By Jeffrey the Barak.

Painful as it may be to take a writer’s hard work and unpublish it, after 18 years it was time to look at this ancient online magazine with eyes of steel.

Many old articles have been unpublished, including many of my own. Most articles on the subject of health have gone, because the Internet can be a dangerous place to seek health advice, and the-vu would make a terrible doctor.

Other philosophical outpourings which were beautiful in the 00s look a bit less brilliant in the late teens, and so they have been returned to the electron soup, with not even a trace of essence on the their long-landfilled keyboards.

Travel articles that were shared on the-vu and numerous other sites that accepted such submissions, have traveled into the ether.

Environmental comments, once on the cusp, are now forefront in the minds of the majority. No need to keep them on the-vu decades or years later in order to convince anyone we have seriously harmed the planet. They have been discarded in a green manner.

Product reviews for things that have long been phased out, have themselves been phased out of the-vu.

I have been less ruthless with the scooter articles, because there are very few places where such writings will ever appear.

The long series written by the late Louis the Scooterer remains online, as a reminder of how cool that man was.

For many years, when I still lived in Los Angeles, I would attend the L.A. Auto Show, with a “the-vu” press pass, and write a few things. These articles do not stay current for long, so they have now driven away to a place that is nowhere.

Even articles just like this one, about previous cleanups, have been cleaned up. This one replaces four of those.

Certain WordPress “Categories” have merged, or their content has been re-categorized, and the original category deleted.

the-vu has now been reduced in size from hundreds of pages, to a few dozen, but the stats showed that where once there were crowds, there remained only tumbleweeds, so it is unlikely anyone will mourn their slipping away.

Some pieces remain because they were contributed by personal friends of mine whom I know from the real world outside of computer screens and emails.

The process is ongoing so perhaps some articles that still exist now, may also soon be vanishing.

It is no exaggeration to say that in the early days of the-vu, long before blogs or social media, there was a thirst for reading online articles, that has since all but dried up. We once had 100,000 page hits in a day. Typically we now have fewer than ten in a day.

Will anyone even read this post? Hard to say, but I had to say something as I wiped so many pages into invisible history.