Hi everyone,

To those who don't know me, I am the owner/admin of this site. I just wanted to give you all an update.

First of all, I am very sorry that I "abandoned" the site. It probably upsets me a lot more than it upsets anyone else! It wasn't by choice. I have mentioned some of the personal life (health) issues I was having. But the shortest way I can explain what happened... is that I took a full-time job in 2015, which I threw myself into. My plan was to keep updating this site as well. But sadly, my experience at that workplace went bad very quickly. Keep in mind: I am autistic. I was used by my employer. I was ostracized and bullied by my coworkers, all while suffering daily sensory overload and having worse meltdowns than I've ever had since i was a kid. All of this caused a mental breakdown and left me in a state where I could hardly take care of myself; there is no way I could have been running a website as well. I was fired... and it was an unfair termination based on a stupid social clique. I wanted to fight the termination because it's not fair to be fired over something you can't help (my social skills are lacking due to my ASC!), but I had no relevant medical records here in England at the time, and I also didn't want to go through that extra stress.

Anyway, I am still trying to recover from all of this and getting help rebuilding my life. But I wanted to tell you what I am doing and respond to a couple of common questions I've received while I've been gone.

What I'm doing on this site: This is very boring... but in order to keep the site online I need to move it to a cheaper host. I am in the process of transferring it to a new host, but there is lots of setup involved. I will give a notice when I am going to do the switchover as there may be some downtime or weirdness while it's stuck between the old and new hosts.

Some questions I wanted to address:

Are you shutting down the site? No, I don't plan on doing that.When are you going to approve patterns again? I'm not sure yet, hopefully after the site has been moved to its new host, but I may have other life things to take care of in between.Why don't you let people help run/moderate the site? I would love to do this and have started working towards that. There are two problems though: 1) It's not as simple as just "letting people help." The site's admin areas are outdated and hard to use. I would have to write a massive user manual for anyone to be able to do it, and I'd rather spend that time improving the code instead. 2) It's very hard to find moderators who stick around. Most moderators are only active for a short period of time.

Finally, I apologize to anyone who received any email responses that had an angry tone. I am not angry at any of you. I am only angry at myself, and at my previous job for causing so much of this. Sometimes when I get a bug report, it reminds me that this site is "dying," and that triggers an angry response in me because I'm angry that it's dying, I don't want it to, but things happened that were out of my control.

Anyway thank you to those of you who have kept visiting, or who have offered help or answers to others while I have been gone!