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I've only ever shuttered one forum, and that was at the behest of the community itself. A decade in and it had become a toxic place, everyone agreed that they w

by buro9 3y ago

I've only ever shuttered one forum, and that was at the behest of the community itself. A decade in and it had become a toxic place, everyone agreed that they wanted to give multiple new things a try and that the place in question should be deleted. Not archived, not available forever, but deleted and nothing kept of it. I obliged. When the day comes that I shutter another I'll ask the active members at the time what they want to happen to their data. They may desire to leave it as a resource, they may want to delete it, if there's a clear majority in the decision I'll go with whatever they desire. I value the choice of those whose data it is, who contributed to creating it, over anyone else's hypothetical needs.

cesarb 3y ago
> When the day comes that I shutter another I'll ask the active members at the time what they want to happen to their data. You might not have that chance; unless you have a co-admin with full access to everything, the reason for the forum to shut down might be because you're no longer there.
- KyeRussell 3y ago
  And? In this hypothetical situation where they “aren’t around”, I don’t think that people searching for answers to tech support issues are high on their list of concerns, and - probably - almost certainly those of the forum members.
  - hammyhavoc 3y ago
    "And" the availability of information is important. Respectfully, on most forums, I don't care about the community, I care about the content, that's why I'm there, to have discourse and generate meaningful value in the form of knowledge. If someone passes, yes, that sucks, but that's life, we're all snuffing it at some point. However, the world carries on spinning, and that information should continue to be available, especially if the forum is for a niche and frequently generates useful information. If a forum is becoming "toxic" then that sounds like a moderation problem.
    - arpa 3y ago
      It seems like these kind of forums are not exactly your area of interest, if they're community focused. Information gets snuffed out all the time, with every death of a person we lose large piece of information, but hoarding, and especially expecting others to hoard or assist hoarding is not the correct approach to what is essentially a _you_ problem, so grab that terabyte disk and make a mirror yourself if you are so inclined. Nobody is or should be required to let corpo behemoths in for your convenience and to comply with your questionable opinions.
      - hammyhavoc 3y ago
        I'm part of several digital archivism projects. My personal disk array is 54TB of data. That's without even getting into 1PB+ of data on LTO carts. Last time I checked, Archive.org et al weren't a "corpo behemoth", but consuming server resources is exactly what a normal user does. Site owners should get with the times and serve up cached static pages to users who aren't logged in. Even then, they should be serving up cached static pages and rebuilding cache for relevant pages when someone posts new content when it comes to forums. Not being able to handle a few crawlers is an administration problem. Why should the community/public suffer for someone's inability to configure a server appropriately?
        arpa 3y ago
        We live in primarily free societies where individual has the right to decide upon their actions. Telling people that there is only one "correct" way of doing things is obnoxious and toxic and reflects upon your inability to see your opinion for what it is, an opinion. My opinion is that "screw crawlers and scrapers" is a valid opinion. If i'm hosting a playground, it's my playground and my rules. If you want to play elsewhere, please do. If you want to preserve data, please do, but not at my expense. Disagree with that? feel free to, but don't think that you are somehow in the right, because if you go with this shit to court, you will be laughed out of the door.
    - buro9 3y ago
      You have no inherent right to other people's data, regardless of how they shared it or the visibility of it at the time they shared it. You are not owed the sum of human knowledge. If people wished for their content to be available to all forever they'd run a blog and pay to ensure it is available, and would proactively seek to get it archived. People on forums aren't doing that, and the data of any given individual is a contextless collection of semi-random mumblings on different topics because without the fullness of a conversation involving others none of it makes sense. It is within that context that a forum admin can decide what to do, they have been granted right (by T&C) to the collection of all the forum members comments which restores the context and gives meaning to the content. Every individual on the forums I operate can obtain their own data, but it would be meaningless by itself. As the operator of the collection of content I get to determine what best to do with that, and sometimes that may be to delete it all. Sometimes that may be to seek to archive it. And on this occasion it is to treat this knowledge as having valuable to those already participating in the community and to not be shared beyond that. Elsewhere you said this: > Call it what most forums are: an ad-supported business. People generate content for the owner for free because they too derive value from the information that others share. The middleman is just a middleman But the 300+ forums I run have no adverts, they are not a business, they are non-profit. Their value (if you want to measure everything in a capitalist way) is social, to help those in the community. The purpose of the forums I run isn't to expand the sum of human knowledge, or to make myself personally wealthy of the back of the efforts of others, the purpose is to help be a remedy to adult loneliness by connecting people by their shared interests in geographically small areas such that it builds relationships and forms bonds. Yes there is a hell of a lot of expertise captured here around those interests... but no-one has any inherent right to it.

by buro9 3y ago

cesarb 3y ago

> When the day comes that I shutter another I'll ask the active members at the time what they want to happen to their data. You might not have that chance; unless you have a co-admin with full access to everything, the reason for the forum to shut down might be because you're no longer there.

KyeRussell 3y ago
And? In this hypothetical situation where they “aren’t around”, I don’t think that people searching for answers to tech support issues are high on their list of concerns, and - probably - almost certainly those of the forum members.
- hammyhavoc 3y ago
  "And" the availability of information is important. Respectfully, on most forums, I don't care about the community, I care about the content, that's why I'm there, to have discourse and generate meaningful value in the form of knowledge. If someone passes, yes, that sucks, but that's life, we're all snuffing it at some point. However, the world carries on spinning, and that information should continue to be available, especially if the forum is for a niche and frequently generates useful information. If a forum is becoming "toxic" then that sounds like a moderation problem.
  - arpa 3y ago
    It seems like these kind of forums are not exactly your area of interest, if they're community focused. Information gets snuffed out all the time, with every death of a person we lose large piece of information, but hoarding, and especially expecting others to hoard or assist hoarding is not the correct approach to what is essentially a _you_ problem, so grab that terabyte disk and make a mirror yourself if you are so inclined. Nobody is or should be required to let corpo behemoths in for your convenience and to comply with your questionable opinions.
    - hammyhavoc 3y ago
      I'm part of several digital archivism projects. My personal disk array is 54TB of data. That's without even getting into 1PB+ of data on LTO carts. Last time I checked, Archive.org et al weren't a "corpo behemoth", but consuming server resources is exactly what a normal user does. Site owners should get with the times and serve up cached static pages to users who aren't logged in. Even then, they should be serving up cached static pages and rebuilding cache for relevant pages when someone posts new content when it comes to forums. Not being able to handle a few crawlers is an administration problem. Why should the community/public suffer for someone's inability to configure a server appropriately?
      - arpa 3y ago
        We live in primarily free societies where individual has the right to decide upon their actions. Telling people that there is only one "correct" way of doing things is obnoxious and toxic and reflects upon your inability to see your opinion for what it is, an opinion. My opinion is that "screw crawlers and scrapers" is a valid opinion. If i'm hosting a playground, it's my playground and my rules. If you want to play elsewhere, please do. If you want to preserve data, please do, but not at my expense. Disagree with that? feel free to, but don't think that you are somehow in the right, because if you go with this shit to court, you will be laughed out of the door.
  - buro9 3y ago
    You have no inherent right to other people's data, regardless of how they shared it or the visibility of it at the time they shared it. You are not owed the sum of human knowledge. If people wished for their content to be available to all forever they'd run a blog and pay to ensure it is available, and would proactively seek to get it archived. People on forums aren't doing that, and the data of any given individual is a contextless collection of semi-random mumblings on different topics because without the fullness of a conversation involving others none of it makes sense. It is within that context that a forum admin can decide what to do, they have been granted right (by T&C) to the collection of all the forum members comments which restores the context and gives meaning to the content. Every individual on the forums I operate can obtain their own data, but it would be meaningless by itself. As the operator of the collection of content I get to determine what best to do with that, and sometimes that may be to delete it all. Sometimes that may be to seek to archive it. And on this occasion it is to treat this knowledge as having valuable to those already participating in the community and to not be shared beyond that. Elsewhere you said this: > Call it what most forums are: an ad-supported business. People generate content for the owner for free because they too derive value from the information that others share. The middleman is just a middleman But the 300+ forums I run have no adverts, they are not a business, they are non-profit. Their value (if you want to measure everything in a capitalist way) is social, to help those in the community. The purpose of the forums I run isn't to expand the sum of human knowledge, or to make myself personally wealthy of the back of the efforts of others, the purpose is to help be a remedy to adult loneliness by connecting people by their shared interests in geographically small areas such that it builds relationships and forms bonds. Yes there is a hell of a lot of expertise captured here around those interests... but no-one has any inherent right to it.