A not-so-brief but simple answer is that we are super short staffed, unfortunately as you know we are a self driven volunteer group and over time there is a normal churn of folks coming and going, however to due to the many years of network attacks we lost a lot more folks than usual and have been unable to find folks willing to help the community in public by serving as forum staff, many folks do help with other jobs but many have said the fighting, bad attitudes of some community members and their own personal circumstance leave them unwilling to commit a lot of their private time to making this place a bit more homely.
Recently the staff whom are still left spoke about this serious situation and it was decided that further efforts by all existing staff are necessary to locate new staff members to both replenish the existing ones and offer further functionality to our skillset, a mix of skills obviously insulates us from unexpected events and thus diversity is something we have always aimed for.
Two staff members are on holiday btw if that helps explain the lack of any festivities and whilst I could have undertaken the changes its not something i normally do or even thought about so my personal apologies for spoiling the fun, I also over many years stopped recruiting staff for the forum as I wanted the current forum head to choose his own staff , not wanting to be driving from the back seat has meant i haven't chased up some folks whom I believe are well suited to helping the community both modernise and reinvigorate itself, this too was a mistake but i gave in to my own fears of folks making allegations that I had not stepped back from running the site myself, my main role here is development/documentation and that too suffers from intermittent staff issues.
if honest folks want to put themselves forward to join the forum staff please drop any of the existing staff a line and we will contact you for a discussion of responsibilities and outline the potential for helping the community past this time of uncertainty, we are all in this together by our common usage of this network and we will together lift ourselves from the mud, this we can all take a part in by using the forum and offering our views, ideas and simply put our time for others, if we cannot meet that goal in the long run we are truly redundant.
WinMxWorld has a lot of the trust and responsibility of the community resting on its continuation that much is clear to all so whatever the current situation we are still all looking ahead far into the future, a brighter future with more fun, laughter and participation is of course preferable to one where we "just get by".
I hope I have answered your question and outlined the solution in respect of your observations Stripes
