Mossy did an excellent job of answering the question; but I did want to chime in just to show that were are many of us in the community who keep up with the forums and news, but contribute in various ways to the site.
We are in a state of transition, which seems to be a characteristic throughout the history of Emuscene / MacScene. As Mossy mentioned, this most recent 'reboot' of the site represents the first time we are in full control of every aspect of the site.
When I first started Mac.Emuscene.com (1999, was when I began) Octavius and I were under the control of the Emuscene staff. Our first battle was acquiring the rights to continue the site under the title Emuscene, turning it to a Mac focus; this resulted in our first reboot. The next four or five years were filled with reboots because of unreliable hosting, bad programming, and general lack of knowledge. The next challenge came from competition from sites like emulation.net and MacEmu. Eventually MacEmu and Emuscene merged / acquired each other (I think IUG and I tell the story differently
). Our most recent battles have been internal with trust being misplaced and files being lost.
Today however, Elemodo Software (which spawned from the Emuscene / MacScene community in 2008; all the staff members and people who have done work for the company have come in some way from this community) will always keep MacScene secure. There will be no 'reboots' as long as Elemodo is around. A number of us are working on projects which (while giving us some extra money on the side) also contribute in many ways to this site.
For instance, this version of MacScene is based on v1.2 of our Genesis software which is a feature-rich social networking application built on Joomla. Elemodo is using a lot of the technology (and the knowledge we developed in running Emuscene / MacScene for eleven years) to create a viable company. We've been very successful thus far, and I hope to continue our success into the future. We have about a dozen clients, and our profits are what makes MacScene continue to run ad-free.
We are also currently working on a sister-project to MacScene, and you might be able to uncover in these forums some clues as to the direction of what I've been calling 'ViGi'.
And to speak to your comment that 'the site seemed a lot more lively before', I disagree a bit. Looking at our analytics data shows that the site is more popular than even. A new member signs up about once a day (once every 0.96 days to be more exact). We have more traffic than ever before, and the traffic is more diverse (our traffic used to be nearly 90% North America / England...now its more like 60%; the rest being predominantly in Canada, France, Australia, Japan, Spain, Brazil, and Mexico). Our forums are the most active part of the site, although our posts per hit ratio is down (I can only assume because we are receiving more hits). Since the day of our relaunch, our hits are down 5%. However in the period between our previous relaunch and now, our hits are up nearly 20%.
MacScene has always been about the community, and not about any individual member. So if you have any recommendations (especially on the development side, I'm not much of an editor, reporter, or writer myself), please let me know. I love trying out new ideas, especially if they're creative.
And we were all n00bs at one point or another and stop sitting in the corner...you're creeping me out.