Thoughs on the future of the old forum...

smcameron

It's fine, whatever you decide to do. I'm just giving a gentle push to think about the future, e.g. if there was a way to archive threads to plain text files or very vanila plain html files, that would be satisfactory to me. Really, I'm happy to get what I pay for (i.e. "nothing" is fine.) But something that preserves the information but presents a much smaller target than some big forum software would be nice. I've already saved everything I need off the old forum so if it disappeared, I personally wouldn't lose very much.

smcameron

Also, in case it wasn't clear, I am more concerned with the preservation/archiving of the new forum than the old forum. What's done is done. What's not yet done is not yet done. We have a chance to think ahead here.

That is to say, let's have a PLAN for how to archive this new forum as we go instead of waiting until it falls over and then jumping to a new ship while we watch the old one sink into the depths of the sea.

poVoq

smcameron Hmm, I am probably a bit less archive minded, but I understand that forums tend to be the worst kind of knowledge base, but the only one people can be actually bothered to populate (tumble-weed wikis all around).

Anyways, I see two points worth considering:

Flarum has a modern terms of service plugin that actually asks for and stores user-consent on policy updates, so data becomes much more portable (under GDPR you can't just hand over personal data for processing without prior user consent).
It seems like the non-javascrpt version of Flarum is optimized for bots (google search etc.). This is less ideal for human consumption but should probably make it not too hard to make text-only snapshots of the forum.

smcameron

Hmm, I am probably a bit less archive minded,

I suppose I'm a little sensitive, as I have two games of which I'm the primary author for which the main discussion during development occurred on freegamedev.net.

Word War vi https://smcameron.github.io/wordwarvi/

The development discussion for this game was entirely lost when freegamedev.net lost the entire forum back whenever that happened. That was multiple years worth of discussion about the game development just gone forever.

Space Nerds in Space http://smcameron.github.io/space-nerds-in-space/
The development discussion on freegamedev.net is here: http://smcameron.github.io/space-nerds-in-space/ and it spans from November 2012 to the present day, almost 10 years worth of discussion about the development of the game, which I'd not like to lose. (I've laboriously copied it here by hand: https://smcameron.github.io/space-nerds-in-space/history.html so that I won't lose it.) When I'm looking at my code, wondering, "why did I do it this way?" I can look back over these 10 years of discussion and maybe find out why. It's not very nice if 10 years of that kind of discussion is just disappeared, accidentally or deliberately.

poVoq

smcameron Yes I get your point, but there is always the internet archive, no?

smcameron

poVoq

smcameron Yes I get your point, but there is always the internet archive, no?

Have you tried it? Shit's not there, yo. If "archive.org" is your answer to "where's the backups", you have no business running anything, and you're a bush league amateur. But, maybe this is that kind of forum. A bush league amateur forum, and I should treat it as such (i.e. consider everything written here to be potentially ephemeral and gone tomorrow, and take my own action to preserve anything important to me, just as I learned to do with the old forum.)

ced117

poVoq reside on a server I can't access.

Can't you get a copy of that forum, put it on your own server and make it read-only or something like that ? :-/

poVoq

ced117 for legal reasons no (database includes too much personal data) as there is no such thing as FreeGameDev.net as a legal entity and thus transferring this data from the current "owners" onto my server would be in breach of the GDPR. But I am looking into ways to only scrape the public posts and mirror them as static files as a backup.

That said, the old server is not at risk being shut down. As long as the old forum does not break it will continue to exists. I hope if we disable registration and posting the database will not be constantly bombarded with all the (by default hidden) spam posts that the old forum gets (easily hundreds a day on some weeks), and thus be less likely to break.

ced117

poVoq There has to be something that can be done to remove the ip addresses, e-mails and so on.... But yes, i do get the fact that's it's not easy after all.
But anyway, i hope you can grab a copy for yourself, just in case.

ffaf

Which software are new forums using? Does it have RSS or something similar?

ced117

ffaf The software is called Flarum.
I dont think it has RSS by default, but there are extensions to add it.

poVoq

ced117 @ffaf Yes, we are experimenting with various rss feed option right now. Not fully functional but you can find it here for now: https://freegamedev.net/atom (edited)

There used to be a really nice & fully functional RSS/ATOM feed extension for Flarum, but it hasn't been maintained and thus isn't compatible with the current version that we are using. Edit: was updated, see link below.

ffaf

Thanks poVoq , it is ok I can turn on notifiactions of pop in from time to time.

Great job setting this up, I frankly like it more than the old interface (and more importantly, it is not falling to pieces).

ffaf

btw poVoq that link is not functional now (I can wait, just wanted to let you know)

poVoq

ffaf Ah sorry, see: https://freegamedev.net/d/1-welcome-to-our-new-forums/22

ffaf

Maybe old forums could have a nice banner/link to new forums? That would haste the migration.

poVoq

ffaf Done.

maybe @hagish has some input on how to best archive the old forum? But as I said, we don't plan to retire it immediately.

poVoq

smcameron I was joking, but truth to be told: yes this forum is totally amateur run, for better or worse.

Well this new forum itself is actually intentionally not hosted on an amateur run VPS, but a professionally managed (cheap) server. But that comes with certain limitations and isn't a silver bullet either.

As for Flarum itself... as with many open-source projects: you get what you pay for :)

hagish

We could switch the old forum to read only at some point and just keep it as is there. The server will be there in the foreseeable future. And when the old phpbb version is set to read only and maybe even the db (if the forum can run on a read only mysql account) the security is ok too.
Another option could be to crawl the forum and turn the public pages into static html file. This would likely require some programming.

[deleted]

Note that previously, the new forum was dead slow. It is now better, and at least usable, which is a good change (it was the server, I've read).
It is still rather slow on some specialized operations, but I don't consider those important (like, scrolling to down to answer... oh... maybe it is important after all...). It also still requires JS server-side, but I don't think many will be convinced by this argument to keep an old phpbb forum.
I don't know if it's possible, but joining the auth systems would maybe help convincing people (less stuff to do to switch from one to another)?