Seems like they didn't like any of our ideas and have gone off on their own.
I think what happened was several things.
The announcement of Accuweather forum's imminent demise took everyone by surprise, except for a select few sworn to secrecy. A few of the all seasons posters on there started panicking, for obvious reasons, and started looking for an alternative forum choice. A few quick boards were implemented by a few willing to give it a go and others posted links to established forums such as this one.
This forum looked to have a lot of content similar to accuwx and people started signing up. I PM'ed saratogawx when a lot of people started posting they had signed up, first I wanted to make sure such an influx of users was welcomed, as while similar a lot of the members there wanted the same set up and some even wanted to transfer a lot of the content already posted. Secondly I wanted to be sure that this board could handle some of the load accuwx takes on during big weather events. The server there has crashed several times, especially when related to the Northeast/Mid Atlantic areas, it's not uncommon for their to be 32 pages on a thread and the storm is still 3-5 days away.
There's two main forums I know of being developed. One is the one you mentioned after this post with a reserved domain name very similar to this one. I as well was not keen on the name being so close to this one, especially after a lot of us had already signed up and posted here. There was a request for users to submit choices for a permanent domain name.
The other forum is being built by a couple other accuwx members, but have not seen an update on that one in a little while.
When it was announced, 6 months did not seem like much time to find a new place that would both welcome and accomodate the members from there, but Ken quickly put that to rest by stating his willingness to make it work here, as well as many of this forums established members did.
There was a lot of uncertainty at that point not having an actual closing date. The more people that announced they signed up here, the more people went ahead and signed up too.
It took awhile before the members with the brainpower, sources and financial means to create something caught wind of the forums closing.
Regardless of where we all end up, there won't ever be another accuweather and i wouldn't want any other established forum taken over and made as such.
As with anything, change is hard to accept, and whether it be this forum or a new forum there's going to be changes that some don't like and those members go elsewhere.
I still come by here often, the current weather sections are not as active as I am accustomed to but, in that same breathe the accuweather forums are not nearly as active as they normally are either.
This got a lot longer than anticipated. In the end I don't think 80% of us know where we will end up. A few of us have already signed up to 3 or 4 sites just because they were mentioned. A lot of members signed up where everyone else was and then the brainpowers showed up and offered to make a new forum using an accuweather mold.
We were pretty much banded together over there by regions, NE/MA had by far the most members and other regions slowly waned off and headed to AmericanWX.
Now that the initial excitement has dwindled a bit it' more of a wait until accuweather shuts down and see what else pops up between then and now and what have you.
