The Goodman Games Forums Are Closing

[goodmangames]

Hello everyone!

It's been a long time since I posted on here. I still remember about 20 years ago when we first started these forums!

I'm here to let you all know that we’re migrating our comms elsewhere! Goodman Games has outgrown its web forums. The software we use for these forums is incompatible with the direction we’re moving for the rest of our site, and it's been causing problems. So we will be shutting the forums down in about a month.

That’s four weeks to migrate important information elsewhere, stay in touch with contacts, etc.

We still do most of our communication through our Facebook page: https://www.facebook.com/dccrpg/

You can also keep up with us at our official discord site: https://discord.gg/bSR5SGg

Thanks for all the support from the greatest fans in gaming over the many years of our forums — we look forward to seeing you on Facebook and Discord!

[GnomeBoy]

It certainly had a very hey-y heyday in it's time -- perhaps the heyiest -- the obvious precursor to the amazing modern DCC RPG Community.

If we provide a disk, can you download the internet for us to use -- or at least this forum in its entirety?

[Big Mac]

That’s four weeks to migrate important information elsewhere, stay in touch with contacts, etc.

Sorry to hear that you are having to close down your forums.

I'm an admin at another forum, called The Piazza. Our founder Ashtagon set up The Piazza, back in 2008, when Wizards of the Coast decided they were unable to provide forum support for out of print Dungeons & Dragons campaign settings

We have expanded well beyond that since then. There have been a number of people talking about individual Goodman Games products, in various different parts of our forums, over the years. It's not quite got to the stage where something like a bespoke DragonMech forum or a bespoke DCC RPG forum has become viable for us. But if anyone wants to migrate a topic from your forums onto our forums, so that they can continue the discussion in a phpBB forum environment, we would be happy with that.

We did have a number of TORG fans migrate to our forums in 2020, when their previous home got shut down. And that worked out pretty well. So maybe we might be able to have bespoke forums for some old and new Goodman Games settings and systems on The Piazza in the future...if that is something your forum members are interested in.

(We do also have an industry news forum, if Goodman Games staff want to come and announce new products, Kickstarter programs, etc.)

[Mike_Ferguson]

I logged on here for the first time since 2016, apparently.
According to my account profile, I joined these forums all the way back in 2002.
So long, and thanks for all the fish. And the memories.
Good times.

[demonsquidgod]

Is there a way to archive the forums before they go away? I know a lot of people talk about everything that was lost when the G+ forums went away. Maybe it could be hosted on the Internet Archives?

[Bobjester]

Well, so long & thanks for all the fish.

I might see some over at the GG discord, but there are so many notifications I had to silence all of them so I can sleep during the day.

Unfortunately, I won't be seeing anyone on facebook, as I have reduced my web presence to the bare minimum for close friends & family there.

[Meadhelm]

Hope you continue to have a forum in some capacity.
Driving your community engagement to third party platforms, instead of using the platforms to funnel to your siteis a bad decision IMHO.

Archiving the old forum and starting afresh is understandable.

Engagement on those platforms is specific to age ranges and susceptible to the platforms own ensh*ttification which is gradually making them untenable for the people who do use them.

Best of luck. So sad to hear it.

[Ceronomus]

So, I've webscraped the forums, and seem to have a complete copy on my machine. It appears that I can move through the forums locally on my machine (although I cannot login or the like). I just let my machine run into it was done, sometime over night. As there have been new posts, I can update the archive periodically. If we get a hard shutdown date, I can be sure to update the archive the day before.

So, unlike the losses from Google+, most everything will be saved. I have come across a post where the initial post was deleted by its creator. As the conversation wasn't backed up on the internet archive, things like that are just gone.

<Having mentioned that, to avoid vandalism, I'll be making a second copy of the archive next - in case other posts are deleted moving forward>

[Ceronomus]

...and I've already found a problem. It appears that, when there are multiple pages showing as 1 2 3 4 5 ... 14, it did not grab pages 6-13. I'm going to need to see how to fix that. So, everything isn't archived yet.

Back to the drawing board.