It has been six years since these forums have been online. The latest post was form March, 2011. I don't even remember why they went offline, but they did and eventually they disappeared for good. Or so I thought, since I didn't have a single backup of them.
However...
Thanks to Mike Burk (and several hours of my time doing weird arcane things with a CentOS vm from 2012, cpanel, three dockers, and a few hundred lines of node.js code) I was able to get a backup of the forums migrated to the latest SMF, and the latest mysql. Registration's (temporarily) disabled, but posts and everything should work.
Where do we go from here?There's a lot of just ancient posts and topics on this board. I mean, it's all ancient, since it hasn't been live for 6 years. But most of the projects and other things have been put on the dusty shelf, or imploded.
But let's be honest, most of us don't remember the game this forums was born around. We remember the Mafia games, the Wars, the community we built here. This was where a lot of us met, and made friendships that lasted years.
And some that, sadly, ended far too soon.
My intention is to open these back up to registration, and get them into a more stable, maintainable state. I want to build a community again, and breath some more life into these old, dusty boards. But a community of one is not a community. I'm announcing this topic, with the hopes that some of you still have those emails (lord knows, some of us never change), see the message, and decide to come back, even if just to laugh at our much younger selves.
Then, we (as a community) need to decide what we want to do with these. Archive all the old stuff, and try to make some shiny new boards and move on? Keep these forums in an archived state, and disable posting? Start over from scratch with new software, new posts, and a new mission?
Whatever we decide; my intention is to keep these forums running indefinitely. There's meaning in that for me, so I'll gladly keep spending the time required to keep them up.
--Chris
