OffPrompt started on the 22nd February 2001, with a post about Canberra Rep's 2001 season. Since then there have been over 2600 posts and over 1000 registered users.
The main reason I started OffPrompt was to provide a place for information of interest to actors, crew and others actually involved or interested in putting on theatre in the ACT and surrounding area.
A few of us had recognised how parochial individual companies are and I wanted to break down some of the barriers to people participating in multiple companies. The primary barrier I felt was the lack of public information on what was happening with individual companies. Many companies had newsletters or mailing lists that focussed entirely on them and many people involved in company A, might never hear about opportunities in company B or C etc. I wanted to stop that and provide a single place to find that information and those opportunities.
Over the past 12 years I think OffPrompt has fulfilled that goal quite well, however things never stay the same. With the growth of social media, especially Facebook, there are now multiple avenues for people to find this information, and they are more suited to building the sense of community that I hoped to build around OffPrompt, but never managed to achieve.
Also, while I was active in the local theatre community, obtaining information to post on Offprompt was reasonably easy, but now that my involvement in local theatre has significantly diminished, sourcing that information, and indeed the time to maintain the site, is now considerably harder. I’ve come to rely on others posting the information and that has changed the character of the site to more of a publicity channel and that’s not why I created the site in the first place.
So, it's time to shut it down. I am keeping all the posts and comments so they may be recreated if needed in the future, but the site itself has been closed.
A huge thank you to everyone who posted, helped and supported OffPrompt over the years.
Carl.