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UPDATE ON TIMELINE: The Future of the Penny Arcade Forums
Sterica
YesRegistered User, Moderator mod
YesRegistered User, Moderator mod
Hey Everyone,
As promised, here's an update on the future of the forums based on the new info we received this week.
Penny Arcade has informed us that they can no longer commit the time and resources to running of forums. They've decided to fully separate from the forums, but they don’t want to shut down the community abruptly. Instead, they want to "pass the forums on to the community," meaning the volunteer staff will be responsible for running things moving forward.
PA's contract with Vanilla runs through the end of 2025, May 21st, 2025, so the existing forums will stay operational until then. To maintain continuity, we’ll need to establish an independent platform before the contract ends. Whether that involves a migration, or just a removal of PA branding and staying on the Vanilla platform is yet to be determined. We will most likely begin removing PA branding earlier, while still within the active contract. This shouldn’t impact the day-to-day user experience, though it will bring a noticeable visual change.
There are still many questions about the future setup, potential migration or archiving, technical issues, and what a successor community might look like. We don’t have concrete answers yet, but we want everyone to start thinking about what they want for the future.
This update gives us a starting point to discuss and plan.
Bahamut edit: Turns out the shutdown date is May 21st, not December.
Hahnsoo1 Edit: We are now moving discussion of this announcement and future discussion of the Future of the PA Forums to its own Subforum, which you can find here:
https://forums.penny-arcade.com/categories/future-state-planning-center
As promised, here's an update on the future of the forums based on the new info we received this week.
Penny Arcade has informed us that they can no longer commit the time and resources to running of forums. They've decided to fully separate from the forums, but they don’t want to shut down the community abruptly. Instead, they want to "pass the forums on to the community," meaning the volunteer staff will be responsible for running things moving forward.
PA's contract with Vanilla runs through the end of 2025, May 21st, 2025, so the existing forums will stay operational until then. To maintain continuity, we’ll need to establish an independent platform before the contract ends. Whether that involves a migration, or just a removal of PA branding and staying on the Vanilla platform is yet to be determined. We will most likely begin removing PA branding earlier, while still within the active contract. This shouldn’t impact the day-to-day user experience, though it will bring a noticeable visual change.
There are still many questions about the future setup, potential migration or archiving, technical issues, and what a successor community might look like. We don’t have concrete answers yet, but we want everyone to start thinking about what they want for the future.
This update gives us a starting point to discuss and plan.
Bahamut edit: Turns out the shutdown date is May 21st, not December.
Hahnsoo1 Edit: We are now moving discussion of this announcement and future discussion of the Future of the PA Forums to its own Subforum, which you can find here:
https://forums.penny-arcade.com/categories/future-state-planning-center
Hahnsoo1 on
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This discussion has been closed.
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There are a lot of us here who could easily keep this thing going. I’m glad we have the time needed to figure it out.
Do we have visibility into how much the current contract with Vanilla is worth, or what it would cost to maintain it?
I can’t see any reason not to look into migrating to something new. Especially if there’s going to be any reasonable way to export from our current database.
We are looking into this as an option. It would be the easiest path forward as a technical process but there is a matter of the cost that we need to learn more about. And once we have the information on cost we can discuss how to manage that cost going forward.
catchy and rolls off the tongue
A lot of this is what I do for a living.
The monthly bills for this place at the level of traffic we see should be low four figures a month more often than not, in a self hosted solution with volunteer labor.
There are enough of us active that between volunteer effort and community contributions we can putter along for years to come.
If vanilla reduces volunteer labor, and remains under 1500 a month, its worth considering.
If the staff are (understandably) reluctant to foot the cost out of pocket, I imagine between the users here, some form of community support could be thrown together.
Side note, calling my shot now:
The last post made under the current Vanilla contract / PA association is going to be us all finally discovering who Bizarro Stormy is.
My PA Club membership was entirely due to the forums, so I would consider supporting an independent effort if we move elsewhere. There is almost certainly going to be a larger discussion (and frankly, some splintering), but at least we'll have some time to figure it all out.
So we're finally starting a forums Only Feet account to keep the lights on?
We currently have some get-under-the-hood capabilities, a mix of "getting directly under the hood" and "contact with Vanilla people."
Under the hood is still a terrifying nightmare of intermingled custom bits and kludges that have accrued up over many many years so there'll still be issues there probably for as long as the current hosting situation continues. Buuut we're in a better position to put out fires than we were, say, when quotes or OPs vanished a little while back. (A lot of that period was things breaking while the communications channels weren't in place.)
Of course, should we get our own hosting/etc set up, the resultant forum will, in fact, Be Ours as far as that kind of thing goes.
I admit I'm at least kind of a fan of the sheer staggering hubris of simply calling the successor The Forums.
AFAIK, Vanilla does not offer a self-hosted option anymore. It is Vanilla Cloud or nothing.
Their Open Source repo sat dormant from Nov 2022 to Jan 2024, then started getting monthly lobs over the wall at the beginning of this year, then those abruptly stopped in July. https://github.com/vanilla/vanilla/commits/master/
Kidding. It's nice to have clarity. What the heck is the new name gonna be? Dime Colonnade has a nice off brand ring to it!
https://discord.gg/6cbYjwQV
I don't want to start thinking about a new name, because you just know that any kind of naming/branding discussion is going to bring out the various cliques in the forum to hash things out, and that might get bloody.
He has been pretty consistent on that point.
NEOPAF, nobody has heard of that, right?
I can get ya "theforums.live" and "theforumslive.com". "theforums.com" is a no-go.
Also, it's impressive that the boards have as much archived as they do, given how much it's exchanged hands, electronically speaking.
So, the Council of Mods will be the deal moving forward. I know that's vague and some of you want more in terms of what that entails, but remember that we've been in the lurch for months as well so we weren't really planning to do this! We did want to announce this early to allow you all input on the future of the boards, so your input there would also be appreciated.
I can get ya "new-twitter.co" or "now-twitter.com" but I wouldn't put money on either surviving a C&D
Pfft, .gov or nothing!
But seriously this is not surprising but it is disappointing. A transition to something else is a frightening prospect for keeping the community going, but I hope it can happen. I haven't posted as much recently but I've been here a long time and still enjoy browsing.
One concern is that forums are largely a medium not used much anymore and the PA comic was one way to actually get new people to wander in, though I dunno how important that actually is? Definitely a concern with stuff moving to discord because how do you find those?
Anyway I am rooting for this to work.