Yeah I feel like the site owners went AWOL... I have some spare time I can dedicate to overhauling the site. I can even host the test infrastructure. I mean we're on vBulletin v3.8.8 for christs sake.. And it's 2018 (almost 2019!) and Techist only has HTTPS on the login page. That's mildly ridiculous.
At one point there was talks of migrating to Xenforo, which would have been great. But alas...just like all the other owners, nothing came to fruition. I remember you and I even volunteering a bit to do some work if needed since we're developers. Didn't take us up on that either.
I wonder, how hard it would be to grab all the data from the website and make one... Seeing as the current owners really have no plans to do anything, or even try to make the site profitable.
You'll have to re-name the forum but it could be doable...I'm sure there's some kinda copyright stuff you'll run into if you don't
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