That’s it, folks. I’m out.
I’m retiring from these forums after what has been a surprisingly long run.

Why? Oh, there’s a number of reasons but none in particular are a primary cause. I’ve been here as a volunteer helping to run things for over twenty years, so I think I’ve done my time. Life is busier than ever; my day job is long hours and quite stressful at times (especially since my home city of Melbourne is in total lockdown and I’m working from home), I’m married now and would like to donate more time to my wife, etc.

And now I get to be a bit self-indulgent.
I first encountered CBR back in 1997 and I still remember the CBR Chat Room with folks such as Silver Lantern and Hairbutt the Hippo. The chat had this weird filter so certain cuss words were changed to less offensive ones … fudge.
Not long after, during the craziness that was the Hal/Kyle Green Lantern nonsense, I put my hand up to be moderator of the Green Lantern Board (taking over from G’nort) – and Jonah gave me the nod. That was fun, let me tell you - but I apparently did a good job as when the ‘Super Moderator’ roles were created Jonah promoted me.
According to the Wayback Machine, the GL Board looked like: https://web.archive.org/web/19980116...com/boards/gl/
I still love that word balloon background image.

At some point, and I don’t remember the year, I brought over the Comic Book Rumbles Board and it’s cohort of posters from its going-defunct-home to CBR. Yes, it’s my fault.

I don’t know what year, though definitely no later than 2002, but I was soon made an Administrator of the forums. Did you know that in the early 2000’s CBR had its own radio station? Every song had a superhero theme/link to it. Good times. Some creators recorded promo lines for it.

If you want a measure of how long ago that was, in 2002 these were the Forum Moderators:

Alistair, Arune Singh, Augie De Blieck Jr., Azangel, Blue Beetle, Captain Jim, DarkBlade, Expletive Deleted, FlameStar, Free Lance 2.0, Gail, Greg Hatcher, Hairbutt, Jade69/Legolady, JustinD, knightsky, Mac Danny, MacQuarrie, ManchesterTrix, Matt Fraction, Mike Smash!, MMagrane, OzBat!, Papergirl, Plan9, RichJohnston, Scott Shaw!, See No Evil, Silver Lantern, Sir Tim Drake, Steve Pitts, Steven Grant, Stony, Tynne Fanel.

The Super Moderators were;
Buried Alien, Conn Seanery, T’Omm

The Administrators were;
Jonah Weiland, Matt

A lot of names there I fondly remember, many who I’ve sadly lost track of over time. More sadly, some who have even passed on from this world and I still miss talking to.

I remember going from CBR’s custom forum system (that simply couldn’t handle the volume of traffic it was getting and would crash all the time) to the Vbulletin software that we still use to this day. Essentially Jonah’s server people installed Vbulletin and the rest? Basically, that was me.
I set up:
Each and every forum, including the forum hierarchy (yes, even those forum descriptions).
Every user group and their permissions (including what Vbulletin options were available to which group, which we could and couldn’t use, what each group can and can’t do/see, etc).
The avatar system. Those avatars you can have on your profiles without uploading your own? I made hundreds of those. And I made them AGAIN when we upped the default avatar image size.
The Forum Q&A/ User guide – laying out forum member expectations, the basis of what we use to this day.
The Moderators Guide. Written from scratch, just like the user guide, to help new Mods find their feet and get their heads around the way Vbulletin works. I wrote a few versions of this.
The general protocols for how the forums work (that’s complicated and vague but I don’t want to go into the details here).

I still remember arguing with Jonah when he decided we needed to make the change to Vbulletin. I didn’t think it would work (going from a tree based forum format to a more linear one) but I was wrong. I almost quit over that, glad I didn’t. I should make it clear that Jonah was awesome to work with, he’d send postcards and gift packs out at least once a year as a thankyou (including a CBR “Comics Don’t Suck” T-shirt that I loved). He was always open to ideas and even if he didn’t like an idea, he’d always discuss it openly and fairly.

I was proud when in 2014 Jonah made the call to wipe the Forums and start over, looking to forge a far more positive discussion of comics and pop culture. I believe it helped this community a great deal, allowing people to enjoy comics more rather than have to endure the bleating of people who simply wanted to ruin the good times of others. The move set a precedent and a philosophy that is healthy for fans and should be taken up by more places, I’m glad these Forums continue it still.

The sale of CBR to its current owners was a shock, let me tell you. That was a crazy time.

Anyhow, I hope that I’ve been able to do my part in building and maintaining a constructive comic book fan community here. I hope that, even if you didn’t always agree with my admin decisions, you at least understood why I made them. I hope I’ve been able to provide you all with an online comic book home where you’ve been able to feel safe, comfortable and welcome.

If you ever want to catch up, feel free to find me on platforms such as Twitter (I tend to use the moniker @matt_of_geek ). I may pop back here occasionally but it won’t be very regular at all, there’s a time to move on after all.

Good luck to you all. Keep reading and enjoying comics!