I think, incidentally, activity on all three sites was waning even before the Orange festival, although that has made it more obvious. We're just not getting the same number of participants these days.
I agree with your points about the problems of updating and my greatest fear of solutions not fitting previuos moves and having to be redone. But I needed feedback like that so as not to make a complete prat of myself by just setting up the game with all of it's woolley thinking. There are other types of cryptic games already played on this server, but I wanted one that had a finite life span. There is still an empty game slot.