7 years ago, I started this forum as a pet project for my high school friends and myself. Over the years, it has morphed into something far greater than that–-it has attracted people of various different communities; it has seen periods of sporadic activity to complete inactivity, then back again. But now, it is time for me to step back from Esoteric Chat and let somebody else take hold of the project.

Some of you reading will remember when Ryan Wild shut down the TotalFreedom Minecraft server on 17 August 2023 and staunchly discouraged anybody from continuing the server in any form. I–among others–criticized this attitude as selfish, and so I also believe that maintaining my ownership of Esoteric Chat instead of giving somebody else the opportunity to make it better would be, in just the same way, selfish. As such, the best thing to do for the forum would be to pass its ownership on to somebody who wants it.

Jess is a real-life friend of mine. We have known each other for almost four years now, and we're both graduating from college this week. Needless to say, she is a person who I know well enough to trust with a great deal of control over the forum. While she will have been completely new to the forum as of this time of writing, I am confident that, going forward, she will become an integral part of the community.

This is not to say that I will become completely absent from the forum, however it should be expected that my participation becomes less of a regular thing and more of an occasion. While I am still excited about continuing to put time into this project, the unfortunate reality is that I'm just too busy to make very much progress. I will continue to head the development of the esoBB forum software, however Jess has a good level of understanding with regard to backend management, and so she will be in charge of any changes pertaining to this forum.

You may continue to reach me with the e-mail address "contact (at) murgleis (dot) com," whereas "admin (at) esoteric (dot) chat" will also direct to the mailbox of Jess, as well as my own.

Cheers!