I just signed up to say a big thanks to Tony and everyone else involved with this project. I've only recently discovered and started using all these cool tools so I've missed most of the fun, but it was very impressive what you built.
I'm not surprised to see GDPR mentioned when discussing this sad subject of closure. Time for a rant, hello everyone btw!
<rant>
I suspect we'll be seeing many more smaller sites shutting down once they get exposed to the demands of GDPR. Much of we do online is going to get caught up in these new regulations. It's not just large e-commerce and business sites - but even small blogs, forums, anything too that uses ads or analytics to help pay the bills - all this will at least need legal statements from you to your end users, and you'll need to ensure your partners are fully compliant with GDPR. There are other compliance issues too such as where the data is stored if you are hosting outside the EU as some people do, although this happens less frequently now than used to be the case when EU data costs were much more expensive - but can be an issue if you use services outside the EU such as mailing list providers, engagement and commenting systems, etc.
The wordpress community is scrambling to try and respond before these regulations come fully into force in May this year. It's not just the platform (such as a Wordpress CMS or forum system), but any plugins you have installed too that might do anything with personal data needs to be compliant and included in your statement. Usernames (can be), IP addresses, and email addresses are to be treated as personal information. If someone on a forum requests to be forgotten at the very least you have to anonymise all their data (i.e. change the usernames attributed to every post and quoted reply, which may be enough according to some people, or maybe even destroy all that post data). You need to lay out all data collection you do, including partners such as advertising companies, google analytics, etc. and the EU expects this to be in human digestible form - i.e. no longer buried in long legal disclaimer text. Most people also collect server log files that contain identifying information so you'll need to deal with that too and include those in any requests for data.
There are also data security requirements. There are also questions about who would be responsible for any breaches should exploits be found in the software you are using on your site.
Anyone you hold personal information about can demand to see all the data you hold about them, and you are required to respond within a reasonable time frame. This one could be fun on a forum. There are also provisions for providing export of all this data you hold in a common useful format (such as CSV) but it's questionable whether this would apply to blogs/forums. And the right to be forgotten stuff I mentioned earlier could be messy for forum sites with threaded conversations, if you choose to comply in the most extreme way and simply destroy all user contributed data when asked (again, this won't be as easy as just deleting all the posts that belong to their userid in your database, any quotes in other posts will need handling too).
It's an absolute minefield for people who don't have the resources to hire lawyers and security consultants.
I know of some US sites that are planning to just outright ban all EU citizens via geoblocks to avoid GDPR. There are rules about geoblocks inside the EU, but obviously there's nothing the EU can do if an overseas site denies access to those based in the EU. I wonder how EU citizens will feel about the EU if some of their favourite sites get shut off to them due to these burdensome regulations? Or even EU communities that shutdown entirely due to GDPR? Let's just say I doubt many of these people will celebrating "thanks EU for trying to protect my privacy".
</rant>
So yeah I can see why MyDSLWebStats is going away just because of GDPR alone, let alone all the other reasons that were outlined in the sad announcement that just caught my attention.