this thread about 10 posts before bump limit so we can quickly sort them out, and hopefully we should by them finally be ready to re-open the archives in the next OP.

Assuming life doesn't get us, of course.

>>57921063
>What really sustains a thread is active engagement.
You don't know the half of it.

Since its start last year, threads would almost always last under a week and could even be as short as three days. Arguments still happened every now and then, but the thread would recover. Then, from the end of March to the start of April, we had an apocalyptic thread. The thread's most disliked user decided to complain about the thread task and question because it didn't interest him. I was the one who made that thread, but the task and question were provided to me by another user. Said user got very upset and an argument started which lasted for two days, throughout which the hated user constantly argued with several other people while simultaneously claiming that anyone who argued against him was either a troll or a stalker who had it out for him. Other users routinely pointed out his circular logic and sheer lack of intellect, but he refused to admit that he was in the wrong. This culminated in the person who used to maintain the archives making the executive decision to delete all of the hated user's content from the archives, citing his continued lack of interest in other people's content and refusal to admit that he is ever in the wrong, since he had continually gotten into arguments since joining the thread and also regularly disparaged other people's concepts or ideas. While that user probably didn't have any actual fans, some people defended him on principle, and seeing that his reputation was sunk, the archives and pastebins were deleted by the old guy. Along with both the exiled user and the guy who deleted the archives, three users also quit. The remnants decided to go on hiatus for ten days. Then 4chan was shut down just as the thread was coming back, and it diminished interest in the thread once again. Threads now consistently last around three weeks. Unfortunately, no amount of "engagement" is ever going to make this thread as active as it used to be.