"It is with regret that we are announcing the imminent closure of the official Editors forum.
As our fan bases over at social networking sites like Facebook and Twitter have grown, we've seen a downward trend in the amount of people using the forum. As less people are using the forum, we'd love to concentrate our news and discussion over at those platforms. We at Team Editors are grateful to everyone who's participated in the forum since it started and have enjoyed reading your thoughts and interacting with our most hardcore fan base over here. The forum has, for a long time, been a very important part of Editors history
On Thursday July 17th, the forum will be closed permanently. That's six days to leave your final messages and to read back through the good times (and the rough!). Make sure to follow the band on Facebook and Twitter to keep up-to-date on the latest news from the band, and we'll see you in an Editors crowd very soon."
And once again I have the same queasy, ominous feeling I had when the news broke about Chris leaving the band. I hope this really is just as simple as the forum being closed, and not an indicator of something else coming further down the line.
Ladies and gentlemen, the band's official forum is shutting and soon another little hub of Editors activity will be gone forever. I don't want to turn this into a rambling eulogy, so I'll try and keep this brief. If it wasn't for the forum, you wouldn't be reading this. The Lemming Archive wouldn't exist, and this would probably be a blog devoted to cat fanciers or something. As it was, when I first heard about the band I went online and straight to their official site. I then found my way to their forum in the hopes of digging out some more information on them. What I found was a small but ridiculously dedicated group of fans who were all about spreading the word. I stayed there for quite a while, and I had the honor of being a part of the community. When I eventually left the forum, I took the inspiration and passion for the group that was nurtured and grew there and created the Archive, to add to the beautiful noise that already surrounded Editors online.
If you consider the creativity that was allowed to flourish because of the official forum, it's really encouraging. There are a lot of extremely talented individuals there that were given a platform for their work. We had people like Kerry and Flame sharing their amazing live photographs, Gary and Yip making and distributing their live recordings to share with the world, there were t-shirts printed up, badges by Peter, dolls and fantastic clay figurines made etc etc. People expressed themselves in lots of ways other than just simply chatting, and it was totally global. If you hadn't seen the band play in your country you could always read about shows, and sometimes actually download them.
I haven't been to the forum in a while but I'll always associate it with a brilliant time in my life when I first discovered Editors. As I said at the top, without the forum and in particular Peter, the Archive wouldn't be here. Will things be the same with twitter and Facebook as our outlets for Editors information? Probably not. Hopefully, though, this will put more of an emphasis on fans sharing their information via the numerous fan-sites that have sprung up around the group. Once again, in a lot of cases these websites and blogs are a result of the existence of the official forum and experiences that started there. It's almost as if Editors' official forum got us all started, and the baton is now being handed on to us.
Before I go, thanks to Peter, Kerry, Sanity and the Stork Maiden for your work as moderators and just for being exceptionally cool people.
Team Editors, thank you for your work in keeping the forum going for 9 years (oh lordy, the things you've seen!). You really achieved something special there. On a more personal level, thank you for your tolerance and casually looking the other way when I and my fellow conspirators passed around unreleased tracks/live shows and wrote (and continue to write) endlessly about them online. Your help and guidance via pm was always appreciated, and your patience in the face of even the most ludicrous fanboy inquiries from myself was always met with good humour. The forum was, for me anyway, the band taking their first steps into the world of online technology, and its value cannot be underestimated. I mourn its passing, but I celebrate it's place in my life.
Thank you :)
