My first official move as CEO of GameTavern is to outlaw David Caruso jokes.
As Neo stated, I will be taking the helm of GT in a quest to lead it down the path of greatness. Neo will be taking the blue pill.
I actually already have a server of my own that I pay for each month ($20), that I use for hosting my personal projects and just playing around with. I have a 200GB monthly limit, which is way above the 8GB that Neo says we use. My other projects don't generate anything close to 1GB (yet). 200GB seems low compared to the 30,000GB that Neo mentioned we currently have, but my server is a VPS (virtual private server), as opposed to a shared host. We may actually see some speed increases (not that GT is slow anyway).
I also have 200GB of space available, and GT is currently just over .5GB, so no worries there. I have a registrar that I currently use for my other domain names, so I'll just be transferring GameTavern.net to there. That will be about $15 a year.
That being said, I'm going to look into upgrading our version of vbulletin. I would really like to have some of the newer features. It is pretty expensive, so we'll see about doing a round of donations. I won't clutter the forums with advertisements, but we might look into having a small one on the front page or something.
Some people may be wondering about my qualifications to run a website, but rest easy knowing that it's actually my real life job to build and maintain web applications.
As for the future of GameTavern, I have some plans. We won't be going down the route of video game reviews & news. That's been done a thousand times before, and there are bigger sites than us out there that do it better than we ever could. Instead we will focus on finding our own niche and continue doing what we already do best: having a tight knit community.
And of course, a special thanks to Neo for giving us vagabonds a place to hang out all these years. As we can now see, it wasn't exactly cheap for him.