The shit has hit the fan

[Backdoorlover]

I know @Canassman has been trying to reach the admin for a very long time by now. He doesn’t even respond to the messages of his own mods.

So who knows what happened ? As far a we know he could be dead even. I fear that if he doesn’t show sign of life soon, that we indeed might have to act and create a new forum.

Mirrowing this one can maybe be combined with moving some of the more popular topics. Not everything is archive worthy imo.

[dnick]

Yeah that is true.

So the domain is paid until 24. October. Seems to be updated last time at 10. September 2023, I guess that might be the time it was prepaid for the next year. So if there would be no update after 10. September 2024 I guess it is really time to start worrying. But it gives only less than a month to setup new forum and somehow let everybody know.

[aNewFrivolity]

If it would be possible to create a mirrored archive of this forum, I'd say that would be a good first step after Sep 10th. And if there's no word from the admin by then, well ... create a new forum quickly as well, so all active users from here can migrate?

[FarmerDan]

The sysadmin seems to have disappeared from FetLife as well, which suggests a significant life event.

Perhaps we should be looking at Reddit instead? Someone has set up r/AnalOnlyLifestyle2 after r/AnalOnlyLifestyle disappeared (probably for similar reasons to the above) and I'm sure they could use the support.

[Backdoorlover]

I hate reddit. It is another social media platform where info gets lost in a very high rate. I’ve tried to like it, but ran away.

[Colt1911]

If anyone forms another group please let us all know. I’d offer to help but a tech-challenged boomer won’t be of much use. Is the anal only discord group still active? I used to participate in that group unti Apple decided to hate on discord. I only access social media by mobile device.

[analytical]

Hi! It's really horrible that after losing the reddit forum we are apparently in a position that this one can get lost too in a couple of months...

Since developing software is what I've been doing for living all my life, and this forum has given me so much precious information and encouragement over all these years, I'd feel badly without offering any help now.

What do you think about these two options:
- a custom web scrapper to extract all the posts and topics from this forum,
- or, even better, first just save each page, as it is received by the browser, to a local backup (pages would be discovered by following the links targeting the same domain).

The second option is preferable since it would give us as much time as needed after the backup is done, any information that we may want to extract will be available simply by parsing the local files, and, with some custom magic, I think it won't be much of a problem to create a single archive that anyone would be able to download and browse on their own device (preferably desktop).

I can take care of all of this. I'm pretty sure saving a local copy of each page available from the current domain is legal, even if done in an automated fashion (and one that uses, if necessary, cookies copied from the browser to access the pages as a logged in user), the reason being that the forum offers a set of publicly available resources anyway, the same way as making the backup manually would be legal too.

However, we should be careful to make sure that whatever we are going to decide to do with the backup, it will be legal too (e.g. distribution may potentially be not legal due to some licensing issues).

Are there any lawyers on board flying with us? We may need some assistance with the landing

[dnick]

What do you think about these two options:
- a custom web scrapper to extract all the posts and topics from this forum,
- or, even better, first just save each page, as it is received by the browser, to a local backup (pages would be discovered by following the links targeting the same domain).

I have been thinking about these two options too.

I think the first option might be a bit of a legal issue and the work put into it would only be worth if we would be trying to migrate all data into new forum.

Second option is easily possible. There is software for doing exactly this. I don't think it should be downloadable, nobody wants to download huge file, unzip it, find out how it works etc. Also I have already did a mirror copy of the site, in case anything would happen, and it is 2.5GB. The best would be to put it somewhere online for people to "just use". Of course login and other functions would not work as it would be only a read only mirror of the site. And I don't think that anyone would question legality of this. Webarchive already does this with whole internet.

I am not too worried about backing up this site in case anything would go wrong, that is easy. I think the best would be to save it somehow but of course that is not possible without a cooperation with owner. So I guess the main question is, what to do if the forum goes down in October and if and how much in advance to prepare for it.

[dnick]

The sysadmin seems to have disappeared from FetLife as well, which suggests a significant life event.

That could indicate that a forum might actually come to an end...

[Canassman]

I have no knowledge of either the issues involved in somehow making this forum accessible in the future or the legalities, but I support the idea.
I too fear something has happened to the admin.