Whatever Happened to Renard Moreau?

Posted byThe Curious GardenerPosted inThe Gardener BlokeTags:, , , , , ,
When a familiar voice in the blogging world disappears
It was actually Britchy who started all this.

I was thinking recently about blogging, how much it has changed and how different my own relationship with it is today when, for no particular reason, Bitchin’ in the Kitchen wandered back into my thoughts. Britchy was one of many bloggers I knew during the years when I wrote A Guy Called Bloke, and remembering her started one of those peculiar journeys through memory where one name unlocks another. Before long I was thinking about Kristian from Tales from the Mind of Kristian, Paula Light, Beckie from Beckie’s Mental Mess, Teresa of The Haunted Wordsmith, KKatch22 and a whole collection of people whose usernames had once been part of everyday life.

Then I thought about Renard Moreau again.

Renard wasn’t someone I had forgotten after leaving that old blogging community. When Renard’s World disappeared in May 2024, I noticed. In fact, I spent perhaps three months afterwards, on and off, trying to find him. I searched for another blog, another account or some indication that he had moved elsewhere or perhaps started again under another name. I found nothing convincing. Renard, as far as I could establish, had gone.

It is now August 2026. More than two years have passed since his disappearance, and remembering Britchy brought back the question I had eventually stopped trying to answer.

Whatever happened to Renard Moreau?
The Blogger Who Was Always There

My own involvement with online writing goes back much further than WordPress. I was participating in forums around 2000, building websites with Freewebs by 2002 and using Scribd from around 2008. Writing for various blog hosts followed, as did several years of writing on what was then Twitter from around 2016. Eventually came A Guy Called Bloke, and that grew considerably beyond anything I had originally expected.

At its height, the blog had somewhere around 5,700 followers. That sounds more impressive than it really was. Plenty of established bloggers in those days had thousands of followers, some considerably more than I did, and the headline number never told you how many people were actually reading. Looking back, perhaps five per cent of mine were genuinely active, and maybe three per cent were consistently so. Those were the familiar names, the people who regularly read, commented, participated and returned.

I don’t remember 5,700 people today. I remember a much smaller collection of names, personalities, avatars and conversations.

Renard was unquestionably one of them, although he occupied a slightly unusual position. There are bloggers you follow because you are genuinely interested in what they write, and there are others who become part of the landscape because they seem to be everywhere. For me, Renard was both.

I deliberately read him because I was interested in what he had to say, particularly about blogging itself, but I also encountered him throughout the wider WordPress community.

Renard wasn’t really part of the blogging-awards culture that many of us enthusiastically participated in. His territory was blogging itself: WordPress, writing, readership, commenting, engagement, technology and the behaviour of bloggers. If WordPress was a village, Renard wasn’t merely living in it; he was frequently standing back and examining how the village worked.

At the same time, he was highly visible beyond his own site. His comments appeared elsewhere, and his distinctive manner made him recognisable. You could encounter Renard without actually visiting Renard’s World, and over the years his presence became familiar.

There was something quietly reassuring about that.

When Blogging Was a Community

The WordPress world I remember from the late 2010s was extraordinarily social. There were writing prompts, quote challenges, questions, games, reblogs, pingbacks and seemingly endless blogger awards. The Sunshine Blogger Award, Mystery Blogger Award, Versatile Blogger Award, Liebster Award and goodness knows how many others circulated constantly.

I participated in plenty of them myself. Looking back, some of it seems wonderfully ridiculous. You received an award, thanked whoever nominated you, answered a set of questions, nominated another set of bloggers, invented questions for them, and sent the whole thing around again. Yet beneath all the silliness was something surprisingly effective: we were continually introducing people to other people.

A challenge created on one blog travelled to another ten. Their readers followed it backwards and discovered the original writer. Somebody commented on somebody else’s response, another conversation started and another connection formed. It was an extraordinarily effective community-building machine, even if I doubt many of us thought of it in those terms at the time.

Maintaining that level of activity was also bloody hard work. Writing an article could be the easy part. Afterwards came answering comments, visiting other blogs, responding to prompts, creating challenges, reblogging, reading and generally maintaining a presence. If you wanted a busy blog, you had to contribute to making the blogging community busy.

That is partly why those 5,700 followers don’t particularly impress me now. The number was the visible result. What mattered were the people behind it.

I became sufficiently conscious of those people that, years ago on A Guy Called Bloke, I wrote an article on a subject very similar to this one. I had become concerned about bloggers simply disappearing and was determined, wherever possible, to know something about the actual person behind the blog. If someone who normally posts regularly suddenly went quiet and I had their contact details, I might email them to see whether they were all right.

These weren’t necessarily people I had ever met. Some lived thousands of miles away, but when you had been talking to somebody through their writing and comments several times a week for years, their absence was noticeable.

Renard was different. For someone so visible within WordPress, he was strangely untouchable beyond it. Renard was available through Renard’s World. I could read him there, talk to him there and encounter him commenting elsewhere, but there wasn’t the same route beyond the blog that existed with some other bloggers.

When Renard’s World disappeared, the doorway to Renard disappeared with it.

May 2024

Renard was still blogging in May 2024 when something changed. On Friday 10 May, he published an article with the rather extraordinary title The Gravity of Deleting a Blog. Within days, Renard’s World itself had disappeared. Other bloggers noticed at the time because he had apparently been publishing normally immediately beforehand and there had been no obvious farewell announcing that he intended to leave. (The Portly Politico)

The timing is intriguing, but it isn’t an explanation. It tells us that deleting a blog was on Renard’s mind, or at least that he considered the subject worth writing about. It doesn’t tell us why he deleted his own site, assuming that was entirely his decision, and it certainly doesn’t tell us what happened afterwards.

At the time, I started searching. Perhaps he had moved somewhere else. Perhaps he had opened another blog. Perhaps another blogger knew something I didn’t. I tried again periodically for roughly three months but never found an answer; eventually, life moved on, and I stopped looking.

There was, however, something else about Renard’s final period that stayed with me. Some of his later articles felt increasingly AI-influenced.

By then, AI was no longer something happening somewhere outside WordPress. Jetpack AI Assistant was introduced directly into WordPress.com in 2023, allowing bloggers to generate and edit content, adjust tone, correct writing, and develop titles within the editor. By May 2024, WordPress.com was actively promoting AI-powered creative tools, including its built-in AI Assistant. (WordPress.com)
That made the change I thought I could hear in Renard’s writing particularly interesting, given that he had previously expressed reservations about AI and blogging. Perhaps curiosity eventually got the better of him.

For someone who wrote so much about blogging, WordPress and the technology surrounding writers, it would hardly have been surprising if he experimented with the tools WordPress itself was putting in front of bloggers.

What I don’t know is how he felt about the results.

I use AI myself today, along with Grammarly. They make maintaining my current blog considerably easier than maintaining A Guy Called Bloke ever was. My own thoughts, memories, experiences, observations and curiosity begin the process, while technology can help me research, question, organise and develop them. AI didn’t suddenly remember Renard Moreau; I did.

Used without care, however, AI can smooth away some of the irregularities that make a writer recognisable. The sentences become cleaner, the structure becomes neater, and everything can become beautifully organised, but occasionally the writer begins to disappear beneath the writing.

Did Renard experience something like that and dislike what was happening to his voice? Did he begin to feel that Renard’s World no longer sounded like Renard? Or did precisely the opposite happen? Perhaps experimenting with AI showed him that he could write differently and explore things beyond an identity he had established over many years. Perhaps it encouraged him to start afresh under another name, with another blog and another style.

It is an intriguing possibility, but it is only that.

AI may have had absolutely nothing to do with Renard’s disappearance. Something may have happened in his private life. He may have become tired of blogging, wanted greater privacy or decided he had written everything Renard Moreau wanted to write. We can construct dozens of convincing explanations from the fragments left behind, but that doesn’t make any of them true.

I know this because I disappeared too.

A Guy Called Bloke Disappeared

Anyone searching for A Guy Called Bloke today will discover that it has gone. I didn’t gradually abandon the site and leave an archive sitting there. I deleted it, despite the years of writing and thousands of people who had followed it.

Yet I didn’t disappear.

Other people still mention A Guy Called Bloke on their old blogs because I couldn’t delete what they had written. They responded to my challenges, nominated me for things, talked about our conversations, linked to articles, and reblogged material. Those fragments belong to them.

The house has gone, but photographs of the house remain in other people’s albums.

Someone who knew my old blog but lost contact with me could quite easily do what I have done with Renard. They might search for A Guy Called Bloke, find those fragments and start wondering what happened.

They could examine my final articles for clues, notice changes in the writing and construct a perfectly plausible explanation for my disappearance.

They could also be completely wrong.

I know why I deleted A Guy Called Bloke because I was the bloke who deleted it. Everyone standing outside can only ever see the public part of the story.

With Renard, I’m standing outside.

Remembering the Old Neighbourhood

Thinking about Britchy again opened the door to an entire collection of names I had largely put away. Beckie, Kristian, Paula, Teresa, KKatch22, King Ben’s Grandma, Popsicle Society, Crushed Caramel, Cage Dunn, 3C Style, Jay-Lyn Doerksen, Tanvir Kaur, Learning Life, Lismore Paper, Ellie894, Grace, Guidelineswebs, All My Heart Sees, and many others began coming back.

Some I knew better than others, but what surprised me was how quickly those old usernames resurfaced once I started thinking about them.

Perhaps that is the part follower statistics never capture. I once had thousands of followers, yet I don’t remember thousands of people. I remember the smaller number who repeatedly turned up and became part of the place.

A few people from those years are still around. Sadje of Keep It Alive remains in contact through the blog, as does Eugenia of Poesy Perspectives. There are others I still encounter or know of, although relatively few remain in regular contact specifically through blogging.

That is hardly surprising. My present blog isn’t everyone’s cup of tea — or spadeful of soil.

Earthly Comforts is a far cry from A Guy Called Bloke. Someone who enjoyed the old mixture of humour, challenges, questions, prompts and general conversation isn’t automatically going to be interested in what I write today simply because I am the person writing it. More recently I have changed the style and approach of Earthly Comforts again, broadening it considerably. Gardening remains at its roots, but the writing now wanders through wildlife, environmental observation, memory, history, poetry, unusual discoveries and wherever curiosity happens to take me.

I have far fewer followers and considerably less interaction today, and I genuinely don’t mind. I no longer have the time to spend entire days answering prompts, devising challenges and maintaining the constant reciprocal activity required to keep a large social blog buzzing. Nor do I particularly want to.

Mostly, I write for myself now. If other people enjoy coming along, they are very welcome.

The Bloggers We Miss

There is another part of all this that is much harder to measure.

Someone once suggested that Renard and I had some blogging bromance. I never saw it that way. We weren’t close in the conventional sense, and Renard remained remarkably private and difficult to reach beyond his blog. There was simply something quietly reassuring about his presence. His articles appeared, his comments turned up around WordPress, and his name became part of the familiar landscape. I became accustomed to Renard being there without ever really thinking about what that meant.

Then he wasn’t.

The simplest way I can describe what happened afterwards is that I missed him, and more than two years later I still do.

Some bloggers are like that. Ashley Peterson was another for me. Ashley wrote Mental Health @ Home and was one of those people whose presence became familiar through years of blogging. Her story has an ending that Renard’s doesn’t because we all eventually learned that Ashley had died in October 2022. Knowing what happened doesn’t necessarily make an absence easier. I still miss Ashley terribly.

Perhaps that is something follower counts could never measure. Of the thousands of people who once followed A Guy Called Bloke, there are names I have completely forgotten while others can still stop me in my tracks years later. They weren’t necessarily the people I knew best.

Sometimes they were simply people whose presence had quietly become part of my own routine.

When somebody like that disappears, you haven’t necessarily lost a close friend in the conventional meaning of the word. You have lost a familiar presence in your life, and sometimes you don’t realise how familiar that presence had become until it is gone.

Whatever Happened to Renard Moreau?

So here we are in August 2026, more than two years after Renard’s World disappeared in May 2024, and I still don’t know what happened to Renard Moreau.

Perhaps I never will.

Maybe Renard decided he had had enough of blogging and closed the door. Perhaps the person behind the name is perfectly well and enjoying a life that no longer involves telling the internet what he thinks about WordPress. Perhaps he started again somewhere else under another identity and writes completely differently today. Maybe AI encouraged some reinvention, or perhaps it had absolutely nothing to do with anything.

If he did deliberately create another identity and chose not to leave a path connecting it to Renard’s World, I have no desire to unmask him. If Renard wanted his old readership to follow him, he knew blogging well enough to leave a forwarding address. He didn’t, and I can understand that better than most because I deleted an established blogging identity myself.

What I cannot know is whether Renard Moreau disappearing meant that the writer behind Renard stopped writing.

I spent roughly three months trying to answer that question in 2024 before eventually accepting that I had found nothing more. Then, more than two years later, an unexpected memory of Britchy opened the old WordPress neighbourhood again, and there was Renard — or rather, the absence of Renard — waiting exactly where I had left him.

Perhaps one day he will stumble across this article. Perhaps somebody who knows him will. Perhaps nothing will ever come of it, and this will remain one of those small mysteries created by an internet where we can know somebody for years without ever really knowing where they went.

If Renard chose to leave that world behind, I respect that. I don’t need to know who he is today or where he went. I hope that wherever life took the person behind Renard’s World, it took him somewhere good.

There is, however, one thing I would like the Renard I knew to know.

You were missed, Renard. You still are.
About our writing & imagery
Most articles reflect our real gardening experience and reflection. Some use AI in drafting or research, but never for voice or authority. Featured images may show our photographs, original AI-generated artwork, or, where stated, credited images shared by others. All content is shaped and edited by Earthly Comforts, expressing our own views.

Published by The Curious Gardener

A Gardener's Curiosity - It Usually Starts in a Garden …

11 thoughts on “Whatever Happened to Renard Moreau?”

  1. I too often think of bloggers who stopped blogging suddenly. Some are on other platforms and some have disappeared completely like Renard. It’s their choice but still feels strange that one day you’re reading their posts, all normal and the next day…. Nothing.

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    1. Yes some we know what happens – Finding French Charming is now mostly in Instagram, Melanie Bee C and Ashleigh sadly passed away, Kristian l think just eased out, Britchy disappeared in 2020, King Ben and all my heart see no longer write, there are a whole lot of other narratives that live with many names now.

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      1. It was a mix of things, Daisy consumed all my time and energy (she’ll be 6 later this year!), I started my own business, and didn’t have time for blogging anymore. When Ashley died, it really hit me hard and I just couldn’t bear posting and knowing she wouldn’t be the first to comment anymore. Like reading your post tonight about Renard, it bought everything back and I do miss blogging, i miss the community too. I’d love to get back into it but I wouldn’t know where to start.

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