Surprisingly, the peak of the community was as recent as 2014…
http://www.java-gaming.org/content/stats
I see three main problems for this forum being so quite. The first thing, is that the forum software is old. So old that I remember once reading that Riven said it is not possible to even theme it as it is already running on a lot of mods. One solution is migrating the forum to a new software, like Discourse? If the need for Ruby was the problem, why not Flarum? I know it’s really in the beta, but it looks stunningly good.
Second problem as above all mentioned, there are more people who read than people who contribute and post here. Number one reason again is the forum software, it is preventing newbies from registering or changing email address. Second thing, professors seem not to encourage gaming or game development, some here strongly believe that traditional reading and writing answers is the real way of learning. I even experienced situations with professors trying to steer me away from games in general for my own good, and I feel like WTH?
Regarding with frameworks etc., that is not the cause of steering away. Today’s people want to show something, they want immediate results. That is favoured by large and already matured engines like Unity and people prefer them. They do have a point as they are already mature engines used by tonnes of successful games. As I see in my surroundings, in college, I always see people want to get something up and running, nobody really wanted to explore what it is under the hood.
The third main problem is the language getting old, and Oracle is having focus on features that not everyone would use or such. It’s not a wrong thing, but even being a fan of Java language for its simplicity, I really don’t see the need of having modules other than in case of enterprise developers. In my case, most of that is already being done by Gradle and other build systems. I really want to see C# like features, specially the events, delegates, properties, async functions, etc., I’m looking for the introduction of value classes to Java. Kotlin in that end seems promising.
Apart from all this, everyone will have their own personal reasons for not contributing much, as I had my excuse of career building. I’m now in the final year of college, having lots of assignments, exams, and at the same time I had to work on projects, internship, etc., I really used to have a lot of time 6 months ago that I now lack. Since I’m missing a lot of classes now, I had to self study and it also adds to it. Anyways, I’ll look into getting more time for the community now.
By the way Riven, is it possible to migrate to a new forum software now? I really hate surfing it on mobile. If you need any help I can do regarding this, let me know. I’ll be having more time after a month.
Migrating a forum’s content from one backend to the other is not a trivial amount of work, it takes experience with both old and new backends to properly migrate. As a side-note, you don’t know half of SMF’s crappy UBB implementation, and you really wouldn’t want every other post in the new software to have garbled contents. Another point would be that you wouldn’t want all the current links to webpages to yield 404. There are seriously a million little details concerning data-migration, especially if you’re working with a heavily modified current backend.
I could provide a database-dump of JGO (lacking the PMs and other sensitive data), and you could give it a whirl. If anybody gets it to at least the level of stability and accessibility of the current site, we could talk about a migration. Keep in mind though, that you’re basically doing a lot of work for a forum that is already tumble-weeding.
One thing that would definitely help is if we got an email to notify us if someone replied to a thread we’re watching. As it is, we have to log in and manually check if someone has posted a comment to, say, one of our “WIP” threads, which turns it into a “job” that needs doing regularly. Otherwise the thread goes stale and disappears into history and someone who might have been interested in a comment never sees it.
@SteveSmith I keep up to date on JGO via RSS; I don’t think many others do. It actually is enabled:
http://www.java-gaming.org/index.php?action=.xml;type=rss2;limit=50
Makes it possible to see all new posts and follow responses to threads of interest.
Thanks, that’s slightly better, but it still means having to remember to regularly check the RSS feed, and if I don’t do that for any length of time, any interesting replies will get lost in the chaff.
I believe a large part of the decline has to do with the “voxel craze” is definitely basically dead. People wanted to replicate Minecraft and obviously JGO was a perfect community to come get help with that. Clearly that’s not the craze anymore, I’d say AR/VR is and people are using other technologies to make that happen.
Personally, I check JGO at least every couple of days. This forum really sparked my interest in game development and building software in general, which ultimately led to me starting a career in software development. When I first joined it seemed like there were a lot more young people that were just getting into development like I was (I think I was 15 when I registered here?), so it’s unfortunate that all the people I learned and grew with have moved on and stop using the site so much. But I guess that’s how life goes. I haven’t even touched a line of game code in probably 2 years now, I’m more interested in web technologies and my hobbies outside of tech.
So to me the decline of JGO is more emotional than anything. I spent a large part of my teenage years nerding out and learning how to build games with people. Building game engines with people, IRC drama over m77, finally getting cubes rendered in my first attempt at a voxel engine, you all helping build my confidence so I could go ask my first boss for a full time position as a software dev, etc… It’s kind of strange to be able to say those were the good old days! It would be awesome if it was like it used to be but I totally understand why using Java for game development has been going out of style. I’m not entirely sure what we would need to do to bring more newbies onto the site 
But I do owe a lot of thanks to people on this forum. It’s truly been life changing.
@SHC (or whoever would like to get some project management experience on their resume) – I would be willing to contribute time to the project of migration. But I would need direction. I would need to work as an assistant, and am willing to do boring grunt work, and am no stranger to just biting the bullet sometimes and plowing through a list of items that take hand-coding. (Being a musician, having undertaken countless hours of practicing, it teaches you a certain patience with drudgery.)
The last time I worked on a migration was in the 1980’s, to convert 8080 to Z-80! I jumped in to help out our main programmer who was in the process of burning out while putting FORTH cores on multiple systems. I’m proud to say, the effort was successful, despite my having to learn both 8080 and Z-80 in the process.
We did try migration at one point. One or two years ago. There was an attempt™. But it fell flat partly because Riven wouldn’t play ball IIRC and honestly it probably would’ve been a lost cause anyway given the state of the game currently. To not even mention the weight of sorting out such a complex enterprise to begin with.
I think java-gaming.org should pivot to some degree.
[quote=“jonjava,post:29,topic:59069”]
There was nothing properly suggested, just 2 or 3 forum-posts of devs that were willing and lacked relevant experience - in the mean time, I had (and still have) an extraordinary tiny amount of spare time, even my evenings and weekends are swallowed up. It’s easy to suggest you’re willing to take up the task, it’s very hard to actually finish a project to the state it’s ready for ‘production’. Not just for the small group of inexperienced volunteers, but also for me.
You guys really seem to insist that for the current ~20 active regular members, a large investment of time and effort with unknown outcome is the best thing to do… well, I’m willing to play ball, as I said earlier. I’ll prepare a database dump ‘soon’ (this week) and we’ll see who is willing to make a JGO clone worthy and capable of replacing the current forum. If it’s any good, I’ll seriously discard SMF and roll out whatever is ready to replace it.
I have very low experience with Web framework’s
But from what I know: trying direct DB Copy(dump) from one framework to another is nightmare.
Alternative solution, because its WEB – someone can write simple parser(Scrapier, scrambler) for html version of forum)
And dump all data from Front-End side ^^
- if needed compatibility with current version – for every post, topic
can also be dumped Extra info post / topic id
gosh-it-s-quiet-in-here/38470/msg/367159/view/topicseen.html
I think it’s less painful than trying integrate current DB to new framework
Yep. Count me as one of the “inexperienced” that is willing to volunteer time. But I would make a distinction between lack of a particular technical expertise with the ability to get in there, learn what is needed and accomplish something. I didn’t know scratch about digital audio when I first joined this site.
Having a database dump is a necessary and helpful step. Will it be something that can be done iteratively? In other words, if you do a dump on Jan 1, 2018 and it takes until March 1 to get all the migration steps in place and ready to go, can another dump be done on March 2?
20 active members + what…250? 500? 1000? “guests” checking things out every day?
Goal would be, in part, to flip more of the “guests” into active membership. Seems like Java-gaming.org site could also be a useful meeting/marketing place for game makers, tutors, those providing libraries, others.
What are possible new platforms to consider?
I would simply archive the current forum and freeze it in time.
Then create a completely brand new forum, using some probably better software, from scratch, and stick some links to the old forums in there. Migrate just the users over. Job done.
And then fix all the crap with emails and registrations and so on which are surely an impediment.
Cas 
That has never been done before, for good reason 
[quote=“Riven,post:30,topic:59069”]
As I recall, and I may have some of the details wrong, you weren’t willing to accept any help let alone entertain the possibility. It seemed to me like you were using the idea to some degree as an excuse or opportunity to learning modern web development with aspects of it masquerading as some kind of heroic altruism. Not at all a serious or competent consideration in my estimation.
And to imply that suggestions or expertise was lacking is quite presumptuous given that you weren’t listening and, at least at the time, your own understanding of modern web development was quite self evidently - in my opinion - somewhat bankrupt.
To suggest you’re the only one without a lot free time then, now or otherwise is at the very least misguided.
You mention its quiet and everyone pops their head up to say hello!
I log on every few days to check out what is new, I use the “Recent Posts” rather than checking the dates on the forums view (The first few boxes).
I tend to use the “What I did today” post and share my recent work.
If you were going to change any features / design of the website I would personally simplify it and remove some content and concentrate on what is being used / visited.
Anyways I hope the community lives on, I have enjoyed using the website for sometime. 
Ah, the gloves just came off…
jonjava, I’m wondering where you got that - you may want to reread my earlier replies, because I never even hinted at that.
The rest of your response equally reads like a surreal plot twist, not sure where all the anger is coming from… me using JGO to learn modern web-dev for selfish reasons? You’ve gotta be kidding. If you have criticism, fine, share it, and I might identify with it, and try to improve my ways, I’m far from perfect, and we all know that, but this is just silly.
This is a little excessive, don’t you think?
You did bring it up so it’s not a completely unreasonable interpretation. I mean obviously people are generally quite busy.
A plot twist? Of what? A plot twist implies a trajectory that unexpectedly deviates or something like that - I don’t particularly understand how a plot twist applies.
Well, I’m not being angry.
I’m just trying to be clear and honest. And truth is a sword that hurts but it’s not anger. And I’m not saying that what I’m saying is the truth - it’s just my impression of the situation based on old, most certainly somewhat partial, memories.
Obviously nobody is perfect and everyone makes mistakes, myself included.
Perhaps we have an archived link on the topic? Although I’m not really that interested in sorting through old comments.
But I think your comment of the situation wasn’t exactly accurate.
I’m really not trying to be dishonest. So it’s not excessive apart from perhaps the speculation. But that’s the honest impression I had of the situation whenever it was a year or two ago.
The fact is that it went nowhere and that’s probably a good thing since it’s not like that would’ve obviously improved things anyway, probably just made things worse.