So what am I doing, anyway? Is this some kind of scam? Am I even a real person? What is this site about?

Yes, I am a real person. I'm almost old enough to qualify for the cheap coffee. My first computer experiences were old PC games, but my first online experience was to visit a certain BBS system back in 1996 or 1997. In those days, we used fully threaded message boards which showed the whole tree structure of a thread, and just by looking at the graph you could follow the contours of the conversations at a glance, in a way that the modern, linear boards can't reproduce.

Back in the early 2000s, I went back to school as an adult and learned how to program. I was a long-time member of an existing online community based on a website with a collection of threaded message boards, and the former webmaster died, leaving the community facing a deadline after which the existing website would vanish. I stepped in and started paying for shared hosting and built a new system using PHP, but emulating the original site. We successfully transitioned and that site was up for a few more years, until certain, principle members either passed away or moved on.

It has been a couple of decades since that time. I built this site recently, from scratch... sort of. I vibe-coded it, mostly, and the site is PHP-based, with MySQL on the backend. It uses the CakePHP skeleton app and libraries, so expanding the functionality of this site over time will be easy. Because it is hosted on a shared hosting server that I'm paying for out of pocket, it will never be able to support a large community. And I don't seek to build a large community.