KSP Forums Archival Options.

[calabus2]

Posting this from another reply I made to a different post:

I never understood the want or need for a forum backup. The only outcry from a few folks about the forum going away was the loss of mod content. Why? Every bit of that content is hosted or duplicated elsewhere like Github or a few other mod sites. Reddit has subs dedicated to KSP modding among other things. If modders want an outlet for their work there are already options available to them. It doesn't need to be this or some other forum-like site. Reddit is free, less hassle making a sub as apposed to a new website. 

I looked at the active user count here and on the KSP main Reddit sub. The counts were pretty much equal. It certainly isn't a stretch to say that if this forum callaped tomorrow, folks would simply utilize KSP resources elsewhere. I see no need for a new forum.

[Lisias]

9 hours ago, calabus2 said:

I never understood the want or need for a forum backup. The only outcry from a few folks about the forum going away was the loss of mod content. Why? Every bit of that content is hosted or duplicated elsewhere like Github or a few other mod sites. Reddit has subs dedicated to KSP modding among other things.

Historical and legal purposes.

The code is only part of the solution, why the code was written that way is yet more important than the code, because this knowledge will allow to make a better code without breaking whatever is already published.

And we have a lot of IP transfer happening here. Without the legal proof that the IP was transferred to the new maintainer, you can bet your booster than half the add'ons published around here will be considered piracy.

End users only see 20% of the total efforts spent on developing software. Forum has the other 80%.

 

9 hours ago, calabus2 said:

I looked at the active user count here and on the KSP main Reddit sub. The counts were pretty much equal. It certainly isn't a stretch to say that if this forum callaped tomorrow, folks would simply utilize KSP resources elsewhere. I see no need for a new forum.

If this forum collapses tomorrow, the Mod Scene will sink into a nietzschean dystopia where the end users, as usual, will be in the receiving end.

Make no mistake, the only thing preventing end users from being abused are the licenses we use around here - but these licenses demands legal evidences to be valid, and some of these evidences are here on Forum, and not on Reddit et all.

 

=== == = POST EDIT = == ==

Of course, I didn't mentioned (and I should had did it) the importance of Forum as a tool to gather people and maintain a Community.

The long running threads (like what did you do today) is a nearly unique feature on this Forum.

You need a past to acquire the sense of belong.

People became friends here, and friendship is forged over memories.

 

Edited September 5 by Lisias
POST EDIT

[Lisias]

NEWS FROM THE FRONT

Scrapping is progressing slowly, but consistently. I didn't scraped the whole week, spent most of the time working on progress reports and data managing, but still did some new work.

The reports I wrote tells me that:

• We have 1.456.167 URLs recorded
  • images, posts, redirects, you name it.
    • as long is hosted by Forum or its AWS's basket.
• We have 98.32420180964789% of the Forum's topics recorded at least once (using the bizeehdee's dataset as reference)
• We have 36.66643980126591% of the Forum's profiles recorded at least once (ditto)

I had consolidated the week's result into a "partial" warc file and I will update the IA's torrent with it - if anything happens, at least the job already done is preserved. As it's being usual, early next moth the data will be properly consolidated and republished.

I will update this post when the IA's torrent is ready.

Ready: https://archive.org/details/KSP-Forum-Preservation-Project

Edited September 12 by Lisias
URLs from AWS are *not* being accounted.