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[Important] Site merge with Dark Creations?


Arthmoor

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Been putting this off a bit, but as time marches ever forward, the longer it gets put off, the less time there will be to do this right, so it's about time I float this.As everyone may or may not be aware, this forum is hosted on a server I pay a monthly fee for. In the past, this cost has been largely born by customers who use the arthmoor.com domain to do MUD hosting. With the economy continuing to be in a backslide, the MUD community in general has suffered a huge collapse. Some of which is generally their own fault, but that's an issue for elsewhere. The main point being, there are very few if any MUDs seeking server hosting they have to pay for. Yeah, I know, spoiled entitlement brats :PLong story short, the server operation can no longer pay for itself. So I need to make preparations to move content elsewhere and drop this before it becomes a problem for my personal financial situation. Which is rather dire due to the job market here in California being a complete mess. I can't afford to justify paying the bill any more. No, I'm not going to start soliciting donations to keep this running. That would feel too much like begging.Anyway, AndalayBay has offered to take the AFKMods site under the umbrella at Dark Creations. An offer I am more than happy to accept. That will of course mean coming up with a means to get the posts and other content here (files etc) transferred from the QSFP software into the IPB software. Meaning that in the end, folks here would need some sort of account there if they don't already have one. Further meaning of course that future content past the transfer date would all be directed there and this site would be shelved permanently.People who have known me for a long time will probably know that I do not make this decision lightly. You know I tend to enjoy the relative freedom total control offers, but that's a sacrifice I'm prepared to make at this point. Either that, or everything here simply vanishes and I don't think that's in anyone's interest at this point. This place may have started off as a hugely informal thing, but it's grown beyond that now. It deserves to survive beyond my inability to foot the bill.Time is still on our side, the underlying arthmoor.com domain expires in July, so we have April, May, and June available to get this done.Does anyone have any thoughts or concerns? Great idea? Or are those nooses I see being fashioned in short order?

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Tough call. I agree that moving this to IPB at Dark Creations would be better than just losing it all, but as I've become all but completely inactive here, I'm not sure if it'd be worth creating an account somewhere new just to stay attached to these forums. On the other hand, in those three months, what will happen to Iguandons? And QSFP itself? Have you already gotten rid of the rest of the stuff you used to host?

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The blog will most likely migrate back to Dynadot's hosting. Which I'm sure will amuse them to no end, and probably amuse Dwip too. Unless something cheaper than $60/yr comes along that can handle it.If you don't yet have an account, whatever conversion process we come up with will simply generate one for you from the membership records here. Yes, it's going to be painful, but something needs to be done because Dynadot's hosting plan has insufficient capacity to house everything I'd need to move there.QSFP itself is probably going to be laid dormant. I'll leave up the Google code page since that's something I don't need to worry about going anywhere unless they think it isn't active enough. I've got one more update planned for it but after that, no way. There just isn't enough reason to continue trying to fight with it when far better solutions exist.Oh, and I should have mentioned this too, if you have files uploaded here you want the public to see, they'll need to migrate as well or they'll be lost. DC has space for that sort of thing. AndalayBay can weigh in on whether or not our file content is fully welcome there.

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Actually, Dynadot's worked relatively well for me after that one incident. Surprising, I know.Obviously I'm in favor of seeing what we've done here survive somehow, though I'll miss the small, tight community thing we've got going here. My main question is mostly how the logistics work: I'm unfamiliar with DC pretty much entirely, but is the idea here to completely subsume AFKMods into DC sort of willy-nilly (where does the Random Stuff topic go, my threads, &c), or would there be some AFKMods subsection like there is for USKP, DBC, &c), some mix of the two, everyone gets eradicated by the placement of 500 mountain lions, what's the plan here?

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That's part of what we need to hash out, which is why I decided procrastinating this topic much longer was a bad idea.Tentatively, the plan is we get our own section like the USKP, Beyond Skyrim, etc. Under the hosted projects forum. Although we're more general than most of that, I've always felt that those of us posting mods here are part of the team even if we never formalized anything.We'd have our own team download area, and a team image gallery too.

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More palatable than the other way, and probably less troublesome - our general discussion forum would seem far, far more giganticer than theirs, to the point it would drown them out. Unless I missed something somewhere, our random stuff thread is bigger than the whole pub forum. In fact, our general discussion forum would appear to be the main oddity - most of our stuff makes sense living in an AFKMods subforum, except that. Dunno, I'm kind of rambling.OTOH, limited stuff like the tutorials could probably just as well be folded into the main site?We have a certain amount of non-TES and even non-Bethesda mod content to evaluate, if I remember correctly. Since the main audience for the Civ stuff was prettyfly I can just as happily let that be taken down, but.[edit] And I'll be kind of sad if our banner doesn't live on somehow or other. :|

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We'll happily host your files. We'd prefer to set up your projects in our Hosted Projects section, like we have DBC, the USKP, Black Marsh etc. If your project is small, it would be listed under Shared Hosting Forum. Each hosted project gets forums, a download area and gallery albums. Our primary focus has been hosting projects while they are in development, with the intention that they would be uploaded to sites like Nexus upon release. However we have opened our download area to public downloads and have started to become an alternative mirror. The USKP and Thomas' mods are available as public downloads. Currently even guests can download those mods. We can also configure individual categories in the download area to be available to site members only. Still public, but you need to be a member to download, like Nexus has for files over 2MB in size.In terms of AFK itself, we were thinking of setting it up as a major category, like Beyond Skyrim. So instead of Beyond Skyrim, for example, it would say AFK Mods. And I'm just dying to make the description "The land of grumpy lizards and demented rabbits." :devil: Then all the existing forums would be listed in that category if you wanted. All your existing threads would be preserved. We can make some of the forums private to an "AFK team", but we would prefer most of them be public. This would mean that existing DC members would start to chime in, of course. There would be some duplication of threads because we have a "Random Thoughts" thread as well, but that's ok. I'm not sure what will happen over time.We could look at merging some of your threads with the existing DC threads, but I'm keen to keep the unique feel of AFK as well. But we might look at merging a couple of the obvious duplicate threads, like Random thoughts. That would probably yield some odd results though - the posts would be sorted by date, but not consecutive anymore. It might be entertaining though...

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Just saw Dwip's latest reply. Actually we can customize the look of each forum, so you can keep your banner. And we do have forums for other games, which we're keen to expand actually. So we could create more forums if there is enough content.I'd have to look at how large your Random Thoughts is. But we have De-motivational too. :tongue:

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"The land of grumpy lizards and demented rabbits."
Yeah, I LOLed.For comparison's sake, your Demotivational thread has 235 replies. The Random Stuff thread here is 1,744 replies, the Skyrim thread is 1,956 replies. Our General Discussion forum is at least as big as your Pub forum, if not larger in terms of thread count (of Egyptian cotton, obviously). So like I say, I don't want our mass numbers of threads to avalanche you guys.Probably best not to merge threads to preserve conversation order. OTOH, moving ours over and then picking one to close might not be a bad idea. Or maybe it would, since I'm the one who was just whining about preserving the integrity of our own little tribe here, much of which is bound up in the two threads I just mentioned rather than the various mod threads per se.Which is why the discussion of "where does the Random Stuff thread go?" becomes so critical - most of our community building is actually there and in the Skyrim thread. You keep it, maybe AFKMods stays more segregated from DC at large, maybe not. You kill it, do we lose a lot of what makes AFKMods AFKMods? Probably.The rest sounds pretty great, though what of admin rights, just out of curiosity?
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That's what was so funny when I imported the Inn threads from Modcraft. We went from 1500 posts total (on the boards) to over 70,000. :lol: As I said, it's up to you guys. If you want to keep your threads separate, that's fine. We might find that the two threads stay separate, with the current DC crowd using our existing threads and you guys stick with yours. Hopefully there will be a bit of a mix, depending on how the discussion moves in each thread.But yes, keeping your threads open might segregate the community. I'm not sure what to suggest either because I'd like to preserve the character of AFK as well. I'd be inclined to preserve everything and let the community decide.We'll make the admins here team leads on DC. Team leads are moderators of their own projects. You'll have control of your own threads and posts. You can also discipline members if they get out of hand, although most of our team leads leave that to the DC admins. I'll explain how that works on DC if we go ahead with the move. We already have our allotment of administrators - in fact we're a bit top heavy, so we're not adding any more at this point. But with moderator privileges, you'll be able to manage your forums.

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I like the idea of "The land of grumpy lizards and demented rabbits.", but I'm not sure that I have an opinion, let alone one that should count anymore, on most of the rest of this discussion. When we were all about Oblivion mods, I would've felt my say mattered, but at this point ...I don't know that I'll be buying a copy of Skyrim, let alone before y'all get around to moving onto the next game in the sequence, at this rate. I also don't really see myself contributing to the conversations anywhere even close to the way I once did now that everything's Skyrim-centric. Is one able to continue following by RSS if everything here is merged into DC? Will the RSS suddenly become expanded to include a whole bunch of forum content that I can't honestly say I even want to become familiar with? No offense intended, Andalay, but.. well, at this point I've never been to DC and don't feel like pretending I care about a forums I've never had anything to do with.

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I like the idea of "The land of grumpy lizards and demented rabbits."' date=' but I'm not sure that I have an opinion, let alone one that should count anymore, on most of the rest of this discussion. When we were all about Oblivion mods, I would've felt my say mattered, but at this point ...I don't know that I'll be buying a copy of Skyrim, let alone before y'all get around to moving onto the next game in the sequence, at this rate. I also don't really see myself contributing to the conversations anywhere even close to the way I once did now that everything's Skyrim-centric. Is one able to continue following by RSS if everything here is merged into DC? Will the RSS suddenly become expanded to include a whole bunch of forum content that I can't honestly say I even want to become familiar with? No offense intended, Andalay, but.. well, at this point I've never been to DC and don't feel like pretending I care about a forums I've never had anything to do with.[/quote']Blackmarsh and DBC in the hosted projects forums are still Oblivion mods. Elseweyr in the Beyond Skyrim forums is still Oblivion. Those aren't the only games discussed over at DC either.
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DC isn't just about Skyrim or even Elder Scrolls. Our role playing forum, called the Inn, has Batman and Robin in it for heaven's sake. And the Sith... and bunch of others I've never heard of!You can follow topics and forums so you will get an email alert when either of those are updated. You can follow downloads via RSS, but not forums or topics.Anyway I think I've answered most of your questions about the structure, so I'll bud out now and let you guys talk.

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Well since I more or less said my piece and explained the reasons for this, I'll hit the cruise control and wait to see what others think. I do hope folks chime in one way or the other, because this is very much going to affect both communities in ways we may not even realize yet. Yet something must be done.

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I'm happy with the move - I'm somewhat forum agrophobic though, as people here have no doubt realized. In general, I would say keep existing threads and forums intact. This is a very small stie in terms of stats, currently we have 41 members and I'm still in the top five uploaders with two files.If we can have everything AndalayBay has offered us I see no logistical problem, but I think that in terms of community integration, it will either happen or it won't. No doubt there'll be some bleedover but I expect we will remain "that bunch of wierdos in the corner".Personally, I have no problem with that - so long as everyone knows we're nice wierdos.One thing though, do we need to go through all the posts and remove the swearwords?

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Did you ask DarkRider about moving to his Hosted Forums?I mean, all, or at least most of the mods here are already there.

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Personally' date=' I have no problem with that - so long as everyone knows we're nice wierdos. [/quote']But...does this mean I'm going to have to stop randomly decapitating visitors? :(Also, you're right. We're (I'm) a pretty profane bunch. Pretty good chance I'd outright fail any kind of language ban.Re: TESA, my main trouble with the site (as opposed to a possible hosted forum, which I guess is more or less fine) is I really, really, really hate the site design. Yeah, subforums get their own, but you can't much escape that main page, etc.
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Did you ask DarkRider about moving to his Hosted Forums?I mean' date=' all, or at least most of the mods here are already there.[/quote']No, I didn't. The possibility of that happening depends on quite a bit, and I don't know what HIS finances are like right now either. I don't think it would be right to be shutting down here for financial reasons only to show up there with him in the same boat and then unable to pay for the extra burden.@Dwip: You'd probably run afoul of the profanity meter at TESA too :P
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I fully support your decision to move the site to Dark Creations.A lot of the stuff I am working on is already hosted there, after all.As far as language goes, I'm pretty good about holding back when I need to, but I'm sure as everyone might attest to here, I am not afraid of spewing profanity, either. I could go either way, but truth is I'd prefer moving to Dark Creations over TESA, because TESA is a bit too laid back for a forum of mostly active and committed modders (just look at the Shoutbox). Dark Creations fits that niche a lot better.

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Well, it'd be a shame to lose the ability to follow threads without actually visiting the site courtesy of RSS, but at least it sounds like I wouldn't be totally alienated at DC.

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Looks like IPB's RSS feeds don't break down by forums the way QSFP's do. So while it does have a feed, it's not filtered in any way that could be useful to only follow one section.

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