Peter wrote:
[...] Smcameron complains about the forum change, but I don't mind.
I am not complaining about the forum change. I'm totally fine with the forum change. If I weren't, I could ask for my money back... all $0 of it. I've already preserved for myself everything on the old forum I care about. If it disappeared tomorrow, I would not lose much.
I'm just suggesting that perhaps we should think ahead, and realize that someday this new forum will also become old and decrepit, and when that day comes, rather than tossing all the old forum threads into the garbage, and jumping into a new forum, perhaps we should be archiving things as we go into some simple, stable format that can be presented simply, without having to worry too much about security (e.g. perhaps a simple text file archive, or bare bones html archive). That way, when we do move to a new forum, as is inevitable, at least the old discussions are still readable and searchable. That's all. I've survived the total loss of the old freegamedev forums before, (lost the entire thread about the development of Word War vi) and this current transition is much smoother than that one was (i.e. the old forums still exist at the present moment.) I've also survived the total loss of several other unrelated forums. It's not a problem we face alone. It's a very common problem. What's the simplest, dumbest thing that can be done to mitigate the loss that comes from obsolete forum software? To my mind, it's some kind of automated exporting of the various forum threads to as simple a format as possible, so that in the event that the forum software becomes unviable, a bare bones webserver can serve up an archive of the forum data. I'm just suggesting we prepare ahead of time for the inevitable demise of this new forum, rather than waiting for it to occur, and then trying to figure out what to do on the fly, as has happened the last two times. Let us learn from history. Granted, it might be asking a bit much from an unpaid staff of volunteer(s), so it is framed as a polite request, rather than a demand. I'll take what I can get, even if what I can get is significantly less that what I'd want.