Elsewhere, Vorticity said:
>>Ugh, not this one again. I am a professional Perl programmer; are you
>>accepting patches for this forum software which you are probably the
>>only one still using?

I'm not competent myself to judge whether that's advisable, or even possible; not only am I not the system administrator on the platform that's hosting us, I abandoned any aspirations I might've had to be a computer programmer in the spring of 1992. You'd need to talk to our generous host Dave (at donnerjack dot com, please don't spam him, people; he's a busy guy who's hosted us for years and years and years out of the goodness of his heart) about that.

I'm not necessarily against it, as such, but it would have to be handled very carefully, and I can't speak for the person who would have to be doing that.

And then Senji said:
> As I understand it Gryphon isn't touching the forum software for fear
>that it'll break even worse.

Well, see above. I was never going to be updating the stuff myself, that would be a big practical joke. :)

Dave and I have kicked around the idea of replacing DCF a number of times, but we've never pulled the trigger on it for a number of reasons, including but not limited to a) inertia; b) uncertainty about what to do about the "back catalog", since the possibility of importing it into whatever new system we pick is vanishingly unlikely; and the fact that we've never found a modern, supported free forum software with a UX that doesn't give me hives.

--G.
-><-
Benjamin D. Hutchins, Co-Founder, Editor-in-Chief, & Forum Mod
Eyrie Productions, Unlimited http://www.eyrie-productions.com/
zgryphon at that email service Google has
Ceterum censeo Carthaginem esse delendam.

LAST EDITED ON Aug-30-24 AT 10:18 PM (EDT)
 
>b) uncertainty about what to do about the "back catalog", since the possibility of
>importing it into whatever new system we pick is vanishingly unlikely;

One option I've seen¹ for that is to keep the old system, but put it in a frozen state. Anything new would go on the new forum while the old forum would just be a static archive.

Not having to handle any changes should keep things stable, and if nothing else most problems should be fixable by loading a final snapshot to replace everything.

1: Although it was for a gallery linked to a forum, the same idea should apply.

> b) uncertainty
>about what to do about the "back catalog", since the possibility of
>importing it into whatever new system we pick is vanishingly unlikely;

It's not that exotic a proposition. When Tapatalk became insufferable after they took over Yuku, Bob Schroeck moved the Drunkard's Walk forums over to his own host, with all the posts imported from web scraped copies. With full access to the backend, many things are possible.

-IA.

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