Future of the Forums - Help Wanted

It's sad to see these forums go.

This is still a site visit very frequently even though I haven't been posting lately. That's probably due to the fact I'm usually a passive observer both in real life and online.

While I'm probably not qualified to be admin of the new forum I'd still like to help out if I can.

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Originally posted by The Question Yeah, but Big O wasn't as popular as many other anime series. To be honest, it seems kind of pointless to close the forums, only to open a new one with new admins. Krang, you said you just didn't want to be responsible for the forums. It seems rather selfish (sorry) just to close them, if you want to shirk this minor responsibility, you could just step down and let a new admin take over. I understand the fresh start but the part about wanting the new admin to blamed if anything goes wrong seems a bit selfish also. I'm about to get flamed within an inch of my life aren't I?

Well, I've thought about that, too, really, but at the same time, this is specifically for Big O (with a few things added on, of course). I think the new one will be much more generally speaking than here. I can understand both points of view on this topic here.

I really doubt that's what Krang has in mind, and I don't think he's "shirking" his duties at all. People have lives outside of the internet, too. Krang has done a great job maintaining the forums thus far, and he's made a very heavy choice to close the forums.

As for the flames:
Don't worry about them. Just make sure to dump water on yourself and you won't get hurt. =]

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Originally posted by Krang quote: I don't suppose it would be humanly possible to simply import this forum into the other domain? I mean... why not? Well, the biggest reason is that Shredder and I no longer want to be responsible for the forums. These forums are the ones we built, and if things go wrong with the new admin (which hopefully won't be the case), we'll probably get blamed and dragged back into it. Besides, with all the problems we have around here, a fresh start is probably the only thing that can salvage this community before it just fades away on its own. Also, with over 320,000 posts and a database that is nearly 400MB, we'll start running into capacity problems again if the forums become more active.

I don't really understand your first point, to be perfectly honest. I would hope people would be reasonable enough to let you deadmin yourselves since this forum has only one or two modifications I can find.

Touche on capacity though.

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quote: I see no reason to let your WBB2 license sit unused, and the only other site I know of that you run is Technodrome, which has vBulletin. It just seems like a sad waste to let such good forum software sit and rot. WBB2 has been great and has served its purpose well over the years, but it will probably be EOLed eventually in favor of WBB3. Since that would involve spending a good amount of time upgrading the forums, might as well put that time and effort into setting up some new software.

Eh... to be perfectly honest I see no reason why anyone would 'upgrade' to the insanely bloated and much-harder-to-understand behemoth that is WBB3.

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quote: Originally posted by Inigo Montoya choosing and setting up forum software? Well, it'd be a new thing for me, but I could do it with the aid of a few tutorials and some assistance from a couple buddies. How hard could it be? Oops, my wording was a little unclear. By "setting up," I meant choosing the forum layout, usergroups, settings, etc. As server admin, I'll do the actual installation of the software (uploading the files, setting up the database, etc.).

If I may make a suggestion, couldn't you give the admin an FTP account that can only access the forum subdomain/directory? So they could install mods without needing to go through you.

I was a moderator once, on another forum...they died though so theres sort of an albatross like quality to me doing that I'm pretty sure.

I could be like the...very very final option though. The equivilent of arming the civil air patrol,

Thanks to those of you who showed your interest in being the new admin. We'll keep you posted on the details within the next few days.

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Originally posted by The Question To be honest, it seems kind of pointless to close the forums, only to open a new one with new admins. Krang, you said you just didn't want to be responsible for the forums. It seems rather selfish (sorry) just to close them, if you want to shirk this minor responsibility, you could just step down and let a new admin take over. I understand the fresh start but the part about wanting the new admin to blamed if anything goes wrong seems a bit selfish also.

Nice job completely misunderstanding my post and twisting my words around. Let me put this clearly: I'm closing this forum, and I'm NOT opening a new one. What I will be doing is HOSTING a new forum that will be run entirely by a new admin. I will be doing this for free without asking for anything in return, and I will even provide technical assistance to the new admin for free. Like I said, Shredder and I will not be associated with this new forum beyond being regular members there, so all we're doing is passing the torch to a new forum so that our visitors are not left with nothing when we close ours.

Sorry to say, but claiming that running these forums is a "minor responsibility" is just plain ignorant. Apparently you're not aware of the database maintenance and backups necessary to keep the forums running smoothly. Apparently you're not aware of the process involved in approving new members to try to prevent spammers and trolls from signing up. Apparently you're not aware of the fact that I do all of the moderation on these forums myself since the mods have all either left or rarely visit, and there is alot more moderation involved than you would think for a forum this dead. Apparently you're not aware of the hours and hours involved in moving the site when it keeps outgrowing its hosts. Apparently you're not aware of the even longer hours involved in setting up, configuring, and maintaining a VPS since, solely because of the forums, the site no longer fits on a shared hosting plan. Apparently you're not aware of the fact that I'm paying four times as much as I should be paying for hosting just because of these forums. Apparently you're not aware of the fact that I have never put ads on this site, have never required a subscription fee, and haven't received a donation in over 2 years, meaning that all of this money comes from my own pocket. And there's still alot more work involved that I'm not thinking of right now.

Now, with all that in consideration, keep in mind that there is no longer any benefit whatsoever for Shredder and I in keeping these forums running. They are no longer interesting, because hardly anything is ever posted here. They are no longer fun, because of the few posts that are made here, most of them are just people being rude to each other, arguing, and spamming. Neither of us are even all that interested in Big O anymore, and our attempts to expand the forum to cover more anime have failed due to lack of interest. Now tell me, why should I put all this time and money, which are both better spent elsewhere, into a place like that? What it all boils down to is that keeping these forums going is nothing more than a thankless chore, and treating me like I'm lazy and selfish for not wanting to keep doing all this is nothing but rude and insulting.

Other than the moderating duties, none of those points I mentioned above will be solved by appointing a new admin. Besides, appointing a new admin here means that the admin will have to deal with people constantly dragging up old arguments and drama, which wouldn't be the case with a new forum. And speaking of drama, I bet there are some obsessive morons who were banned in the past who still hold some sort of grudge, so for all we know, the new admin could turn out to be a friend of theirs and destroy the forums for "revenge." Again, that couldn't happen with a new forum. And like I mentioned earlier, this community is slowly falling apart, so a fresh start is the only thing I can think of that can help jump start it again.

Also, where in the world are you getting that I ever said anything about "wanting" the new admin to be blamed for anything?! If you actually read my post, you'd see that what I really said was that, although I hope everything goes smoothly, if anything does go wrong, Shredder and I don't want to be dragged into it again when we are no longer admins (and as long as these forums are associated with our site, people will still inevitably complain to us about them). Saying that's being "selfish" makes as much sense as me saying that you're being selfish for not accepting the blame for, for example, this mess. You may say that you're just a regular member and had nothing to do with that, but the exact same thing applies to our role on the new forums.

Get it now?

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Originally posted by X Prime I don't really understand your first point, to be perfectly honest. I would hope people would be reasonable enough to let you deadmin yourselves since this forum has only one or two modifications I can find.

Since these are "Paradigm City Forums" and are linked to from our site, people will most likely still complain to us if something goes wrong. Now, you could argue that we could restyle and rename the forums and move them to the other domain, but there are still tons of old posts referring to us as admins and referring to these forums as the forums associated with our site. Even if we went through and edited all those out, there are still the points I mentioned above. I'd rather just give these forums a proper "burial" and move on by allowing someone else to give them a fresh start.

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Eh... to be perfectly honest I see no reason why anyone would 'upgrade' to the insanely bloated and much-harder-to-understand behemoth that is WBB3.

Me neither, but eventually, WBB2 will no longer receive security updates and bugfixes. When that happens, I don't want to have to deal with script kiddies hacking the forums every few days, then having to restore a 400MB database and having to figure out how they did it and how to patch it each time.

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If I may make a suggestion, couldn't you give the admin an FTP account that can only access the forum subdomain/directory? So they could install mods without needing to go through you.

Yes, that could certainly be arranged. This will be a new domain, so they can have full FTP access.

Oh dear. . . I'll be very sad to see this forum go. But nonetheless, progress is progress.

I know basically nothing about how forums are run, and would probably be very useless as an admin. Even still, I guess I could offer my services as a rules enforcer, or something of the like. . .

WELL, if nothing else, I can promise I'll join this other forum.

Now if you'll excuse me, I'm going to leave and sulk.

Ouch Krang. I was going to rip into Question myself, particularly on the bullsh** 'responsibility' issue that I partially learned long ago to not put on myself. You somehow managed to be even more biting that I would've been.

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I think WBB2 isn't popular enough for script kiddies, but eh, you never know. I can imagine however that the 400 MB database causes immense strain on the SQL server, so I can see where you're coming from with all of that when thinking about it. I suppose I can get the 'fresh start' thing, despite my nature of being a packrat and history lover. Good luck finding somebody to take care of it.

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Originally posted by Trillian Astra WELL, if nothing else, I can promise I'll join this other forum.

Me too! ^_^

I like lots of animes, but my experience is pretty much limited to [adult swim] since we don't get the anime network or whatever it's called I like to read threads about animes/mangas and see if it's something I would be interested in watching/reading.

Sadly I have no admin or mod experience or else I would love to help.

I have a question for Krang. Just for clarification, when you close this forum will all the threads and posts made in the forum be erased? Or will new posting simply be disabled. I'm assuming the forum itself will be deleted as you would still be paying for it out of your own pocket. I'm just wondering is all.

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Originally posted by X Prime Ouch Krang. I was going to rip into Question myself, particularly on the bullsh** 'responsibility' issue that I partially learned long ago to not put on myself. You somehow managed to be even more biting that I would've been.

Well, it really gets to me when I get attacked for trying to do something nice. Most admins who are as fed up as Shredder and I would have closed their forums down without warning long ago and abandoned their visitors, but since we didn't think it would be right to do that, we gave everyone early warning and set up a transition plan so that our members would have somewhere to go. It really threw me off to be called "selfish" and have my duties downplayed after putting so much thought into our plan, especially since I never remember doing anything to upset the person who called me that. As everyone can see by my responses to the other people who asked me a question in this thread, I'm happy to answer any concerns people have regardless of whether or not they agree with our idea. I had no problem with the fact that he didn't like our idea, it was just the unnecessary rudeness that bothered me.

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I think WBB2 isn't popular enough for script kiddies, but eh, you never know.

That's what I thought at first, too, but back when I regularly read the WBB support forums, I would see people report their forums being hacked from time to time for not keeping them updated.

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I suppose I can get the 'fresh start' thing, despite my nature of being a packrat and history lover.

I'm sort of the same way, which is one of the reasons why I prefer to keep the forums archived online.

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Originally posted by seraphjei I have a question for Krang. Just for clarification, when you close this forum will all the threads and posts made in the forum be erased? Or will new posting simply be disabled. I'm assuming the forum itself will be deleted as you would still be paying for it out of your own pocket. I'm just wondering is all.

Nope, all the posts will remain. With the forums shut down, there will be much fewer visitors (especially search bots, which cause alot of the strain on the server), so I think we would be able to move back to a smaller and cheaper shared hosting plan, even with our large database. It will involve one more server move, but that should hopefully be the last one.

Krang, sorry to pester. I guess you didn't see it, or maybe you were too busy to notice, but I sent you a PM. Just don't want it to get lost in the shuffle.

Got it, thanks.

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Profile for Zopwx2 Registration Date: 07 12 2003

Has it really been 4 years?

Thanks to everyone who helped keep this forum going that long, it's good to know all our discussions will still exist as an archive and not be erased.

Good luck to whoever starts up the new forum, although I'm not too sure it won't suffer from the same problems that are ending this one.

-zopwx2

That's why I think it would be a good idea to start a new anime/general forum. Big O has always been really obscure, especially now. A new focus would help attract more people.

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Originally posted by Mike That's why I think it would be a good idea to start a new anime/general forum. Big O has always been really obscure, especially now. A new focus would help attract more people.

Perhaps we should also focus on anime that Big-O fans tend to like as well as anime that have a similar target audience. I think it would be nice if we came up with a list of anime that are like this so that sections in the new forums can be made accordingly.

However, I think the forums should keep Big-O as its theme, meaning it should still be divided into "domes" and have names like "the speakeasy" and "the Smith Mansion". The theme is part of what makes it Paradigm-City Forums.


By the way, if this works then www.paradigm-city.net would have one of the coolest names ever.

I'll throw my name out there too. I know I am hardly active posting wise but I still check it daily.

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Originally posted by Zopwx2 Has it really been 4 years?

I know. 0_o;; I've been here since 2 Aug 2003. XD;;;

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Originally posted by Zopwx2 Thanks to everyone who helped keep this forum going that long, it's good to know all our discussions will still exist as an archive and not be erased. Good luck to whoever starts up the new forum, although I'm not too sure it won't suffer from the same problems that are ending this one.

Of course, there are no such things as problems, only challenges, and it's all about how you go about dealing with them. =]

Anway, a reiteration on what I can do (since I really want to help out): I have experience as a mod and an administrator, and I've done a bit of maintenance on other forums. I have experience in photoshop and I have access to it at all times, and I have a pretty good grasp on CSS codes. There are, of course, a lot better candidates, but I'd love to try for it or at least an assistant administrator or a moderator or something. I offer everything I have for the reincarnation of my online home. I don't think there's much more I can add at this point, so I'll stop pestering this thread so much.

Later days,
Rev

Make this a One Piece forum called Water 7

Hi, I'm new here and I wanted to ask something. Why are you taking the forums to paradigm.net and how is that site different than this one?