While I would be willing to contribute to keep the forum alive, I wouldn’t be too heartbroken if it goes away. There’s also a Facebook group, where you can ask the same sorts of questions (but there are frequently wrong or incomplete responses, there) - so, it’s not that there’s nowhere to go to get help with D8B problems. (I’m in that FB group, but don’t post there since I can’t do so anonymously, to avoid being hit up with tech support questions directly… but it seems more active than on this forum, on the FB group).
Also, as I speculated before, I think this forum really just consists of about one or two handfuls of regulars, and the occasional “new” user who picked up a broken D8B and tries to get it working. But that seems to happen less and less… just a couple new users per year.
At the same time, there seems to be a lot of traffic on this forum (still wondering where that comes from, but I highly doubt that it’s real visits from unique users, but probably rather web crawlers and a couple of users who keep refreshing an open thread to see if a response came in… like, 50 times a day, hahaha).
…and traffic costs money. I haven’t hosted a website or paid for a domain in years, but last time I tried to do that on the cheap, I was always edging on having to upgrade my “mostly free” web-hosting service to something that would have cost “real money” because I was close to the monthly traffic limit. And if I was Peter, I would probably also not want to spend “real money” on keeping this forum alive, for the relatively low activity (but at the same time high traffic) that is going on here.
…and who knows if Peter even still uses a D8B. As those boards get older, they get harder to keep alive, IMO, and we’ve seen a number of regulars say their goodbyes over the past few years, because they dropped the D8B.
Personally, I would NOT want to be the one hosting and maintaining this forum. I’ve got other hobbies, haha
But again, if someone steps up to do this and there’d be an annual “membership fee” in the single digit dollar amount per person, I’d contribute. But IMO, this would close this forum off even more, and it would become mostly a place for regulars… and wouldn’t be inviting for new users to come to ask questions (unless a few of us regulars pay for hosting and domain registration, while new users will continue to be able to use it for free).
I’d just suggest to everyone who doesn’t want to lose the database as a resource, to download everything you think you might need in the future, and keep it locally (like, all the various documents, floppy images, arjepsen’s drive image, etc.), and maybe even save some of the key forum posts locally, so you can revisit if running into the same sort of problem in the future.
…but over-all, my opinion is that the declining user base and activity on this forum, hardly justify to keep it alive. So, if the forum goes offline, soon, I won’t be surprised and won’t be too sad.
I’ll miss the community of regulars here… but we could still just share our contact info directly (I don’t want to post that publicly on the forum), and hit each other up with questions, if something goes awry. Everybody else can just check out the Facebook group, instead, IMO.
Anyway… if someone steps up to do the hosting of a new forum (hopefully while figuring out how to import the existing posts and database contents), I’m willing to make a small annual financial contribution.
Would still be good if someone could get Peter to respond, since I think that it would make things A LOT easier to set up a new platform, if Peter could download the current website/forum content (probably via FTP), and share it with whoever might step up to host a new forum. Otherwise, the “old/existing” content on here would likely get lost, and every question would need to get answered from scratch.
…just my 2 cents.