Quote Originally Posted by gugi View Post
It is partially a technical problem - the software was abandoned by the developers and doesn't work with the newer versions of the forum software we're using. For a year I kept it running in a very hackish way, but given the very few new reviews from that period as well as the extremely low traffic to that section, it was not worth at all my time and effort to continue maintaining it.
If I had some clue as to what was involved I might try to offer my help in migrating to the new system or at a minimum recovering what was there in some read-only format... but I don't want to make any promises :-).

Quote Originally Posted by gugi View Post
However, even if the technical issue was not there, I am not convinced that a dead section of the site is worth keeping. I know that a popular view is 'it doesn't drink or eat, just leave it alone', but my view of this site is 'community' not 'infomercial', and from that point of view anything that the community does not care for should go away.
Of course I have my own self-serving desire for the information to appear. But that aside, I don't agree. Members of this community took the time to write those reviews so I think it's fair to preserve their work/effort (regardless of whether we provide a mechanism for people to contribute new reviews). I'm not under the impression that anyone goes and deletes old forum posts because they're dead/no one uses them. To me, killing the already-written reviews is like going and deleting old posts.

But I'm the new guy around here :-). I'll obviously defer to everyone that actively maintains the site. And of course, if it's too much work to resurrect at least a read-only version, I understand it might not be a priority now. I can certainly appreciate from my own work that people not directly involved with something assume it's easy when they have no idea how hard it actually is :-).