I have a ton of experience with this. I've been running a "Dark Forces II: Jedi Knight" fan site since early 1998. We've been in it so long that probably over 90% of our outbound links are at best broken or at worst lead to malware or pornography (of course I clean it up when I find it -- by removing the links and adding a note). And yet, stuff that people have been directly contributing to our site since 1998 is still available, still open, and freely available without creating an account. The only thing that saves content like this is people who care. Reddit doesn't care, they're in it for the dollars. Facebook doesn't care, google doesn't care (look how many services have been removed over the years).
I miss the days of every site having their own community. I remember when most game companies would put a landing page for each new game that came out and that was about it. Hundreds or thousands of fan sites popped up and provided a community that far outlasted the direct revenue of most games. Then gaming companies decided to create their own "communities," but they're stale, without personality, and as soon as the game isn't making money anymore, the sites languish and are eventually deleted, along with all the helpful content that has been posted by users.
I'm completely torn because you can't count on idiots like me (and all the people who have helped with my site over the decades!!) to keep things going forever.
My take on this was to make all the content "open" -- it started with all our static assets being converted from 25 years of spaghetti HTML to clean markdown and a static site generator. Anyone can clone the repo, recreate the site (including all the static content) and upload it wherever they want. The next step was to open-source the dynamic back-end. The remaining two steps are somehow regularly distributing a database dump (with personal information stripped out, of course) and then finally figuring out how to make available regular dumps of the content that doesn't fit in git or the database (like the ~10G of maps, mods, and screenshots that users have submitted). These two are still being planned.
I wish every site with anything to say had a plan for what to do when the owner is done maintaining it. Figure out a way to make the important content open and up. Internet Archive is great but they miss so much stuff, especially zip files, image files, etc.
I don't think any of this works with a profit motive, however.
I know what you mean, and that's why I disagree with the article's "the content will be gone" point.
I was for a long time involved in running a Civilization series fansite that also dates back to 1998. The site hasn't had much activity for a long time but the old stuff is still there. The forums, which have a lot of quality information, are fully available going back to late 2001, with some of the earlier threads also existing. Static content like user-created scenarios for the games, that's still there. Even if the links are broken (they often are), the files are on the server and recoverable. Recently I helped someone find a bunch of stuff made around the time these communities were first appearing, so late 90s.
That is quality content and it has survived online better than most content on "platforms" and certainly better than content on company-managed official forums. It's something from the early days of the Web, content made and maintained by some people who really the subject at hand, without chasing a profit.
Also, this is tangential to the article's main point, but Reddit isn't like a forum, at all. Forums were built for long-form, long-lasting discussions. A thread where multi-paragraph posts get written as a discussion plays out over multiple days, sometimes weeks, that's normal for a forum because they were built for that. And most forums had better search 20 years ago than Reddit does now because those discussions were meant to be visible for years. Reddit is the complete opposite - in somewhat active subreddits, it's about comment threads that last mere hours. Commenting on something 24 hours old isn't worth it because almost nobody will see the comment.
I generally agree with you, but I also find that the longer forums go, the harder it becomes to find the truly valuable content. You end up with single threads with hundreds of pages. Even when there is some form of moderation, it is usually a point in time effort and the ephemeral nature of some content makes it hard to tell what's still currently relevant.
IMO, the best system is a combination of a reddit-like feed with up/down voting (limited to proven valuable users) and a wiki that is fed by thorough and up to date content moderation.
And yes, it sucks that so many are relying on a for profit corporate entity like reddit. What if there was a non-profit reddit clone where every sub had designated paid moderation. I would donate to pay for high quality moderation of subs that were valuable to me.
The super-long threads are a matter of forum policy. Some forums have a rule that everything about a single subject goes into one thread, which can then grow to be enormous, other forums encouraged more threads. But even with the hard to read megathreads, I think the downsides were easily compensated by the fact that the information would still be there a year later and even ten years later.
I've never liked voting systems on forums because they elevate popular content to the top, which is not necessarily the same as the best content. One of the major advantages of forums in my opinion is the opposite, that forums are a good place for niche discussions as well. Some obscure technical detail that only a few people are deeply interested in can be discussed well on a forum, better than on a platform with upvotes where it'd fail to get the critical mass of points. And of course sensible moderation is the cornerstone of any good forum.
The best system I've seen in online communities is a forum for discussion and a wiki for reference. For a while there, before most forums died but after the early wave of forums, there were quite a few communities that ran a forum together with a Mediawiki install. I still find it vastly superior even to well-maintained subreddits. Some subreddit communities have good wikis, but they're very feature-limited, and no matter how good a subreddit is the discussions suffer from the platform's focus on fast discussions and a terrible search.
Wow, Brian, funny running into you here after all these years! You may remember me as a guy who ran the site for you for a year or two when you needed a break. You also helped me get started with Web development on the server-side. You were always kind, encouraging, and trusting--sometimes I still marvel at how well everything worked out considering how little any of us really knew each other. You seemed to have a knack for finding good-natured people to join in. I have a lot of fond memories from playing JK and working on the site with the great community.
Do you still have the same email address at the .net domain? I'd like to contact you again. :)
I actually emailed you a couple of days ago (at something alphapapa) -- my email address is the same but with `massassi.com` instead of `massassi.net`. Hope to hear from you!!!
I agree, we had so many great people help over the years. It was amazing because virtually everybody had essentially root access to the site and we had no backups, no recovery plan, nothing at all in case things went south. It's quite a bit better now!
I think you're absolutely right that what matters is the community rather than the hosting company. But what I think the article misses is that plenty of those kinds of communities organise themselves on sites like reddit - especially since reddit was largely seeded by communities that moved over from digg, so they already know that these sites come and go. Lots of subreddits have some degree of succession plan in place, with external sites, wikis, discords etc.. Some of them already collect "best posts" into these off-reddit archives (and, sure, it's well worth reminding these communities that you need to set that kind of thing up sooner rather than later - but it's a big leap from that to "leave reddit immediately").
That's really great, Jedi Knight was the first game that really got me as a teenager into modding and designing my own levels for a clan. Which then I had to familiarize myself with the scripting and cog files, and it was really the first time I ever had to think like a programmer. I have fond memories of listening to songs I downloaded off of Napster and designing levels for me and my clan to hang out in and have lightsaber duels.
Some of my favorite gaming memories! Swapping IPs in chat rooms before MSN Zone picked it up. All the "hacks" were so inventive and fun - the Jail Hack by EaH in particular blew my mind. I remember some clan having Coolio's Gangsta's Paradise playing on their page :P
Edit: I wanted to say too, that I think for people of our generation, we understand completely that much of what goes on here will eventually be lost. Almost all the websites or forums that I participated in the 90s and early 00's are gone. And I think I prefer that to everything be recorded & saved for posterity.
Somebody has to do the hosting. Even if it s a federated platform, somebody has to care, federation just mixes up the content a bit. We should be demanding for public archives of people's information.
The problem is that aggregators dont make money from the hosting of the content but by indexing it/mixing it/recommending it. So they have no real incentive to store the content (but they do want the metadata). I think the solution is that we should all have publicly-provided storage space in the form of a free blog or email. Something very simple, could be just text/pics, that is at guaranteed not to be shutdown and is actually protected by free speech laws. Someone has to build the roads
Nobody has cloned and re-hosted (yet?). It requires significant tech knowledge at this point. Plus I'm only 2 out of 4 on the list of things to make that possible.
That said, there are quite a few people in the JK community that are trying to "archive the jk universe" and they have crawled and saved the site and the forums and they do make their copies publicly available.
At first my instinct was "they copied my entire site, that's not right." But (so far) their goal is to copy/archive every JK site and I'm glad they are doing it because tons of old sites have just dropped off the face of the internet. Including the site that originally hosted the Jed (JK) editor and a bunch of other tools, many of which had the involvement of at least one of the original developers of the game. It's just cool stuff and it sucks that it gets lost.
Wow, massassi.net is quite a trip through time. I spent many many hours on your site, playing Jedi Knight with friends and randos through GameSpy. Endless hours of entertainment toying with JED, trying to perfect my own levels, or installing various mods and texture packs.
Thank you for the effort, you gave me quite a few cherished memories.
I miss the days of every site having their own community. I remember when most game companies would put a landing page for each new game that came out and that was about it. Hundreds or thousands of fan sites popped up and provided a community that far outlasted the direct revenue of most games. Then gaming companies decided to create their own "communities," but they're stale, without personality, and as soon as the game isn't making money anymore, the sites languish and are eventually deleted, along with all the helpful content that has been posted by users.
I'm completely torn because you can't count on idiots like me (and all the people who have helped with my site over the decades!!) to keep things going forever.
My take on this was to make all the content "open" -- it started with all our static assets being converted from 25 years of spaghetti HTML to clean markdown and a static site generator. Anyone can clone the repo, recreate the site (including all the static content) and upload it wherever they want. The next step was to open-source the dynamic back-end. The remaining two steps are somehow regularly distributing a database dump (with personal information stripped out, of course) and then finally figuring out how to make available regular dumps of the content that doesn't fit in git or the database (like the ~10G of maps, mods, and screenshots that users have submitted). These two are still being planned.
I wish every site with anything to say had a plan for what to do when the owner is done maintaining it. Figure out a way to make the important content open and up. Internet Archive is great but they miss so much stuff, especially zip files, image files, etc.
I don't think any of this works with a profit motive, however.