Restore the forum (at least as static)

[kevin2kevin2]

https://forum.tuxemon.org/ is currently dead and it is the case for months. But for credits, there are links to it. Without the dead forum, pieces of information are lost.

In consequence, it would be good to restore it. I guess there is no the (wo)man power to restore it in a functional way. However, someone may have a backup of the database and of the code. If it is the case, a static version of it could be generated (for example with wget --recursive --convert-links --html-extension --no-parent http://localhost/forum/) and then upload.

[HippasusTwo]

I second this. Currently you can get a free website from Cloud Oracle last I checked, which offers a virtual bare metal installation and gigabytes of space. I personally would like at least access to the old static version so I could read it, but I also would like a place for people to chatter that I can lurk. Using the github issues system to talk about everything is awkward and I loathe discord.
I personally would prefer lemmy or kbin, although kbin is still a bit rough in development so lemmy is currently better. This would make it easy for anyone with a fediverse account to contribute. The only thing about lemmy is that you can get bot activity problems if you aren't actively moderating, but that can be dealt with if you're really lazy by simply whitelisting some of the really big servers or even just turning it into a normal forum you have to sign up for to talk on (which is a downer but understandable if you need to).

[JaskRendix]

@HippasusTwo I was obliged to join Discord even if I loathed it, it's the only way to share the progresses. Honestly I doubt about a forum, because forum means registration, so another page to access, to moderate, etc. but sure, if someone likes to share things, post things and to reply to itself with rare / non existent external opinions by other users (excluded maybe 2/3 "active" users), then that's ok, you should go for a forum. Let's hope that a decision born in the forum doesn't clash with an opinion of a Discord user (inactive on GitHub) that is not registered in the forum. It happened something similar with GitHub / Discord by the way.

[HippasusTwo]

@JaskRendix
There's still the value of whatever old content was on the old forum put up in a static format. People like to see that stuff, for historical value if absolutely nothing else. For me, the great part about a forum was the fact I /don't/ have to sign up unless I really feel like it but I can still see the outline of what everyone else is (or was) planning on doing. If the only posts were someone posting once a week/month 'here's the last discussion round on discord', that would still have value for me and for other lurkers.

And I presume a conflict between a forum decision and discord decision would be done the same way you'd resolve any conflict, tally up the votes (with some weight toward the people who actually know what they are doing/actually have the motivation for programming, over programming issues of course, although from what you said it sounds like that isn't the case which is just baffling). If there really would only be three forum users compared to some larger population, then it's obvious they'd get outvoted most of the time. I can't imagine anyone joining an open source project expecting to get their way all the time. But it's true you'd need at least one discord server person to relate what happened on the discord, and that'd probably be a bit of a hassle for them.
I guess I'll just keep doing what I'm currently doing (up until I get bored anyway), which is making changes to a fork and if someone likes them (or even notices them) then they can add them. It doesn't sound like people are going to make the forum.

[JaskRendix]

@HippasusTwo it makes sense your reasoning, moreover I ask myself every day when I'll get bored.

[Sanglorian]

I'd love to see the forums restored - even as a static site. There's a lot of project history and brainstorming there.

One option for a new forum is to use the GitHub forums feature. The advantage is that GitHub would maintain it instead of needing someone from the project to do so. Of course, we'd lose continuity from the old forums, but there's already been such a delay that I don't think that's a big concern.

In terms of resolving disputes, we've not needed a vote so far. We've used a mix of consensus and "ownership" over different parts of the project to sort things out. For example, if person A designed monster X, we'd let them decide what it's blurb should be if there's two different proposals.

[HippasusTwo]

I had no idea github had forums. That sounds good! (edit: Still a shame to no longer be able to see the old archive. Maybe it could get up temporarily and then archived on an actual archive site? I know there's one that does that for free - I forget the name of it. You just tell it the url of the website to back up, but the site in question has to be actually up.)

That sounds fine to me unless the original person disappears. I don't actually particularly care which direction the project ends up going (well, beyond avoiding illegal sprites, unplayable crashes and such), so the only reason I care about dispute resolution is that it's nasty when people fight.