What the Heck happened to this Forum, seems dead as doornail?!

General
#5

These are all questions only Kingroy can answer. I’ve tried to contact him on various channels, but I’m still waiting to receive an answer.

The domain has been recently renewed and is paid up unti April 2024, so I guess that, whatever will happen, we have some time to set things up. Depending on the monthly cost of this instance, I might even be able to just shoulder both the financial and technical sides and keep everything running. Moderation is another thing, but we can run elections for that (plus, there’s an automatic user promotion system in place, which will give people more power the more they’re active on the forum).

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#6

Cool, I for one would be fine with transferring a little bit of cash every month for any expenses or hosting. I like this place and what it could become! I’ve been on another (not English language) RPG forum for literally more than 15 years, that one has very few visitors -if a very small and committed crew of grognards- but to this day it is awesome to read things back, occasionally post etc etc. I think it would be a shame if this forum -and all that was shared on it- just disappeared one day!

I really hope someone gets a hold of Kingroy, it doesn’t make sense for him to keep paying for it indefinitely, but it also doesn’t make sense for him to almost never come on here, not be reachable and by far prefer Discord (totally his choice! not my business, but it is not good for this forum), so I hope he would be willing to hand over the reigns to someone who does want to be involved. I highly appreciate he started this place! But yeh, this forum needs active participation of the person who actually can decide and do the most with it,

I will see if I can PM (through this forum) him this thread now, perhaps he will get a notification or mail and respond.

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#7

Sorry for replying to myself, but when I saw this list on Reddit and that people talk about this forum specifically, id thought i’d share:

https://old.reddit.com/r/osr/comments/14c0hb0/so_you_want_to_explore_other_osr_communities_a/

This rings very true from all I have heard:

"Although a very extensive list there, many of us are always on the search for the MOST popular and frequented place because the OSR grew so much that you end up jumping all over the Internet to go to all of these sites on a daily basis. This is with the assumption that people here are very interested in older style games and want to read up on things or research older posts.

Many of us are 40+ too, so we like sites where we can casually read, search, and respond. I bring this up because people like to say “Join the Discord” all of the time but to me Discord is a forum with people that have short attention spans and don’t mind the quickly passing comments that easily get lost on a mountain of replies never to be seen again while they use their Discord phone app on the toilet."

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#8

Well, to be fair discord developed multiple tools for a « longer attention span » discussion like threads and forum channels, but an open source and decentralised media like discourse feels more « in touch » with the idea I personally have of osr : independent and hackable, rétro yet modern.

But it is up to us to convince people and younglings that forum centred discussion is the osr way

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#9

2 posts were split to a new topic: What’s your favorite version of the Thief’s skill?

#10

i mean, it’s why i’m here.

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#11

Some folks have moved over to Lemmy and kbin (Reddit alternatives). Because I hadn’t seen anyone else do so, I created an OSR community there. I also have my own forum that I maintain, and it’s a real struggle to sustain engagement there so I definitely empathize.

I can’t even remember how I ended up here but I end up joining so many spots, with the best of intentions, but many places don’t stick with me and I guess this was one of them.

My experience lately has been that a lot of folks just aren’t keen on forums or, even if they are, in theory, they just don’t engage with them as much as reddit-like places. Maybe it’s the ecosystem, the native apps, the doomscrolling, I don’t know. Hopefully there will be a forum Renaissance— I was hoping the Reddit kerfuffle would trigger it off— but it hasn’t happened… yet!

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#12

I’m here via a link in a comment on a Reddit thread. I really, really prefer forums over Discord and even Reddit. Hope this place pops off. I’ll definitely try to do my part to help.

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#13

Hello folks!

I apologize for not being active for the past 8ish months. Recently had a big life change, and was extremely busy. However, I should have significantly more free time for the coming months and am excited to both return to actively improving this forum and to pursue more creative projects in the OSR realm.

I do intend to keep this forum up and running indefinitely, and if anything were to happen, I promise to put a backup plan in place so that the site remains running and ownership of the domains and whatnot could be transferred.

I think a part of the reason behind my absence was that after we finished the first issue of the OSR Pit Zine, we lost a lot of the momentum of the site and it became quiet. Over the coming months, I want to grow the userbase enough where we can have a critical mass of active users enough to sustain discussion even without a big project running (though I do eventually want to create another issue of the zine).

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#14

I made a post on Reddit about the Pit, would be much appreciated if you guys would drop by and recommend this site so we can get some more faces in here!

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#16

Hey this is awesome news! Thanks Kingroy, for coming back and assuring that no matter what this forum will continue, I suspect steady growth will be in the cards! :slight_smile:

Let me know if you have a Paypal or such so I can drop you a few dollars for the hosting and other costs and such. It wouldn’t even be bad to have that in a visible place or link on the homepage perhaps?

I hope you are well. See you around!

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#17

I’ve paused posting here because it didn’t seem very active, and I didn’t want my quite frequent blog-related posts to look like spam. If this site becomes more active I will resume adding new posts :slight_smile:

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#18

I think its getting bigger again now because of the reddit thing. I just joined from there.

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#19

Just got here from Reddit. Looking forward to the discussions!

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#20

Just to be honest, while discourse is open source and we try to run this place as openly as possible, it’s not a decentralized software in any way. We do our best to put backups in place in case something happens to the server, but the kind of federation you can expect from something like Mastodon is not available here (unless the developers do some magic in the future).

I think some of the features of Discourse (like the power it gives to the community to moderate itself) are more interesting for us than simple federation, and hope you’ll enjoy this place anyway, but I wanted to clear up this misconception.

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#21

well discourse servers are self hostable wich is the definition of decentralised. Your not chained to a platform and their servers, even if the hosting service proposed by discourse feels like classical centralised platform, it is not mandatory and is a nice business model for them to make some money over their opens source tool.

The federation concept popularised by mastodon is yet another beast in the decentralised universe and a cool stuff for cool kids but is it really pertinent for discourse … I don’t know

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#22

I came over due to the Reddit post, too. i’m and old school forum type, so I’m happy to poke around and check things out. I hope to contribute to the discussions once I get familiar with the setup.

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#23

Newcomer here. Came here precisely because I hope to escape the pull of that hydra Discord. The excessive amount of posting considered ‘normal’ and the weird social dynamics caused by it burned me out.

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#24

Okie dokie, let’s start a random table thread! get some osr goodness going.

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#25

Yeah, I think Discord is great for hosting games being run and potentially finding new players, but I don’t think it works well at all for discussion. Any popular server will have too much talking that just disappears. If you weren’t there at a specific moment, there’s pretty much no catching up.

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