!! We're Building a New Forum at writingforum.org (no S) !!

100 GB is the Goldilocks package, I believe. There are upgradeable trim options as needed. As to what we upload in terms of image or media... TBD.

Regarding donations and paid supporter levels, definitely not to start, unlikely in the near future, but potentially viable down the road. You get into a different level when you take money from people, both legally and ethically. We're not going to mess with any of that yet. I will be operating the new forum as I would any other business. There is an operating budget, a legal LLC, a balance of credits and expenses, a marketing plan, a definable product, guest expectations, goals and deadlines, and a management team to execute all of the above. It's not as fancy as all of that, but it's the right way to think about it. I'm very transparent with things like that. When I know more, all of you will know more.

All of these are very good questions. But the priority is spreading the word, constructing the new site into its base functionality, and getting everybody off the boat before it meets the iceberg. Keep the questions coming for sure, but most are probably going to be met with some variation of, "Great idea! Let's discuss it when we're safely aboard the lifeboats.

 

Probably not. Like I said, the data doesn't belong to us. And we need to make a clean break from Daniel and whatever semi-legal entity currently owns the data. I appreciate the idea, though.

 

The gold standard would be a migration, but it might not be possible.
The next best thing will be rebuilding the community in a more sustainable way. It might be a bit of a pain to start with, but definitely worth it long term.
The big fear is that this place could disappear without a trace, and that would be tragic. Homer and Moose are peddling like mad to try and prevent that.

 

I'm not sure what you mean. Like, if you picked a new name and somebody decided to use you "old" ps102? I don't see how/why that would happen. If it did, I'm not sure how to answer. I suppose in your case where we know it was you but no longer is you we might be able to do something. But in general, there will be nothing to cross-refence vis a vis names between the two forums. It would be impossible to filter every name through a data set that no longer exists.

Probably not. We have almost 20 years worth of medals and it would be impossible to recreate them without spending weeks manually combing through everything. We don't have weeks.

The stories will not be migrated, though there is nothing preventing the legal OPs from doing what they wish with their intellectual property. But the new forum will not have the right--legally or ethically--to take what does not belong to them.

Again, things are still very much a work in progress. We haven't even begun to discuss policy yet. All of you have great questions that I haven't thought about yet. We will get answers soon.

Generally speaking, though, the historical data belongs to the people who created it and the legal owner of the database in accordance with whatever terms and conditions we all agreed to when we joined .org. There's nothing we can about that short of stealing it, and that ain't happening.

It's the only option. .Org is almost certainly not going to be here on May 28th, around 5pm my time, EST. I hope I'm wrong, but not taking the chance.

 

sadly not no - we don't have the right access to migrate the database,I will take a screenshot of the backlog list so we could id we wanted make medals for the backlog... however that would be a big task so we might be better taking a reset and starting fresh

a lot depends on how the medal engine functions in the promised land... as it stands only admin can make medals which is deeply stupid, if it was something that could be delegated then it might be more likely that we could award the back log, but even then its a massive task

 

the trouble with that is the ethics and legalities.. there's scrapers available that can download whole forums now... but we only have consent of the membership to display them here. If we scrape the content and display it on the new site people who haven't come over for whatever reason (like for example they got banned) could theoretically sue for IP violation and or make a complaint to the IPO...either of those things could get us kicked off the host which would not be good.

If we acquired the database legally from daniel that wouldn't be an issue.

I don't know if its possible but what would be useful would be a scraper that can be targeted on a given thread with the consent of all those in the thread as with someones progress journal or role play.

In terms of file type, i think we'd need a Mysql file to upload it to a new xen foro forum

 

Is what we're using currently an add on, Moose? I saw a lot about the trophies like .com uses in the Xenforo tutorials, but don't think I specifically saw custom medals. I'll take another look.

But from what I'm seeing, the permissions are crazy customizable. You could theoretically give admin privileges to a spambot in the unregistered/unconfirmed user group.

 

no its a core part of the site - there are medal add ons that could be used instead. I think although its hard to be sure, that permission toi create medals could be allocated to the staff user group, but only from the super admin screen which i can't access (here)...so we have the situation where staff can award them but not create them which is a nonsense (On the XF1 admin screen it is at the foot of the applications page... i don't know if thats the same in xf2.3)

trophies are something different in XF - they're things you get for meeting certain thresholds like 500 likes, or posting in a certain forum x times

 

I think we're going to wind up leaving it - there's some considerable issues legally speaking, the more we discuss it the more it doesn't seem wise

there's also issues about getting things uploaded again, because we are looking at an XF cloud hosted set up not a third party host, we'd have to demonstrate to the XF security peeps that it was legit which is problematic with a scraped file

 

Realistically theres not a lot we can do with this - for mods and admin theres fail safes like inviting them to join or knowing the email they're coming in from... but we can't do that with every member, it wouldn't be practical

 

Its probably worth noting that the user name change thing is a staff created rule not a restriction of XF. Even here i can change anyones username at any time, the reason we have a rule prohibiting it is we had issues with a bunch of people who'd act like complete discheads then want a fresh start and want their name changed (in some cases again and again),

 

strictly you do because everyone is a new member first, but admin can put people in to user groups manually by ticking a box... all this small stuff will get dealt with once we have everyone aboard the lifeboats

 

Its unavoidable - although we do have a list of banned members, however if someone is banned but no longer problematic if they rejoin there's no issue, if they're still problematic they'll just get banned again so its still no biggy