I don’t know how practical or expensive this would be, but would it be possible to offer people in that situation a hard drive with selected threads or posts that they keep going back to as a reminder of their loved ones? It would be a shame if they no longer had access to that at all.
Agree with the above - get rid.
Also want to say thanks to @sean. For fear of sounding like a sentimental owd ghet, you probably don’t realise how much these boards are a part of people’s lives. Yes, it’s probably 98% blathering about what we’re cooking for tea/how to cut a pizza/twats on bikes but it is an important thing. And the 2%, stuff like the MH threads, has probably had a very very significant impact on lives. Very significant
Cheers Sean
Looks like the old boards account for a tiny percentage of traffic (0.39% of the top ten), doesn’t seem like it’s worth the money, hassle or heartache
It wasn’t always a great place either - the boards have become so much nicer since the move to Discourse. Whether that’s because the new system allows for easier moderation, greater user accountability etc or because users have just grown up a bit is debatable ofc
It’s better here and I’m not sure much would be lost without the old board. The best bits (weird meme culture, 5-a-side, AQOS) are here already, leave the toxic sexism and all that in the bin where it belongs. Pull the statues down!
love that one of the first replies to that social thread is bumsra asking for the thread to be deleted
I have every sympathy for people in that situation. However maintaining an expensive board that has ceased to function is not sustaininable longer term. I don’t know how Wayback machine works but is it possible to allow those people access to the archived material they’re interested in? Or otherwise capture a few key threads for them like @blimeycharlie suggested?
The way back machine on the Internet Archive will store everything, hopefully.
Bless you and thank you for saying this.
TBH, I’m well aware that even a human interaction about what you’re having for tea can be as helpful to mental well-being as the MH threads. Don’t ever underestimate what you all do for eachother, collectively. These boards are a manifestation of everyone who invests themselves in them, they’d just be lines of empty code otherwise.
not sure on how archiving works on wayback machine, but I was trying to browse another forum this weekend, not all pages of every thread were cached
Seems to be a system that does it. Haven’t got time to look into it properly now.
https://help.archive.org/hc/en-us/articles/360001514091-Archive-whole-web-sites
I’m gonna mute loads of threads so I can’t read them anymore and take up valuable internet. x
Way ahead of you. I’m down to about six threads and four users now.
I’m already down to about 6 threads and 4 users
Would be funny if someone repeated this gag imo
Would be funny if someone repeated this gag imo
I suspect so.
Probably the same issue if I was to store it on a hard drive.
[prepares to press the nuclear button]
if theyve got links to the stuff they want to keep access to (which i guess they probably would? maybe not) you can just chuck that link into the wayback machine and it’ll work. idk about a search thing tho, dont think it works well with stuff like that
While I have complete sympathy with people who want the old forum to stay online for these types of reasons, as long as they have notice, they could easily download threads of particular interest or value to them. I doubt they’d think it unreasonable that you need to take them down eventually, and it’s their responsibility to archive things of value to them, rather than expect a defunct internet site to stay up indefinitely.
Thank you for all of your feedback. I’ve now made the following changes: