pandm101
Arukoitan
Official Papercrafter
Posts: 185
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Post by pandm101 on Apr 18, 2011 12:52:21 GMT -5
Had a bad thought...I wonder what we would do.
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Post by Pitch on Apr 18, 2011 13:08:36 GMT -5
If Proboards closed all together, we would pretty much be screwed, from what I understand. The idea of moving from Proboards to a better style forum has come up a few times in the past few years. (Seriously, Proboards is so behind the times, it's not even funny any more.) But as I recall there was no way to transfer everything over. So yeah. Unless Proboards were to roll out some export function, we would be screwed if they shut down forever. That's really unlikely, though.
If you're just talking about server issues or crashes or something... those seem to happen on an almost weekly basis. So we'd be fine. <_< And Proboards backs up the forums pretty regularly too. So that's nothing to worry about.
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Post by Mikéy on Apr 18, 2011 13:47:29 GMT -5
I find this to be highly amusing, because I was wondering what we'd do if Flickr, Photobucket, Imageshack, and all of their photo-hosting relatives shut down. Imagine all of the broken and unfixable links around here, that'd be terrible.  But yeah. I don't really have much of a concern for Proboards. I doubt they'll ever shut down. |
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Post by Dashe on Apr 18, 2011 14:51:31 GMT -5
If anything were to permanently happen to Proboards, I'd certainly hope they'd give us enough of a warning in advance to archive everything important. Chiz said there'd be some way to transfer accounts, but I'm not so sure about the posts.
As far as truly scary thoughts go, I'd be more concerned about losing the Internet than Proboards. That'd screw a LOT of things up, and not just MMLS.
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Post by Raijin on Apr 19, 2011 0:03:23 GMT -5
Even if all the posts in this forum were suddenly wiped out with no chance of recovery and transfer, that's not the end of the world. The Legends Station Forum would live on in the form of some other free message board software like Invision and slowly build its way back up. Losing all the work that went into a forum can be a heavy blow, but it's not like we would have no way to communicate any more. Like Dashe said, it would be tougher thinking about what we would do without the Internet as a whole.
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Post by Chiz on Apr 19, 2011 21:49:14 GMT -5
Chiz said there'd be some way to transfer accounts, but I'm not so sure about the posts. The only method I took really seriously, minus pleading for Proboards to send us their custom-format database and letting us worry about reverse-engineering it, would be to get a webspider and manually going through every single page on the entire forums and saving them, to be processed into something importable into another forum at some point in the future. Archiving everything is the easy part - there's many tools that let you 'backup' full sites and that automate that. The key is automating converting the whole package into something useable elsewhere. Otherwise we're left with a very large, static copy of a forum that will both need to be stored somewhere and made accessible...not to mention the broken links throughout. I largely figured out how I'd transfer accounts simply because they're easy to access and their construction has a set pattern (computers like patterns). It's all a moot point, though; I've yet to see any indication that fAB would be willing to host a forum himself, and most of the other 'free' forum hosts (like Invision Free) suffer from many of the same problems concerning usability and control of the data. I think I talked to him about it before at some point or other, and vaguely remember something about how it would be too much hassle and that Proboards fills our needs fine, but it was a long time ago if that was said at all...
As for "the whole internet" being wiped out...there's always dial-up and pre-internet technologies like BBSes and Usenet. As long as telephone landlines exist, there's a way of contacting other computers. The key is, of course, setting up a server to start listening on certain phone numbers before such a thing occurs. Any volunteers?
EDIT: Just looked at some things...at least semi-automating post migration is doable. It's still a very large task for a forum this size, naturally, but it's doable. I figure I'd need about 2 weeks notice to save everything and another month to convert everything. Incidentally, to minimize the interface shock, I'd recommend moving to YABB, because that's what Proboards is forked from a long, long time ago, and still bears a lot of resemblance; it would be "trivial" to take it the final few steps and make it look just like MMLSF does now. |
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Qwertman
Habarool
Work work work...
Posts: 736
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Post by Qwertman on Apr 21, 2011 20:32:21 GMT -5
Hey, if this happened I'd offer server space and whatever help I can offer right away! I do freelance web design so I've got a good enough server plus I know some ins and outs of MySQL and forum software. It's clear that this won't ever be an issue, but it's fun to speculate, and to be honest something that I've never thought of before! I really miss running a forum. Back in middle school I ran an SMF forum on a cheap host and all of my friends went on regularly. We had contests and talked about technology and had fights. It was kind of like Facebook, but more personal, more fun. Then Facebook came around and we just sort of gave up. Perhaps I'll create one for my graduating class at the end of this school year. If the WHOLE INTERNET went down, I bet it would only be a matter of days before the hackers and modders of the world created a new one, utilizing phone lines, wireless protocols, whatever! |
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Post by Pitch on Apr 21, 2011 20:49:53 GMT -5
Back in middle school I ran an SMF forum on a cheap host and all of my friends went on regularly. We had contests and talked about technology and had fights. It was kind of like Facebook, but more personal, more fun. Then Facebook came around and we just sort of gave up. Perhaps I'll create one for my graduating class at the end of this school year. Hah. My friend did something like this too. It was so cool. Just a small, really close-knit group talking about everything and nothing. That was where I spent most of my time before I settled in here. It was a lot like social networking before there were social networks, indeed. Phun times. I can't decide if it's more likely that Proboards would go down or that the whole internet would go down. :06: |
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