Shutting Down the Aquoid Support Forum

This post essentially marks the end-of-life of support for Suffusion from this website.

The Aquoid Support Forum was the one-stop-shop for Suffusion support as well as for support provided for other plugins I have built over the years. However it was beset by problems, primary among them being the insanely high number of spammers who used to register. Considering that it was on a different platform (phpBB) than the rest of this website (WordPress), it received a different level of attention from the creators of the software. As a result I had moved support for everything except Suffusion to the native WordPress forums. This worked well because I at least didn’t have to worry about managing spammers. Regardless, the forum served as a lifeline for Suffusion users who got to reach out for support after the theme was pulled from the WP repository in June 2016, since that point of time crippled the native WordPress forums for it.

In any case, at this point the energy required to administer the forum is a lot more than I or any of the volunteers can invest, so I am closing it down with immediate effect.

For starters, the forum is still available for browsing, but I have shut down two core things:

  1. User Registration
  2. Posting capability

New users will no longer be able to register there, and old as well as new users will be unable to post to it.

What Next?

There is the GitHub site where I had hosted the last stable version of Suffusion – https://github.com/sayontan/suffusion. New users can consider creating issues there. Regular forum contributors Colin and Drake are set up as collaborators on that repository, so they have privileges to release code / patches there.

This will help / encourage users who wish to fork out Suffusion do so from that website.

Closing Thoughts

Suffusion was created at a time when:

  • WordPress was a platform incapable of doing anything apart from very simple blogs. There was no capability to do custom menus, nothing to support custom post types, no post thumbnails etc.
  • The “premium” theme market had multiple players who certainly charged a premium, but failed to deliver very basic features without requiring a developer.
  • The era of page-builders was at least 5-6 years away

Suffusion offered novel solutions for each of the above and all that for free.

The theme remained a pioneer for several years, but with the ever mounting barriers imposed by the WPTRT it became harder and harder to maintain. Every new whim of the WPTRT would mandate a massive change of code for Suffusion (removal of shortcodes, replacement of theme options with the Customizer, removal of custom widgets etc.).

When finally removed from the repository, what I felt was a mix of rage, resignation and relief. Luckily Suffusion had a bulletproof foundation that several thousands of users still found easy to use, and even 2.5 years after removal the theme still manages to stand on its own for the most part. I had hoped that the theme would die down in the months to come, but it has still lingered on, hence rather than shut it down completely I moved it all to GitHub.

I would recommend, though, for users to pick out newer and lighter themes, because the free themes space is a lot more diverse, and WP itself has managed to integrate many of the features of Suffusion in a native manner. Essentially the niche that Suffusion filled for over 5 years is no longer existent, and you might have a more spiffy blog running something else.

3 Responses to “Shutting Down the Aquoid Support Forum”

  1. Dear Sayontan,

    I was one of the first users of Suffusion and I was very active with it. It was a great step forward and I am grateful for it.
    I still have one website with Suffusion active, and I still like it

    Thank you and Colin and Drake für your great work!

    • Hi Connie,
      Very glad to hear from you after all these years, and thank you for your comments!

      I remember that you were very active back in the day – around 2009 / 2010. I also believe you had some health issues (Peter Lurie told me when I met with him in London in 2010).

      Hope things are well with you.

  2. Hi Sayontan,

    I do believe you have the the Lord to thank for Suffusion. Tomorrow is my 71st birthday and I am still running Wildmoz with Suffusion here in Africa. When I first started, my tech savvy, award winning kids in the UK, couldn’t believe the advanced software of Suffusion and they were building computer war games for high-level clients.

    The Lord bless your future ventures and never forget cricket,
    Mauritz