Smart Shanghai closes its forum

Urban webzine SmartShanghai has closed down its online forum.

After five odd years of heated discussions and raging debates, it was determined that the SmartShanghai Forum did indeed address and solve all the world’s problems, and it was decided that its purpose as a bastion of free speech and intelligent discourse was no longer required. So we’re taking a break from it for a bit, waiting for the world to get completely awful once again, and then we’ll relaunch it and enable all the SmSh’ers to once again shed a little insight on pressings issues of the day, thereby setting things right again.

The front page also runs an article by DJ SexyPaul on the forum closure. In the article "Not with a bang" we are supplied with a number of all-time forum statistics, including this telling snapshot:

Top 10 Boards by Replies

"Word association game": 10,752 replies

"Prediction game" : 2,133 replies

"A tribute to the Asian beauty": 1,873 replies

"Asian Beauty Part 3" : 1,159 replies

"Funny picture thread" : 774 replies

"What Song are you listening to right this second?" : 766replies

However, neither the article or the announcement seem to give any kind of concrete reason as to why they have shut down the forum. SmartShanghai has matured into a well designed Web 2.0 site and perhaps the old style ex-pat forum is not a good match anymore. DJ SexyPaul sums things up:

Personas loosely based on real people were formed soon thereafter, and these personas logged in day after day to taunt, goad, insult, threaten, intimidate, bully, and, very rarely, to inform or compliment each other.