Wow, this place is dead, isn't it?

Hi NCOT, I just read your other post & I hope you have great success with your surgery. The way I see it, it's about quality of life.

Yes, HW is dead, it's been this way for quite some time. We have 3 forums with a little activity & that's it. All you have to do is go on the main page & look at the dates of posts & it tells the story. These pop up ads, don't get me started.

Anyway, I wanted to pop on & say hi & good luck with your surgery. Please update us when you have it.

Take care.

Hey there. I occasionally lurk and read but haven’t posted in a long time. Sterilants is not really working anymore. Will be scanned again in 60 to 90 days and determine if I need a third surgery. I hate this disease. But I hate deal with the disability insurance company they think cause you are on a specific drug you should be able to work. Such BS.

NCOT, I just looked & I've been here since 2003. I joined HW for this very forum, had a 1 year dx under my belt with an emergency resection surgery. I had crappy drs & went through 4-5 before finding one that was willing to help. One thing he told me was to find a good online support forum, he said you will learn a lot if it's a good forum. I learned so much & it was so busy, someone was always around no matter what time of day or night it was. Back then online forums like HW was far & few in between. I looked at FB's crohns forum once or twice & didn't care for what I saw, lol.

I hate to jinx myself, crohns wise I am ok. However, saw a new cardiologist yesterday & have 6 tests scheduled, he found no pulse in my lower legs yesterday. I had a test for that this morning, will be checked for AFib, carotid arteries may be causing issues & on & on, 5 more tests to go. The tests are spread out from September to October & will see him the 3rd week of October for results. Covid & Delta are on the rise here again so appointments are being spaced apart. I haven't felt well this entire year.

It's encouraging at least that you got your letter about pre-op stuff. I just hope this will be your light at the end of the tunnel, you've been through a lot.

Yes, the UC forum is not busy like before. Those ads were a killer & people left, then we had all of that horrible spam. Do you remember the days of each forum would have pages of that crap? We worked for hours trying to clean that mess every day. I just hope the ones that left are doing well & living their best life.

Pop on when you feel like, I check daily here.

Straydog - I found HW in 2007 or 8, but I didn't join straight away. At the time I was quite busy with other online stuff (all gone now...), but I lurked increasingly often and started to use the search function to look through old posts. My previous "mild" disease had taken a distinct turn for the worse and kept on getting worse. Nobody explained anything to me and in those days I was terrible at asking questions, so I basically got nil information from my doctors. The internet was the first place I started to really learn about Crohn's. Nearly fell prey to some absolute nonsense too - I remember being interested in something offering a colon detox - but for the love of all that is rational thank god I never went down that path.

Urgh, I remember the spam. Did the admin ever try to put any spam measures in place? I used to be a site admin of a forum now since long gone. It was only a small, rather niche, site but it did start getting spammers and that's when I looked into mods (as in modifications, not moderators) to deter them. I added a question on the registrations page and told people where to find the answer - spambots would not be able to do that step. And... it worked. Stopped the spam overnight. It was easy for me because I had a phpBB2 forum and phpBB boards had an active modding community with lots of free mods available. But even so, I still feel like HW could have done something to stop or at least slow down the spam :/

Good luck with your cardiology tests. I hope everything will be all right.

I don't think the redesign helped either. I get why HW needed to update itself for the smartphone era, but it was just so bland compared to the previous design. That said, the pop up video ads are way worse than any redesign could be. Even on a desktop it's a nuisance. Haven't tried using HW on my phone recently and don't think I want to try at this rate.

I'm glad you've stuck around.

@Poppysocks - Yeah, that's partly it. I certainly think Facebook started off the trend to kill off forums, but that's not the only reason. Google didn't help by de-emphasising forums on its search pages, so even if people searched for a condition, forums for that condition wouldn't show up on the first page. (And 99% of people don't look beyone the first few links - that's proven.) Basically forums became far harder to find unless you already knew about them and social media sites took over, and then ruined, the internet.

I've been busy betting the races online from Woodbine. My forte has always been maiden races and Covid-19 provided nothing but maiden races. Since the advent of the slot machine at the racetrack I've been living large. Before slot machines mostly losing years. Its amazing I always knew I could pick winners if the races weren't 100 percent fixed or rigged and when they put slot machines into the racetracks I can actually now bet an honest race\. Dishonest races drives the entire public away from the slot thus honest races.