The esctoday.com forum, which has been offline for the last few days, will unfortunately be remaining offline for the foreseeable future. It is with regret that we have had to take this tough decision to protect the future of the site.

The team at esctoday.com has always prided itself on neutrality, and as such, is funded on donations from readers and affiliate schemes, whilst relying on the hard work of a dedicated team of volunteers. We havenever andwillnever take payment or donations from participants of theEurovision Song Contest.

As such, and with increasing costs, the maintenance of a busy forum within the site represents a sizeable financial committment fromour funds. The forum itself cost more than half of the total running costs of esctoday.com.

In order to protect the future of esctoday.com, for the forseeable future, we will no longer be able to continue to host a forum within the site. We are aware that there are several good forum sites for the Eurovision Song Contest fans, but there are few sites that have the dedication and ability to provide informative, accurate news across the whole of the continent.

For this reason, we have had to take a very difficult decision, not to reopen the forum. We would invite all members of the forum to contribute their thoughts through the reactions section to our news articles and invite the forum moderators to assist us in monitoring these.

However, exciting new plans are in the pipeline which will hopefully bring back the forum in the near future. And in the meantime, the team's focus will be be to bring quality Eurovision Song Contest news to readers.

We hope that forum users will understand, and thank everyone for their support. Of course, article reactions still offer readers a chance to comment and discuss the hottest topics of the day.


Richard's ESC history began way back in 1992, when he discovered the contest could fuel his passion for music and languages. Since then, it's been there at every corner for him in some way or another. He joined the esctoday.com team back in 2006, and quickly developed a love for writing about the contest. In his other life, he heads the development team at the learning resources company Linguascope, and writes about all aspects of language learning on the site Polyglossic.com.