I’ve got plenty of resources. If you guys don’t want to give up and use reddit/discord then please post in this thread. If interest is high enough I’ll try to have a new board set up by the end of the week! Please post feature requests also – I’ll be shopping for appropriate forum software.
EDIT: SRK has been saved, but I’m going to keep developing this anyway. I’ll use this thread to post dev updates.
Current Status:
Animated avatars - COMPLETE
Upvote system - COMPLETE
Main theme - COMPLETE
Stage Select (theme selector) - WIP
There’s a ton of people trying to do this. I know Paradise Arcade Shop and Jasen’s Customs have both stepped forward and talked to Wiz about keeping at least parts of the board alive. IMO, everyone interested in doing this should all get together instead of having a dozen or so successor boards springing up.
I’ve started a dialogue with Mr. Wizard. Nothing is concrete but I am hoping we can come to an agreement and preserve everything and keep the forum going. I can’t make any promises but given the size and volume of the forums alone, this is not a cheap endeavor that can be run without constant oversight and tinkering. I have a few people lined up to help share the burden of the tremendous cost and technical aspects of any migrations that Mr. Wiz and the collective SRK team agrees to; I can’t discuss details but its not something that can be run on shared hosting or general open source forum software. Just take a look at Vanilla Forums monthly costs and you will quickly realize that this needs to be done correctly and with a few $$$ investment on whomever takes the reigns moving forward.
Yes, Vanilla is expensive corporate forum software and migrations are not easy or cheap if they are being hosted on Vanilla’s servers.
If migrations fall through/are not possible, I’ll still be willing to make a new one for the community. =) We won’t have the old threads, but there will be very few costs involved and maintenance will be easier.
Either way, please keep posting here to gauge interest!
If there needs to be a donation drive or a professional web developer with SQL/Web Programming skills would be of any assistance let me know. Not familiar with Vanilla forums but we have an idea what platform we want to move too I’d be willing to help contribute migrating something. I’d be definitely willing to throw a bit of cash at the problem also. While I think the forum could get trimmed down, I’m don’t think it’s at the point it needs to die. Several threads still get a couple pages a day, others get a couple pages on key days when the shows they are associated with them have a new episode, and I know a lot of threads I still look up a few times a month.
If it’s archived I’d definitely want to try to migrate a couple threads in tech talk & tier for obscure games even if it isn’t the initial launch. That shit is a treasure. I think it would be best if it was still linked from the main SRK page just because having a centralized hub is just an experience that really would suck to be lost, but if the Wiz and Inkblot aren’t up for that it is their site.
Maybe could do premium memberships and have a monthly bar like Reddit does with reddit gold so people get an idea of the problem. Also less obtrusive ads that don’t take over your screen might not be a massive influx of money but be better than nothing.
I ad blocked this site because every time I switched page’s I’d get full page ads that would cover the page and when I fullscreen linked videos with ads up sometimes the page would reload for some awful reason. It having poor mobile compatibility has also been a problem.
I feel like subs would drive most people away. I was really surprised that SRK was using such an expensive corporate solution with such a high monthly cost. I imagine unless we are being forced to use Vanilla at the new location it would be much better to run a fast, light, and more economical piece of software – preferably on shared hosting or servers run by the new owners.
Vanilla is a cloud service used for companies and sites that have MUCH more traffic than SRK. (Adobe, etc.)
