Seventh-Element

As of my writing this, Seventh-Element’s been closed down about a month. For those of you who are viewing this for the first time in a while, or are coming back to check us out, a little explanation is in order.

Throughout June and into July, Seventh-Element went through a bit of a management crisis. It became clear that the site was on unstable earth, first with its focus drifting to mindless spamming and then to staff dissent. On July 21st, the site was closed down and I considered myself done with Seventh-Element. Over the following weeks, I received numerous e-mails and IMs from people offering to take SE up or merge it with other sites they owned, or even buy it from me. I remained adamant that the site couldn’t be resurrected—after all, when a site falls to management issues that the founder couldn’t pull through, the site had to be doomed.

But two critical aspects of the site have remained intact—the idea, and the people.

That alone always has been enough for me to want to continue the site. So, once more, myself and a few of the staff members are working on banging out a “new SE.” Although this time, we’re not going to be reshaping ourselves based on old rules. We’re not going to just throw the site back up as it was. We’re working hard on remaking the site around the things that SE has always stood for—people, ideas, and creativity. Only this time, we’re going to take our sweet time to make sure everything is thought through. One consistency in the long winding journey that has been SE always has been we never make the same mistakes twice.

~~Over the coming weeks, we’re going to be rebooting the site slowly—adding articles and blogs, relaunching the full site and forums last.~~ At this time, no timetable is available, but one thing is certain—we’re not going to be doing it the same way we did before.

Update - August 12th 2008 - I'm currently working with the staff on getting the forums running before the beginning of September. The reason why this is taking so long is that we're going to be switching over to Invision Power Board instead of vBulletin and we need to convert the database, skin and boot up the new forums. Also, it's the first time the staff and I have done things together in an integrated fashion. There's a lot of news about the future of the site to come. =)