Thread:Fossiliferous/@comment-27904998-20160417022029/@comment-24668482-20160419084836

AndalayBay wrote:I can offer free hosting, but you'd need to supply the forum software/license because I know from past experience that communities can't be combined. You guys need your own independent site. I can host the wikis, no problem, but the forum software is linked to a specific URL. Hosting Secret Society and Seeker's Notes as sub-forums on my site wouldn't work. That's the only way I could extend my IP.Board licence to you. However if you want to get an IP.Board license or free forum software, I could host the wikis and forums. We have a Wikipedia farm. To be honest, I never set out to start a forum about the game. There are plenty of those out there, and they are great, there was never a need for another. If I had wanted to start a forum, I would have used a stock forum site, most likely using vBulletin software since that is my comfort zone (laziness and fact I have very little free time). It would still have limitations as a result, but it would be a normal looking forum with normal looking features and much greater control for the users. But, the thing is, I never set out to start a forum about the game.

I set out to write a few wiki pages of information to help players. To start something that others could join in and help with. To have a place where people could put and organise information easily. Forums are not actually that great for game guides. I set out to start a wiki instead. The wikia editor was the the most novice-friendly I found at the time (although I'll admit that is based on very limited research as I knew if I spent any longer on such a decision I'd never make the decision). For my purposes, handing control over to a larger corporation made sense, I didn't want to pay for servers for what was just an experiment on an idle saturday. I did not want to have to deal with anything back-end really as no way to predict the site would ever take off. I was risking a time investment as it was, I did not need to risk money as well. I just wanted to put the information up and see if people found it helpful when starting out in the game. Although the editors here have their limitations that become more obvious the more experienced you get at editing, that initial appeal of being easy to jump into is actually quite important. And if I started over today, I'd still use something like wikia because of that. The idea of wikis are that any one can edit them, not just one or two people. It needs to be overly simple, open and accesible. There is actually a lot more that could be done here using custom CSS and JS for those inclined to get into that sort of thing so have not yet reached ceiling of functionality. But I would never have been able to build something quite so user friendly, and the goal was always to start something that I could walk away from knowing that others could easily take over the running and contributors could continue to contribute.

The site took off, and people came and decided to stay. It was not by design, that is why it doesn't work well. People are trying to force a square into a circle hole. That is how a forum ended up here.

I am well aware that the amount of page views this place gets means that it could support itself independently now (even if only a partial migration occurred). But it is not something I care to do. I don't see the appeal of migrating the wiki. All exisiting content here would have to stay here, it does not belong to anyone. It would have to be re-built elsewhere. The CC-BY-SA license would allow a carbon copy to be made if that was what people wanted as a starting point. But I don't see the point of having the same info in two places. You are just diluting both sites. The work involved in a complete re-write to make it new and stand on its own two feet doesn't appeal to me personally (I don't have the same investment in the game any more, updating the wiki feels more like a chore these days, creating a new one would just feel like work).

The people here are free to come and go as they please. If they feel that they have outgrown the limited communications features here, then setting up a dedicated forum and migrating over to it makes complete sense. And it should be done, as it is a community worth preserving and growing. But, personally, I would just continue to edit pages here until I finally reach the point of walking away from the game. I am very, very close to that point already. I have limited time left in the world of SS. I would consider myself in semi-retirement already. Starting over now, or taking on such a big project would be a bad idea as the risk of my reaching the 'don't want to do this any more' point during the critical time of building something new is just to high. Starting and fully investing into such a project would be so damaging to the community. I wouldn't do it to them.