As everyone can see, the forums aren't really used anymore. In addition, there are technical reasons I'm considering just shutting them down.
They rely on an old PHP version that has been out of date for years, and is likely full of security bugs. There isn't a nice upgrade path to any decent forum system that I can find. There are new versions of vbulletin but I'm not keen on spending hours and hours setting them up, doing the imports, tweaking all the colors, etc., just for some software that nobody uses.
Really the only hesitancy I have is that some of the threads are really valuable to me just from a nostalgia standpoint, and of course the editing forums have a ton of useful info for the 1 or 2 people that still edit JK.
I've looked and I can't find an easy way to output "static" pages that we can just save and serve. I could probably write something to export all the forums/threads but that's another software project that I'm not keen on undertaking.
I'm kinda curious if anyone still here has any programming chops (in any language that can talk to mysql) and would be interested in taking on an "export to static HTML" project. I could strip the database of anything personal (basically just leave join date, username, post count for all users), dump that user info + forums, threads, posts to an .sql file you could import, and then you could write whatever software it takes to export to plain HTML.
Alternatively, vbulletin has a "cloud" plan that says it can import vbulletin 4 and it costs $15 or $30 per month. We could try that but I'm getting to the limit of what I'm willing to spend on this site so it'd be nice to have a bit of help if possible. (It's actually more a time issue than a money issue -- if any long-time member wants to manage the vbulletin cloud -- like the whole thing: tweak the colors/styles, moderation, spam filters, whatever else -- reach out, I may consider just paying the monthly fee and letting you deal with it.)
If the forums are important to you, maybe use an archive bot or something to pull a copy because I don't know how long they will be up. I'm looking to shut down this old massassi server towards the end of January 2022.
They rely on an old PHP version that has been out of date for years, and is likely full of security bugs. There isn't a nice upgrade path to any decent forum system that I can find. There are new versions of vbulletin but I'm not keen on spending hours and hours setting them up, doing the imports, tweaking all the colors, etc., just for some software that nobody uses.
Really the only hesitancy I have is that some of the threads are really valuable to me just from a nostalgia standpoint, and of course the editing forums have a ton of useful info for the 1 or 2 people that still edit JK.
I've looked and I can't find an easy way to output "static" pages that we can just save and serve. I could probably write something to export all the forums/threads but that's another software project that I'm not keen on undertaking.
I'm kinda curious if anyone still here has any programming chops (in any language that can talk to mysql) and would be interested in taking on an "export to static HTML" project. I could strip the database of anything personal (basically just leave join date, username, post count for all users), dump that user info + forums, threads, posts to an .sql file you could import, and then you could write whatever software it takes to export to plain HTML.
Alternatively, vbulletin has a "cloud" plan that says it can import vbulletin 4 and it costs $15 or $30 per month. We could try that but I'm getting to the limit of what I'm willing to spend on this site so it'd be nice to have a bit of help if possible. (It's actually more a time issue than a money issue -- if any long-time member wants to manage the vbulletin cloud -- like the whole thing: tweak the colors/styles, moderation, spam filters, whatever else -- reach out, I may consider just paying the monthly fee and letting you deal with it.)
If the forums are important to you, maybe use an archive bot or something to pull a copy because I don't know how long they will be up. I'm looking to shut down this old massassi server towards the end of January 2022.