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.

[Big Mac]

...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.

Good luck!

I remember someone doing that with the Gleemax forums, thinking they got a working copy and then finding out it was not working afterwards.

So a word of advice would be to specifically disable your Internet connection, when testing your archive, so that, if you have anything that hotlinks over to here, it will appear broken when you still have time to do something about it.

[Ceronomus]

Yeah, I'm still having problems. It is getting strange my last attempt actually ended up storing the smallest amount on my drive after reportedly downloading over 110 GB. Something really strange. I keep getting a PANIC: too many links error, which might be what is killing my attempts.

I encourage everyone to keep trying. If need be, I'll try doing this a forum topic at a time.

[JediOre]

Wait? What?
Oh no. I'm finally not working two jobs any longer and am interesting in setting aside time to start getting back into the forum boards and they are being shut down? That is terrible news.
Doubly so as I'm not on Facebook or discord in any real sense.

[herecomethejudge]

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!

Very sorry to hear it, Joseph! These boards are wonderful documents of their time and hold a lot of treasure, and I'm glad to have had time to delve into them. They helped a lot in my transformation from TTRPG-curious dillettante to full-on Judge. Facebook (personal data cartel, don't use it myself) and Discord (too cluttered) just aren't the same.

Is it possible to leave the forums up at least through the end of May (two more weeks) so that everyone can have time to make their backups? I just saw this notice yesterday.

Yeah, I'm still having problems. It is getting strange my last attempt actually ended up storing the smallest amount on my drive after reportedly downloading over 110 GB. Something really strange. I keep getting a PANIC: too many links error, which might be what is killing my attempts.

I encourage everyone to keep trying. If need be, I'll try doing this a forum topic at a time.

Yeah, it's tough with the phpBB format as everything links to everything, and there are a lot of links you have to be signed in to see. I'm trying too, using some commands someone online recommended for it, and it's deleting a lot of the fluff but also not rendering the style and formatting, so it's a little hard to read. Better than nothing though! There's a lot of great stuff on here and it's important that people are backing it up in one way or another.

[JediOre]

Would it be possible for these forum boards to make their way to the Wayback Machine located at http://web.archive.org/ ?

[herecomethejudge]

Would it be possible for these forum boards to make their way to the Wayback Machine located at http://web.archive.org/ ?

A lot of the older stuff is backed up there already, and I'm submitting some extra URLs now to try to fill in more of the gaps. Hopefully, the forums will stay open for another couple of weeks so that it all can be properly crawled.

[herecomethejudge]

...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.

Sounds like it's not going deeply enough into the links, only grabbing one order of what's visible? In other words, it might be grabbing page 5 from that screen (page 1) but not going deeper and reading the links on page 5 itself (or 2, 3, 4, or 14, which would link to pages 6, 7, 12, 13, etc.).

[moes1980]

It's also been a while since I've been on these (or any forums for that matter) in a long time (more than 10 years!). I'm very sad to see them go, I wish they could be kept in since archival from. I really enjoyed my younger years when I had time to read everything and worries posts. This life Facebook and discord just don't work as well as these classic forums, in my view.

I'll go though my old posts and say goodbye!

[monty77]

The closure of the Goodman Games Forums marks the end of an era for a vibrant community of RPG enthusiasts. It's a reminder of how online spaces evolve and shift over time. While it's sad to see it go, the memories and camaraderie fostered there will live on in the hearts of its members.

[JediOre]

. . . . This life Facebook and discord just don't work as well as these classic forums, in my view. . . .

I must agree. Forum boards work very well. Any hope of Goodman Games adding a new forum board site that is more compatible with your existing website?

[Big Mac]

Would it be possible for these forum boards to make their way to the Wayback Machine located at http://web.archive.org/ ?

Here is something I posted on the Goodman Games Forums are Closing topic that a DCC fan posted over on The Piazza:

They are giving members four weeks to back up any information from old threads, either on new channels or via the wayback machine. Should you be interested in any information on their board, please consider doing so now.

Here is the Save Page Now link for the Wayback Machine. It only archives one page at a time. It is not a crawler. You need to archive each topic you want to save. (I suggest you untick the box for archiving error messages.)

So, just to be crystal clear, you don't go to that Save Page Now page and throw in the Board index URL and then walk away. You have to get all your favourite topics and feed every single one into the Save Page Now do-dad.

I've got a Bookmarklest on my PC, that feeds a URL of a page I am on into the Wayback Machine (so I can check if pages are archived fairly quickly) but still it takes time. So you are not going to be able to save everything that way. If you like one niche thing that Goodman Games has done (like DragonMech) you could maybe save every single DragonMech topic. (There are 320 topics in the DragonMech forum, so that is 320 Save Page Now requests you would need to do.)

It might actually be possible for someone to reach out to people working for Wayback Machine and request they archive the entire forums, but I don't even know if that is a service they offer. (And, even if it is a service they offer, that sort of thing won't happen from folks hoping that someone else would request it. Someone would need to hunt down Wayback Machine staff and ask them.)

So, I think that gives you two choices:

• Pick part of the Goodman Games forums and start feeding topics into the Wayback Machine manually or
• Go on a hunt for Wayback Machine staff to see if there is a way to request a more automated capture of the forums.

The other option is to get some sort of personal archiving software and pull an offline mirror of the forums onto your own computer. Then you can try to find a place to host the backup later.

[Big Mac]

...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.

Sounds like it's not going deeply enough into the links, only grabbing one order of what's visible? In other words, it might be grabbing page 5 from that screen (page 1) but not going deeper and reading the links on page 5 itself (or 2, 3, 4, or 14, which would link to pages 6, 7, 12, 13, etc.).

Do be careful to confirm that Wayback Machine is actually archiving content.

I've looked through crawls of the old Gleemax forums (the Wizards of the Coast forums for D&D) and people have archived pages that list topics...but not actually archived the topics themselves.

I have looked through crawls of the old Wizards of the Coast website and people have archived pages that have multiple free downloads on them...but not actually archived the free downloads themselves.

It's no good to just do a Save Page Now request. You have to double check images are pulled over, as well as text. And you have to click on the links to topics, to make sure an archived copy of the topic is there.

And...because Wayback Machine defaults to "the last backup of a URL" it is possible you might check the Wayback Machine has a backup of a 400 reply topic and see a backup that dates back to when it was a 100 reply topic (i.e. with the last 300 replies not archived). So you kind of need to make sure it's not just the first page of replies that has been archived.

It's a bit counter-intuative, because as well as navigating around a copy of Goodman Games's community, you are also jumping forwards and backwards in time, as you navigate.

Good luck with what you are doing!

[herecomethejudge]

It might actually be possible for someone to reach out to people working for Wayback Machine and request they archive the entire forums, but I don't even know if that is a service they offer. (And, even if it is a service they offer, that sort of thing won't happen from folks hoping that someone else would request it. Someone would need to hunt down Wayback Machine staff and ask them.)

So, I think that gives you two choices:

• Pick part of the Goodman Games forums and start feeding topics into the Wayback Machine manually or
• Go on a hunt for Wayback Machine staff to see if there is a way to request a more automated capture of the forums.

The other option is to get some sort of personal archiving software and pull an offline mirror of the forums onto your own computer. Then you can try to find a place to host the backup later.

The Wayback Machine in fact has a method by which you can submit spreadsheets of URLs to their Save Page Now service that also will archive all of the links that are directly off that page. That means that if a topic is only one page long (that is, fewer than X number of posts so that it doesn't have a page 2), the topic will be archived along with the forum index page which links to it. And even if it does have a page 2, as long as there is a link to page 2 off of the forum index/topic list page, that will be archived too. Where it starts getting into trouble is when there are, say, 20 pages, and on the forum index/topic list page, it says, "Page 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | ... | 19 | 20." In that case, it will pick up pages 1-5 and 19-20 but not 6-18, so you have to go in and feed it some of those page links directly.

Since reading this news a few weeks ago, I've been daily submitting a spreadsheet of about 1200 links that reach pretty far back into the forums. There is a limit of submissions that they will take from one user per day, but by submitting it once a day for the last several weeks and randomizing the spreadsheet row order each time, you can get it to do get to everything eventually. I've been able to make enormous progress with it; when I first started submitting it, it was saying that it was archiving 10K+ "first archives" per session, which is to say that there were 10K+ new links it was picking up that weren't in its archives previously, but that number since has dropped from 10K to 7K to 4K, etc. to where last night's haul said there were only 143 first archives. Even if the forums got pulled today, I feel pretty confident that almost everything's up there.

If I have time, I might grab a new list of forum links this weekend and try running that too. I was pretty thorough in assembling my initial list of 1200, but I know I left a few things undone, for example, in the 50+ page Play By Post forum topics, as they were lower priority IMO.

The link to the spreadsheet submissions page is: https://archive.org/services/wayback-gsheets/ To make it grab additional links, be sure to check, "Capture outlinks." I've also been selecting the "Capture screen shot" option also.

[finarvyn]

Sad that the forums here are closing. I don't do discord, so I will miss that part of the GG community.

[herecomethejudge]

Just to add regarding the Wayback Machine, my original list of 1200 forum links turned up only 3 "First Archives" on the last run and was under 100 each time before that (down from 10K-12K on the first few runs), so I'm pretty sure that most of it has been crawled, again excluding some of those Play by Post threads with 40-50 pages, but even those should at least be partly saved.

The only problem I see is that some of the pages weren't archived with all the visual formatting, so they are more like plain HTML pages with the text kind of clumped together here and there. They're less-easy to read than the fully formatted pages, where the posts all have their own little box and are neatly labeled, but they're still legible for those who really want to dig in.

As the forums are still up, I will see what I can do this weekend to continue getting more stuff archived, but like I said, the backups are pretty good as they stand now.

[herecomethejudge]

Sad that the forums here are closing. I don't do discord, so I will miss that part of the GG community.

Same. Discord is kind of a necessary evil to have as a lot of my contacts are on it, but I think visually that servers, in general, are hard-to-follow messes and will not be remembered favorably in the grand scheme of Internet trends.