Hey friends! I haven’t posted here in many years, mostly because there hasn’t been any noteworthy news relevant to this comic. This will just be a housekeeping post to make sure everyone’s aware: The Orange Belt Forums, including the Zelda Comic forum, are being retired.

If you ever joined the forum, then you’re aware that basically no one (other than me) has posted in the forum for many years now. It’s a ghost town that’s been entirely supplanted by a Discord community server for any Orange Beltians who still keep in touch with each other. The Zelda Comic forum always had dedicated [discuss] posts linked at the bottom of each comic update (for awhile anyway), but obviously those haven’t gotten any love since the comic ended.

Even then, I’d generally be okay keeping those old posts around in a working state forever, but now I’m running into some severe technical debt. The Orange Belt host is no longer supporting the version of PHP we’re running for the server software, and that software (Vanilla) hasn’t received meaningful or supported updates in many years as they switched focus to a hosted-only commercial offering. As a result, I need to shut down our Vanilla install in the next few weeks.

There’s probably going to be a bigger post somewhere on The Orange Belt’s homepage about this, but long story short, I want to keep the forum around in a read-only archival form. This community is important to me, and I feel a sense of responsibility for capturing this narrow slice of Internet history for posterity. Lots of people (including me) lived some formative years in that space, learning how to interact online as they matured over the years. It wouldn’t feel right for that to just go away.

I’ve removed the forum link from this site’s page navigation. It should still work once we go read-only, but no posting will be possible, as the site will become purely a static collection of discussion posts. If you want to keep talking about Zelda Comic, the comment section on this blog will remain open as long as there’s a Zelda Comic site. If you’d like to join our Orange Belt Discord, you can request an invite link via Discord DM (wavebirddash) or email (mario at zeldacomic dot net; to filter out the spam bots, you need to tell me what one thing Link says in episode 252!).

Apologies if this woke up someone’s RSS reader and got them excited for some big comic reboot announcement (nope), but I figured it was important to keep everyone in the loop. Love you all.