Freeciv forum relaunch

New releases, projects, multiplayer games, etc.
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JTN
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Posts: 473
Joined: Wed Jan 30, 2013 12:15 am

Freeciv forum relaunch

Post by JTN »

Welcome (back) to the Freeciv forums. For those who were here before, please accept our apologies for the extended downtime. Thanks to syntron for setting up phpBB, and to Per for hosting.

This is a completely new forum instance, so existing users will need to re-register; and it's a bit bare-bones at the moment.

We've started with a copy of the old forum structure, but since there's no content, now would be a good time to implement changes, if anyone has suggestions.

What about the old forum contents?

We're afraid all content from the old forum (whose server died in March 2012) remains unavailable.

We had hoped to physically recover the old server's disk and resurrect the old forum -- this is part of the reason for the delay -- but it never materialised. We do have a rather elderly backup from 2009, which we may bring back as a separate, read-only forum archive at some point. Davide's forum at freeciv-mundi.org also has a few old posts recovered by web scraping.

By sheer luck, we do have a copy of all uploaded files until a day or two before the server went down (although no information about who uploaded them or what threads they were in). So if your only copy of a ruleset or something was stored here on the forum, contact us and we can try to dig it out for you.
Davide
Posts: 18
Joined: Sat Feb 02, 2013 3:05 pm

Re: Freeciv forum relaunch

Post by Davide »

Hi, new Freeciv forum!
In March 2012 this forum suddenly disappeared. After a few weeks there was still no information at all about what had happened and the situation was clear to be unrecoverable. After about a month I decided it was time for me to roll up my sleeves and dedicate time and the little required money to put online a forum replacement which our community was missing.
Since then the forum had grown at a constant rate, and when in early January I launched Freeciv Greatturn, the growth begun to shape exponentially. In one month the userbase grown from 20 to 70 members.

As of today, I am still spending a couple of hours per day working around the forum and the wider website in general, and I have Big plans for the following months.
I'm still opened with my old proposition, that one about letting you all, maintainers, admins, and passionate elder members of Freeciv into the internals of civland.org. I would be pleased to share root accounts to the system, and adminship to the forum and the other web services I've build up. Freeciv needs to rely on an active and wide team of reliable members enthusiast to expand the boundaries of Freeciv and to provide a fairly adequate maintenance to the existing services.

Yesterday I met Reiner and he wondered how unbelievable it is for Freeciv to be still alive and kicking after all these years.
I think we do have the ability to forge the required team not only to keep Freeciv alive, but also to provide an infrastructure to help it grow bigger and under new shapes.
Last edited by Davide on Fri Apr 12, 2013 1:20 pm, edited 1 time in total.
pekka
Posts: 7
Joined: Sun Mar 17, 2013 11:38 am

blank sheets and new pencils

Post by pekka »

Hi.
I am one of the regulary players @ freeciv public servers. I give my congratulations to freeciv.org for finally getting a forum up and running.
I think a working forum where players, coders and enthusiasts can meet, that enable 2-ways communication between them, is of capital importance for a open scource project. Given the fact that http://forum.freeciv.org was down for almost a year, disabeling community interaction, has lead to http://freeciv-mundi.org/forum/ beeing the de-facto freeciv forum. This way freeciv-mundi.org has keept the player-community alive.
Additionally I hope the reported difficulties restoring old forum content is a tale for the past. Not keeping backup of forum, not keeping the history alive, is a show-stopper. There was much good stuff there. On the other hand, you now have the oppertunity to start over with blank sheets and new pencils.

Given the fact that you now are "starting over with blank sheets and new pencils", and given the fact that freeciv-mundi.org/forum/ has been the forum keeping the community alive, why don't you cooperate and coordinate your efforts. The very least you can do is to mirror your forums/databases. This way there will be redundantcy of the forum data. This will hopefully ensure that we never see the whole forum get lost again.

Pekka
cazfi
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Posts: 3077
Joined: Tue Jan 29, 2013 6:54 pm

Re: Freeciv forum relaunch

Post by cazfi »

One of the reasons of hosting problems is very simply money. Core team is not only contributing our time to freeciv development, but some of us actually pay most of the bills. We're currently revisiting donation systems so community could help financially. I hope there's will to do so in the community.
Per
Posts: 2
Joined: Fri Feb 01, 2013 8:49 am

Re: Freeciv forum relaunch

Post by Per »

We are now raising money to pay for an improved server. Click on the PayPal link at http://freeciv.wikia.com/wiki/Donations to contribute! :geek:
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