Maybe I’m missing something, but to be fair I don’t think it’s right and safe to assume that a forum will be working forever.
I think it’s good that they’ve announced it beforehand, instead of just making a sudden change and send everyone the middle finger (THAT would be a shit practice).
People should make a backup of the projects now and snapshot everything. I’m sure there are scripts that enable it with relatively low effort.
Well, they aren’t closing the forum until the end of the year, so that’s plenty of time for people to scrape it.
The issue is making it accessible for people new to it to be able to find.
while they could keep it up as an archive, theyre a company after all. giving a 6 month notice beforehand is a nice thing these days, i can probably scrape the site to some degree, index it, and serve it with a basic file server, and im not that skilled compared to other people in these regards
so if the community is dedicated, i bet they will probably spin up an archival project
i am not saying this to give the company a pass, i am saying it for people who fear it will be hard to archive
That’s no good. Time to back up some of the resources I might need. Thanks for the heads-up!
Isn’t this basically what Archive of Our Own was founded for? They may focus on fan fiction, but it seems like one could start a conversation with the Organization for Transformative Works to add another wing for this sort of content.
Wayback Machine archive - you’re welcome.
First RM2K.net, now this. What a shame. I hope people can manage to preserve stuff. Sadly I’m out of storage atm.
Just in case you are not aware, there is at least a backup of the files from RM2K net. But sadly lot of metadata and description from the webpage is not preserved: https://rmn.rmarchiv.de/ and https://archive.org/details/rpgmaker-net-game-archive
