Having problems registering on Coin Return? Please email support@coin-return.org, and include your PA username and PIN.
For those who don't know, forums.penny-arcade.com will be closing soon. However, we're doing the same kind of stuff over at coin-return.org with (almost) all the same faces! Please do feel welcome to join us.
For those who don't know, forums.penny-arcade.com will be closing soon. However, we're doing the same kind of stuff over at coin-return.org with (almost) all the same faces! Please do feel welcome to join us.
For those who don't know, forums.penny-arcade.com will be closing soon. However, we're doing the same kind of stuff over at coin-return.org with (almost) all the same faces! Please do feel welcome to join us.
For those who don't know, forums.penny-arcade.com will be closing soon. However, we're doing the same kind of stuff over at coin-return.org with (almost) all the same faces! Please do feel welcome to join us.
Posts
On the other hand, you have situations where in the future, someone could make a Jon Bois like video essay about some of our threads. And people may wish to not be associated with something like that.
I've always operated under the impression that everything I say and post will be preserved in some form for all time. Not out of maliciousness, but because most people are HORRIBLE at data hygene, retention, and properly handling logs. If I had the chance to nuke my past... I dunno if I would. But I respect people who wish that option.
My hat's in the ring of "IF we can preserve the posts, we do so..." But in terms of opting in and out, it's important to remember that the quote function literally uses BBcode with a user's name embedded in it. Naturally the various links to specific posts will break without a DB rewrite, but that plaintext user name info will still be present.. and going through that is a fool's errand, even with very well crafted regex.
I like the idea of a curated "history" or archive. No need to show everything, but instead show our best, and how our community came to be what it is.
If it means we lose some of those rare old gems that people look back on fondly, I say so be it. Those vanishingly rare specimens of Good Posting are a cheap price to pay for getting rid of so much trash and filth whose existence has been a greasy mark on the legacy of this place. This is not a place of honor, what was done here was repulsive to us, etc. etc.
@Zibblsnrt, if you can believe it, nobody leapt at the chance to do it.
I think it's fine to lose all prior data and I even look a little skeptically at the idea of re-hosting a ton of old stuff that's been posted by banned users or just people who are not around to comment anymore.
$1 donation for every thread of yours you want to keep.
Literally tens of thousands of posts, millions of words… memories, stories, etc.
Preservation does not mean it has to go into a new forum… but it is the other side of the coin for the people saying it’s my data and I want it nuked from orbit.
It’s my data, and I want to preserve it.
Offline archives, or in the new forum I am somewhat ambivalent about… but the new place will feel rather empty if our drawing of horses and spooky story threads and whatnot aren’t there.
I think the issue is this version of Vanilla has a ton of cruft and tech debt in it AND it's more costly than the other options. If we even could get the deal PA got.
Yup. The juice isn't worth the squeeze. Vanilla's "extras" and supposed broken extensions are base level features in most modern forums.
Yes, even nested subforums. (xenforo has an option to display them or not on the main page IIRC)
The mods will likely have to do without Geth though.
I never knew this, but it makes a lot of stuff a LOT more funny
That being said, I think that either the forum itself, or someone in general, should archive at least some of the Phallas and other PbP games played in the critical failures forum. Not all of them are necessarily important, but they were really interesting labs for game design, and there was some good creative writing in there.
I would be sad if those were gone.
Everyone is going to value something different from what we all created together.
Value different times of their life where this is where they spoke with friends and chosen family about what they went through.
And the unspoken part of this is that it’s already all archived. Nobody is getting the reset button they think they are getting. It’s already been scraped to hell and back, and is viewable on the way back machine.
Someone might do a whole new high effort OP in the new forum 'Politics and News' forum about MENA that attracts everyone who wants to discuss it seriously.
Or the 'Life Stuff' thread someone posts they managed to break 30m in their 5k, and that becomes a new exercise thread, that ends up splitting into multiple 'Life Stuff' threads based on who is how intense in their workouts.
But I guess what cultural divides we want to preserve are still tabled for now. I don't think carrying existing threads over as-is vs. people wanting to carry over the current discussion is worth too much effort but that's just my opinion.
Would take maybe 2ish weeks as to not hammer vanilla into anger to have a nosql in a portable format to be ingested by whatever database we choose to go with.
And because associations are on the user level across everything and there are no forum functions to worry about, simply removing participants who ask to be removed is stupidly easy.
Technical issues are not the issue. What we want to do is.
Focus should be on legal and technical issues in migrating accounts as seemlessly as possible so as to not whittle off members through transitional hurdles and some redirect period where the old URL, if feasible, points to the new community home. Assuming we don’t attrition most of our community off in the transition, we’d be back to status quo within a short period regarding active threads.
EDIT: while thinking about it, what is the presence of the forum in something like IA’s Wayback machine?
There's snapshots going back to the vbulletin days.
That's just because if the forum needs to handle money (and it does) it needs some business to hang under. And that used to be PA, but obviously, it can't be anymore.
If we don't want that anymore, then we're stuck with 'Let's create a free sub-reddit and talk there' and I think we're more than that.
Offline forums are fine but I'm 100% in agreement with people who don't want things migrated to a new, publicly facing space.
The forum has traditionally not offered the ability to delete accounts or overwrite posts in deleted threads and people have collectively shrugged about it but now that there's an opportunity for a clean slate, I think it should be offered to people.
Yes things are archived in the wayback machine but that's also significantly harder to navigate and doxx someone via versus doing a specific google search and trawling through old posts.
I've said it before but people would collectively shit themselves if a social media platform didn't offer the option to delete old content and I'm sure every single person here has removed content from other platforms, I'm not sure why the forums should be different.
100% agree on giving people opt-out capabilities and I wouldn't support any system that can't adhere to that from the jump.
Any idea how large the entire forum database is? The text is pretty small obviously but i really don't know how many pics and other larger file formats are actually hosted here versus just embedded. I was thinking, if possible, having an archive of the forums stored somewhere that was accessible to those who wanted it would be nice, if it is small enough. I am not technical enough to know if there is a way to compress the data and still have it be searchable so people could search for and download specific threads they wanted to keep. If so we could include the cost of hosting it in the cost of running the other forum, at least for a bit, and people would have longer to pull down anything they wanted before/if we decided to delete it.
Personally i think that this place is actually, legitimately important in the history of the Internet. Despite the old adage, things posted online do not in fact last forever. A ton of the early Internet is being deleted or otherwise made inaccessible and i think the early days of this place, and others like it, have genuine actual historical value. If people do not want to bring their posts to the new forum i understand. Some of the things from the early days are pretty fucking terrible and some people have changed and no longer agree with what they wrote at that time. But i hate to see all of that disappear.
PSN:Furlion
Maybe create a space on the new place that links to the archive, but I think it should be clearly delineated and ideally not very discoverable.
I would still land on the side of importing nothing from this place's current post database, but if the decision everyone comes to collectively is to preserve stuff, this is the absolute most I would be okay with, personally. I really dislike the idea of throwing all our old threads into place and just sort of... posting on top of them as if they'd always been there.
One option would be keep but anonymize, but I think that in general I feel it’s better to bring stuff over if it’s affirmatively wanted instead of excluding stuff that’s affirmatively not-wanted.
Of course, I’m on team “delete almost everything” so I’m obviously biased toward that end of the opt-in / opt-out decision, and I’ll abide by whatever’s agreed upon.
I think it’s perfectly fine to archive everything no matter what, though I think if we do, it’s better to anonymize first.
I also think that if we choose to host that archive in any form, then the choice between opt-in or opt-out is one of the more fundamentally important decisions in that process.
I do understand that would turn a lot of what’s archived into a weird half-legible ruin, and that does genuinely make me sad. However, I think something is better than nothing, especially if that something is salvaged from a situation as ethically complicated as this one.
Beyond sentimentality, I don't see a single reason to start this project with ensuring we have gigs upon gigs of data to host from the get go.
Not to mention that porting that post data could limit choices as far as what platform the new forums use, increase the complexity of going from vanilla to whatever, as well as potentially require support from vanilla to get a proper exporter going.
I'm not an expert on this, but I really think making this transition as simple as possible for those volunteering to do the real work is important.
There was some discussion in one of the other threads about making at least some portion of the forum behind a login wall. Certainly we should do that for anything like art or creative writing. The only reason not to have the whole thing behind a login wall is the ability to hypothetically attract new users, which I think is legitimate (ignoring for a second the fact that we don't know if that's even slightly feasible). But there actually is a solution to stop bad-faith scrapers from getting the content people want protected the most, or at least require they construct a login, a thing which I don't think they generally bother with? At least for minor sites? Could be wrong, of course.
Edit: Though I guess the hosting is a concern. Would an archive stripped of file attachments (mainly images) be worth it? Probably a lot of links to old image hosting sites that are broken anyway.
If we switch to something like xenforo or other modern platform, we could just import the old posts and put them in an "Archived" category if we really want a clean break, but also wanted to keep a bit of the past.
I don't think keeping a vanilla forum around is that attractive as an option.
Technically, you could also just keep a data dump around in a zip, but that in practice means no-one will ever look at it again.
The likes will sustain me in my old age, when friends have passed on, and I sit alone in front of a window, raindrops slowly cascading down. I'll look back and smile and think "Yeah, that post in 2012 sure did bring about 2 whole rows of awesomes"
My most agreed post has got to be that one in the thread about some absolutely awful practice that goes on in jails and if we should condone it as a good thing. Still brings a smile to my face that I was able to zing that one off so quickly.
I mean, I do. If I get to a game/film/show late and enjoy it, then it's not uncommon for me to go back and read the reactions to it from it's release. I've also revisited stuff like the reactions to the How I Met Your Mother finale a few times.
Plus as I said on last page, I do have some longer blog-style posts I've made over the years that I revisit sometimes, but if I'm able to download my own posts that'll solve that one.
i believe the most awesome'd post i ever had was when i said something insightful like "moar like Repooplicans"
truly a document to be preserved for the ages
It is easily scraped and indexed, any modern platform can ingest it, if we do text only the amount of content is not of concern from a storage perspective, and it is, at most 5 or so content types we need to handle.
It is less fraught by far than trying to extract, for example, the full email address list of every person who ever registered here, which would be constituted as a data breach if tenancy was lost on it.
Keeping the images that people uploaded directly to PA might be a valid concern from a storage perspective, but until that gets properly assessed even that isn't guaranteed to be a bad thing.
Multiple people who have experience doing data migrations / ETL have already done some scraping over the years. I was able to, in a couple of hours, set up a pipeline that ingested half a year of posts from a busy subforum over a couple of hours. It isn't the impossible or complicated task people are making it out to be from a technical perspective.
So if we are going to have the discussion, lets have it from a social / ethical framework as stated in the thread title, and not muddy it with technical issues that really, truly are not present.
For me, sentiment is the reason. But others seem to feel there is technical information and creative works that are of value and worth preserving on that basis.