@Riven - Have you basically given up with this site? You sound pretty negative about the decline of the site and in forums in general.
The idea of an archive and start again approach sounds like a good one, very little work required but you can fix the a lot of the negatives about this site. You were once up for taking over java4k so you must still have an interest in java gaming.
I definitely want to try it out @Riven, that would be something I’m really willing to do. However I can’t say an expected date or so, this is experimentation and I’m going to start in a month after my exams. Will you please PM me with a link to the database dump you said earlier?
The idea of the freezing up of the current forum as an archive is pretty simple that it is the first one that came to my mind, and especially as I’ve witnessed it on the GameDev.net community, it went completely smooth and I like it. However from some previous messages, I understand @Riven is not interested in this, he wants a completely migrated community and also be happy with the links.
In this way, my guess is that we have to first start tinkering with a modern PHP system (I’m looking at Flarum) and then spend some time analyzing how it stores the posts in the database. I had worked with PHP and MySQL in the past (but not a forum software though, nor I had written any mods for SMF) and I think a bit of looking into should get us something. My guess is that this approach works, but in the longer end.
[] Start with analyzing the database table structures.
[] Write scripts to automate the process.
[*] At each iteration, test and improvise the script.
If you permit, I’d like to take the dump you’re going to provide, and create a repo on GitHub and commit this dump into it. Our tool should be able to take a basic site of Flarum and modify the database after reading all the posts and the users. What do you think?
And we could always take the help of experienced and willing to contribute members like @philfrei.
By the way, I opened a support ticket in the Flarum forums: https://discuss.flarum.org/d/7290-migration-for-a-very-large-smf-forum
The JGO database dump will be publicly available - it is the community’s data after all. Besides the IP-addresses, emailaddresses and private messages, everything in the dump could (in theory) be retrieved with a scraper.
Where? I’m hosting the backups that you are providing everyday with cron jobs at https://jgorecovery.goharsha.com but aren’t they encrypted?
Emphasis on will be. 
[quote]… I’ll prepare a database dump ‘soon’ (this week) …
[/quote]
I think that given the actual conditions, this remains the best choice we have. I wanted to upgrade the forum also for the jogl community, but all my attempts got stranded…
I really wouldn’t like jgo to slowly die… so freeze smf, make it read only and start from scratch with Discourse…
I remember that you could turn it up in few minutes and few commands, I once tried with Digital Ocean and Discourse and I was a total newbie
Today it looks even easier, since they made Discourse available as an Application
I’m convinced that the forum appearence plays an important role in attracting new people and talents
I must keep my AWESOME medals/posts ratio so no more messages if my post isn’t life changing >:( >:( >:(
other than that, got big life changes and I didn’t have time and motivation to do things, but now I’m back 8) (said the guy that nobody knows :persecutioncomplex: )
Is it possible to get the key for the dump so I can take a look at the data, I would not mind having a go and creating an archive viewer.
I assume this is a relational database, might be a nice project to migrate it to some thing like MongoDB (or any no sql/ document store) and create a simple front end for it.
Seriously, forget the data. It’s there, it can be left where it is, it’s not going anywhere. The problem is that there’s not much new stuff coming in, not the availability of the old stuff.
What’s the Bestest Forum Software out there?
Cas
Had a quick look, these seems to be popular or new
Forums
I am in a few other communities that use other tools like Slack rather than the traditional forum
Chat / Communities
Maybe a mix of the two could work, a place to chat / share etc with a tool like chat and a forum for the questions, articles etc. Maybe there could a few sections to the website:
Articles
Forum
Chat / Communitaction
I mean people come here to read info on coding, they come to ask questions and also post in the “what I did today” is more of a chat room where you can share things.
Just some thoughts.
** Edit
To help bring people to the site maybe a list of games made by people on here at https://itch.io could be tagged with JGO etc.
[quote]forget the data. It’s there, it can be left where it is
[/quote]
A forum without any existing topics is a big turnoff for new users though, it makes them assume that the board is still-born/dead.
(I would never register somewhere, where there are only a handful of topics floating around, which is what this board is going to look like after a big reset without copying old topics. Also there aren’t huge amounts of users left, which makes getting new posts to fill the board even harder)
It needs to look alive from the get go, having old or lets say existing content integrated where it makes sense helps with that.
I’m not arguing against what you’re trying to say though, just focusing on copying the old board over to a new software is definitely not gonna make the community live up again, there needs to be something to attract new gamedevs.
Maybe some kind of Rating/Review System coupled with game of the month/year/whatever awards to motivate ppl to make and show off their projects?
http://www.runthinkshootlive.com/ has this and it’s pretty good, it creates a motivation for mappers/devs to create and upload their mods there, it’s success is also because of his YT-channel though, so i don’t know if it’s worth it.
Just making a newer and better JGO could lead to something akin to the ZM2 release… The previous version 1.21 still had some full servers (~20 to 60 users) every night and the release of Version 2.0 split the community and killed the game after a few days/weeks, even though it was technically better. There wasn’t a big enough influx of new users (not enough advertising) at the launch of Version 2.0 and poof dead, zero players. At least that’s how i remember it.
Old users going to java-gaming.org will simply find themselves automatically migrated to forum 2.0 and it’ll be no less dead than it ever was. We can have links back to the read-only version of the old forum as stickies or customised pages if necessary.
It won’t be any more or less dead than it is now. The difference is we’ll be able to read it on mobile devices and newcomers might not be quite so thoroughly discouraged from turning up if the registration process is relaxed and improved somewhat.
I dunno what Slack brings to the table, AFAIK it’s just electrons in the wind isn’t it? Ephemeral warbling lost forever with little by way of useful organisation.
Cas
Discourse, I just say it comes from the same guys beyond stackOverflow
Yes, I’m a member of a number of communities that use Slack, and it’s tolerably annoying at best. Organisation is a bit better than it once was, but the key annoyance is that the free version isn’t that useful, and the paid version is really expensive. A moderately large community soon loses access to conversations, in the space of a few months. One of the best things about JGO is the publicly searchable archive of stuff that’s still really useful years later!
What ever the future would like to see the site live on, always look forward to reading through all the new posts. Not so bothered about viewing the site on my mobile but I guess its 2017 after all.
I could put together a Discourse instance this week if people are interested in the “fresh start” approach.
Another great thing about Discourse is that it supports user moderation, so the people in this thread who want to be more involved could be.
But I also pretty much agree with a lot of what Riven said: this stuff takes more than just promising time. It takes knowing what to do, coming up with a plan, and then executing that plan. Saying “I have time if you just tell me what to do” isn’t very helpful, because the hard part is figuring out what to do in the first place.
I forget to mention that most of my professional programming life has been spent with databases. OK, its mostly MS Access but with a lot of VBA behind the scenes and some web-apps interfacing through Microsoft-world servers and such, but also SQLServer and installation and dabbling with MySQL. I am comfortable working with relational database structures. I have migrated data on multiple occasions.
When I ask to for direction, it doesn’t mean “tell me what to do”. It was meant more as “point me in the direction of a problem or issue or task to be solved.” I’m capable of researching and getting up to speed on issues. I just want to make sure I’m interfacing with something useful.
I’m looking forward to perusing the data dump.
I’m looking forward to checking out the various proposed forum targets.
I vote “nay” on Slack.
It’s also worth noting that Discource provides a script for migrating from a SMF forum: https://meta.discourse.org/t/migrating-to-discourse-from-another-forum-software/16616
That migration script might be the best thing we have to move to a saner forum. I can definitely vouch for Discourse, it’s fantastic forum software.
Riven - what’s the best way to go about doing this? You of course have access to the back end of jgo, how would one go about hosting a discourse instance? Someone would need permission to do this or would you prefer to trial run it on another host that one of us own ?