Yes!!
Ugh. Reddit is a mess. The phrase “dog’s breakfast” comes to mind.
Should / Could we start working on contingency plans? for example let’s say they come out tomorrow and say “the SDMB will close on 2 weeks”, could we be ready with a plan for a migration/move to another site?
Who would be in charge?
Are you just looking to start a new site or move the archives? Because the archives belong to the current owner, and can’t be moved without their blessing.
And we certainly won’t be allowed to use the name.
Many years ago, during another period of uncertainty, one member did create a lifeboat site . That particular domain is long gone, but there’s nothing to stop anyone from reclaiming it, or something similar.
Technically there are several places to check if the Dope went dark without warning.
I think there are at 3 still active related message boards and a Facebook page. There were more in the past and an IRC channel.
That’s something we would need to discuss
At the very least we could agree on a replacement name and designate a team to create a forum for us, we would need to find a way to communicate the url to all members too.
Some of the snopes refugees tried that. It was unworkable. It wasn’t possible to follow this sort of discussion.
It’s not; not in the sense that these boards are. It’s not a single meeting place for one group of people. It’s a huge collection of groups, every single one of them with its own membership and its own rules. And within any specific one of them it’s only well set up for single topic discussion; and not well set up for that if one wants to be able to keep track of who said what at what point during the conversation.
I was a little surpriised to see that alt.fan.cecil.adams is still around. That goes waaaaay back, obviously. There was another newsgroup misc.facts.straight-dope, but it appears to have disappeared.
Agree. Also, because there was no planning, most of the members were lost and never heard from again. At least having a refuge space would improve the change of continuing, with or without an archive.
There’s already an r/sdmb. To say it’s lightly posted to is an understatement. It appears to be modded by @shijinn who hasn’t been around here in over four years but is active on reddit.
I’d check out giraffe board before reddit. It’s likely to get a lot of activity if this site suddenly dies.
And I’ll already be there of course. I’m one of the regulars.
Una’s Board is another place to check and even Mellophant.com. I am almost positive skipmagic’s board is gone.
I checked that out, and was astounded to see that there are people posting in there regularly! It seems to be the same five or six people in every thread, though.
There’s also a Dopers group on Facebook, which seems to be used whenever someone is wondering whether it’s them or the SDMB that’s down.
We could write a crawler to archive the current content. It would be nice if all of the HTML were nice and semantic, but Discourse is a piece of shit and breaks the internet, so it’s probably not really very semantic, either. I’m not looking at the source to figure that out. I suppose with some work, a motivated person could crawl the non-semantic HTML and figure out everything anyway.
We’d miss private messages and nothing that a crawler couldn’t crawl, but it would be possible to save everything publically available.
What’s our user agreement say? Does Chicago Reader et al own our content? Do we own our own content? Would scraping all of this stuff present legal issues because of the original authors? Does Sun Times or NPR otherwise have a claim to the content?
I doubt it would matter. By basic and nearly universal copyright law, the poster owns the post. So to clone every post, you’d need to secure the permission of each poster or their estate.
You’re not a library and no one is going to believe a claim of historical archiving when the stated intent is to rehost without the agreement of the current licensed host (the Dope).
All postings and other material on the SDMB are copyrighted by STM. Republication of material appearing on the SDMB without express written permission of STM is prohibited, except that users retain the right to republish their own work. By posting on this board you grant STM and its successors and assigns a nonexclusive irrevocable right to reuse your posting in any manner it or they see fit without notice or compensation to you.
~Max