It's been a great 18 years, but it is time to say goodbye to TTD.
Eighteen years ago, after the demise of Sharing The Groove, a few of us music sharers decided to start The Traders' Den to continue to be able to share the great live music that a few brave, awesome tapers had managed to record. One thing that was important to us was that the lineage of the shows be shared with the recordings. We also strived to weed out the non-original recordings when possible. Yes, this was new for a lot of users and I know it pissed many off, but I think in the end we managed to bring a lot of users around to our way of thinking and I like to think that the music sharing community is better for our efforts.
But now, our site is struggling. We have 18 year old software running on old servers with old PHP and MySQL and, to be honest, it would be quite the effort to bring it all up to date. The vBulletin side would not be as hard to upgrade, but our tracker is even older than our vBulletin software and it would require a lot of rewriting of the code to make it compatible with the newer versions of PHP and MySQL that we need. We've done our best to try to keep the site just chugging along, but I think there is just nothing we can do at this point to keep things moving smoothly without a major upgrade.
So, it is with a heavy heart that we have decided to close down TTD at the end of this month.
I want to thank our fearless moderators for all their time and effort on this site. I know it hasn't always been easy for them answering the same questions over and over again, but they did it. They also had to deal with some rather interesting characters that came along, but they always seemed to keep their cool while doing it. They put in many hours of their time just helping to make TTD the best site we possibly could. Thank you, thank you, THANK YOU! This site couldn't have reached it's potential without your efforts!
I also want to thank all of the tapers. This site couldn't have existed at all if it wasn't for you all. Taping isn't a hobby just anyone can get into. I think you need to have nerves of steal to get your equipment past security into some shows. And then to have to stand still to make a great recoding instead of jumping up and down with the music... well, you guys are all heroes in my eyes, so thank you all!
To all the uploaders, well, this site obviously would never have lasted at all without you guys. Even during our rocky server times, you still managed to stick in there and upload. Yes, I know it was frustrating, but you still did it with very little complaining. So thank you all for your continued efforts and all the time you put into each of your uploads!
To all the users, this site also couldn't have lasted this long without you. You guys stuck with us through all the hard times as we tried to get this site going in the direction we wanted it to go. And even though we never pushed for donations, you all managed to contribute enough every month to keep us going. Thank you!
One last think about the site, right now I have the site back to using cloudflare. I know this will break the tracker for a few of you. However, if I turn off cloudflare, then it breaks the whole site. So, for the next two weeks, I am going to leave it as it is right now. I am sorry about this. And for those of you seeing a white page.... it seems some browsers are automatically redirecting to https instead of http if we are using cloudflare. I know Safari doesn't do this, but the latest version of Firefox does. You can turn it off in Preferences > Network Settings > unclick the box next to Enable DNS over HTTPS.
So long TTD, you will always have a special place in my heart!
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