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It has just been announced that among other things, Paizo is going to be looking into newer forums to go along with updating their website and storefront.
This makes me incredibly worried about how the play-by-post games here would handle such a migration. It would be like coming into a movie right in the middle, especially if you can't cross-reference with the early part of the game as the older forums are left behind! What if some GMs decide it's not worth the trouble?! These forums are the primary way I engage with Pathfinder/Starfinder AT ALL because I don't have enough friends IRL interested in learning the systems and as the one with the most knowledge of it the role of GM would default to me, a thought that absolutely TERRIFIES me. Some of these games I've played in for literal YEARS, and there's dozens more that I've been in that petered out and died unceremoniously! I don't want to just cast all that aside and start from scratch!
How do I handle this? How much time do we have left? Mentally I'm running around screaming with my metaphorical arms flailing like a metaphorical Muppet...
I have to say this worries me as well. In the past I have attempted to get my PbP pages onto Archive.org, but the process is long and my time is constrained.
Does anyone know of a bulk downloading system where one could save a PbP in its entirety separate and archived? It would make me feel better if I had command and control over them, and had options for links and such like I do with my maps in google photos
The one I am most worried about is this one - Silver Rose
It has a couple of offshoots that I'd like to have an archive of at well.
There is also this one - Opalline Tide
As for extrinsic motivation, I would certainly be happy to discuss what you would consider a reasonable motivation. It is only fair
As for extrinsic motivation, I would certainly be happy to discuss what you would consider a reasonable motivation. It is only fair
Ditto for these threads:
Dark Ages Vampire - Bloodlines
and this one:
Count me interested when you have it up and running.
If you want to talk extrinsic motivation I can be reached at
Patrick[underscore]curtin[aat]yahoo[dawt]com
Hmm, more interest than I counted on.
So good news... I hooked the code back up and it still runs, though it looks like it needs a few tweaks to pick up the correct page elements — that's not a big deal at all.
Bad news... the existing database of 35,000 threads is so big that it crashed when I tried to load it on my home desktop. I may end up having to rebuild it from scratch, and I'm also asking around to see if anyone has a more powerful server that I can use for it.
Sorry for the delay, no access to a server on my end.
Got it all running. Went ahead and nuked my old (broken) database, so I'm re-pulling everything from scratch... right now we've pulled 15,035 threads (of ~24.5k), representing 2,033,858 posts, going back to 2007.
This means I've gotten all the more recent ones than that... and now it's time to talk about the format you want for your backups. I can do something "human readable" like HTML patterned after Paizo's aesthetics... or I can give you something like JSON/CSV which is a lot more flexible if you want to slice and dice things. There's a bit of a time investment either way... probably a bit more for the HTML approach.
Patrick Curtin's requests will be the first to get processed, probably this week sometime... I'll post updates as I have them.
Whatever is easiest for you is fine for me.
My email (following Pat's convention): Petrankov[aat]yahoo[dawt]com
Thank you!
Hmm. I’ve worked with CSV files in excel, is that similar? I’m a casual when it comes to computer work. It’s a part of my work, but not a large part. I’d likely be better off with something a bit more user friendly.
I’d prefer keeping it in a story-oriented mode, honestly. The metadata isn’t really that important to me. I enjoy going back and reading it, especially when story arcs near reveals and such.
I definitely am interested in this as I have PbP from way back in 2009.
Has there been any updates regarding some sort of timeline for the new/updated forums??
I'm happy to know that they are at least backed up for now.
This is a move Paizo should have taken years (we're talking close to a decade) ago, so it's good on that front at least. Their explanation for never updating the forums has always been because it is, for some godforsaken reason, intrinsically linked to the storefront instead of being its own separate thing.
Any update to any of their online infrastructure would necessitate overhauling the forums as well.