Inactive Forum

General Discussion
1

I’m thinking of taking the forum offline, since it hasn’t been used for a long time, and the hosting isn’t free. Most discussions happen in Slack.

If we take it offline there will still be a backup and it could be revived later.

…but if anyone thinks this forum should stay online and try to be revived, post here or in Slack, and we could figure out how to salvage it. :slight_smile:

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2

Do what you think is best. A backup is better than lost information. I find the knowledge here is very useful.

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3

I don’t mind leaving it online if people are posting, but it has been costing hundreds of dollars since it has been dormant during the pandemic.

I can extract the content into a static site and leave it online even if the dynamic forum is taken offline. (Static content is free to host.)

Something like this might work:

wget \
    --adjust-extension \
    --mirror \
    --page-requisites \
    --convert-links \
    --recursive \
    --user-agent "Googlebot" \
    --wait=2 \
    https://forum.codeselfstudy.com

I’ll try it and post an example to see what people think.

(also would be happy to keep the forum online if people want to try to revive it)

4

Switch it to a static site. No need to pay that monthly bill if the forum is dormant.

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5

Agreed, but Slack only has a one year retention for free plans. Recommend trying out Discord, which has unlimited message history.

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6

I’ve thought about it, but I think we would lose most of the Slack members, because people can’t be imported into Discord by email address. The percentage of people who would respond to an announcement about switching will be low, and I think it would result in 30-40 people in Discord while losing the ability to notify the 1,500 Slack members.

I have a backup of the Slack message history (public channels). Slack just doesn’t display it. If we need it, it might be possible to deploy it to a small server with a “login with Slack” button. People could then search the complete archives, but only if they are a member of the Slack group. Or the Slack archives could be imported into Discourse and become searchable with Discourse search.

Discourse also has a chat feature (click the chat icon on the top menu bar), but it doesn’t have the same kind of notification system than Slack has.

7

I scraped the forum and it doesn’t look very good. Maybe I will postpone this idea for a while.

8

Bummer that it doesn’t look good.

Having a static site with follow-on comments managed by Disqus might be a viable way forward.

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9

I like the idea of deploying the Slack history to a small server with a “login with Slack” button!

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10

It can be difficult to “quit” projects.
Why does the scrapped content not look good?
I wonder if AI or cursor could recommend a good way to present the data in static site form. There much be a backend DB with all the post data.

Often now I think of opportunity cost. Usually like "If only I invested those hundreds of dollars in NVDA instead… :smiley: "

Saving money is good, and this is a unique challenge, but not impossible.

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11

I don’t know, up to you. It is kind of nice to see it live now, and this is an interesting content generator… hmmm

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12

The forum cloaks to search engines. If a browser visits, it’s an Ember SPA. If a bot visits (including curl, wget), it’s a very plain, server-rendered HTML page generated by Rails.

I think I’m just going to leave it for now. The number of hours required to convert it probably isn’t a good investment at the moment. :slight_smile:

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