What if the SDMB goes dark? Should we make a contingency plan?

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1

Continuing the discussion from Chicago Reader Being Sold (Again) and Who owns SDMB? :

Should we, as a community, consider coming up with some sort of contingency/continuity plan in case the SDMB ever suddenly goes dark one day?

My understanding of the current board situation is that we’re basically flying under the radar, vaguely owned by a subsidiary of a nonprofit media group called Chicago Public Media, but without any official interactions with them. As far as I know, we don’t even have a way of contacting them (is that true? I’m not sure) or any word about how long they’d want to keep running these boards. We seem to be either under the good graces of some mysterious benefactor, or perhaps simply forgotten about.

But running these boards isn’t free; somebody has to keep paying the Discourse company to keep the lights on here.

Maybe we’ll last another 30 years. Or maybe next month another owner takes over and decides to add a bunch of AI spam. Or maybe it just — poof! — goes dark and forever disappears one day, with little to no warning.

That’d be pretty sad!

I’ve been a part of this board since I was a teenager (in my 40s now) and I’d like to see it keep going. Many others are old-timers who I’ll miss if this suddenly goes away.

Thoughts?

I know we’ve previously had a partial split that spawned The Giraffe Boards, but I’ve never participated there so I don’t know how it works.

From a technical perspective, it should be possible to make a backup of the entire SDMB and restore it to another Discourse instance, but that can only be done while we still have some living admins who can perform the backup (I am not sure if we do, TBH…). If it gets shut down without warning, we’d lose all the old posts and current users.

From a financial perspective, it would cost probably a few hundred dollars a year to keep the board going (my guess), maybe less if we can get a technical team together to self-host the software. But somebody — some org, or a trust, or at least a group of individuals — would have to be able to pay the ongoing costs.

From a community perspective, any non-seamless, non-automatic transition is likely to lose a bunch of users, especially if there’s no orderly migration and just a mass signup (with new usernames) on another board. I doubt many long-timers would want to bother with that, or that we’d even all manage to find the right place to move to, unless it was all discussed and agreed upon beforehand.

Anyhow… is this premature? Probably. Hopefully. But I am admittedly a little worried, and figured it wouldn’t hurt to at least start thinking about this.

Anyone else?

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there is probably also an IP issue there … who “owns” the data-base and can “da mods” just copy it with all the contact information and contact the teeming millions? …

I’d have no qualms, but for ‘muricans in ‘murica it might be a (legal?) problem

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I am an Admin on the Giraffe Board and it would certainly be a place for people to discuss and find out about the replacement. I understand that there is a Facebook page and there is also a subreddit that is mostly dead but anyone can post information there.

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hahaha … I don’t know if done on purpose or just by chance, but the subreddit looks soooo 1995 …

:wink:

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We have no access to the database anyway. We could probably run some reports to a .csv, but no direct access. We’re Mods and not Admins.

When the SDMB goes dark, it will be the end of an era, but we’re slowly dwindling anyway.

As far as copying the board, I suspect the IP of the board will be tied up by the actual owners even when they turn it off. Major legal issues most likely. Without their permission all we could do is start a new board and try to gather the users.

These worries had happened in 2009 and weirdly 2 boards started at the same time (literally the same weekend). Thankfully, 16 years later the SDMB is still up and working, those boards are tiny little satellites.

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I wonder… would the mods at least be able to export a list of current active users (say, posted something within the last 2 years) and their email addresses, backed up safely somewhere? That way, if the board ever does disappear, at least there’s a way to contact the existing users and maybe assign them the same usernames on another board…

But we’re getting new users, still! At this rate, we might still have 3 or 4 users in another 16 years… :sweat_smile:

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There is nothing wrong with the run we’ve had, the things we’ve done or the friends we’ve made along the way. Remembering and rejoicing are the two things that cannot be bought, sold or shut down, and that will be more than enough for me when our time comes.

Which ain’t just yet, by the way.

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Yeah, sort of like the seed vault in Svalbard. The Giraffe boards look and work like the SDMB of old. I am not a user over there (yet) but that seems a logical place for flotsam from this board to end up should we eventually strike an iceberg. The problem is alerting everyone here, active users and the occasional reader/poster where to go if we/they try to come here and all they see is…

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I think most “regulars” of this virtual dive-bar know the giraffe-boards … and that would be a logical meeting point

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I’m not sure if the mods have access to such a list, the ability to use it in such a way if they do…or even the ability to tell us if they do have such rights.

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How many of us could that other board afford to take in?

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All of us but there’s some historical baggage with the place that may make it inappropriate. I envision it as a stopping ground but would be willing to take it on if it is truly the only option so long as at least most of the current mods would be willing to help.

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Funny you should ask that question right now. Before I joined the SDMB nearly 12 years ago, I had been a frequent poster on another message board. It was quite a large community with a lot of users and a lot of different forums, but I pretty much abandoned it because I preferred the SDMB. A couple of months ago I thought it might be interesting to visit briefly and see what was new, and it was … gone! So yes, it can happen and it does. It seemed to have been unceremoniously shut down without even an explanation, and it wasn’t for lack of participants.

I haven’t been following subsequent events very closely, but it seems that an enterprising former member there started a new message board, and though I don’t think they made any effort to replicate the old content, nor I imagine could they, they did replicate some of the same forum structure and then tried to reach out to as many former members as possible, and from what I saw, quite a few were joining up with their old user names.

I think sometimes when we ponder these things we overestimate the cost and logistics of running a message board. It’s not that expensive, and I’m sure that the regulars here would be more than happy to contribute membership fees to cover that cost. I sure would. And Discourse hosting simplifies a lot of the admin stuff.

But from a technical standpoint (not a legal/IP one, on which I’m not competent to comment) wasn’t the essential data export already done when TubaDiva moved us from whatever creaky system was supporting vBulletin to Discourse? Mods may not have access to the database, but surely the Discourse admins do, because they’re hosting it.

I agree we have to be careful about legal rights, but from a purely technical standpoint, if we can get TPTB to agree, I don’t see why we (the collective “we”, with someone volunteering to be the admin) could not at least in theory continue to carry on with the existing database and the existing registered user base.

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I think @hajario is correct that there are hard feelings from some posters (on both sides) that would make it a challenging, but not impossible fusion.

But I also think it’s the most likely waypoint into any possible long-term decision. But I really feel both boards have a distinct if similar culture, and the status quo is best as long as :oncoming_fist: :wood: it can be maintained.

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Technologically speaking:

That was a snapshot from 5 years ago. So all but irrelevant to today.

Are Discourse instances portable? Of course. Given admin rights to pull the data.

As you say, the legal details are beyond my scope too.

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That wasn’t my point. Once the posting database was moved to Discourse, it and its ongoing evolution was hosted by Discourse and is under their control.

Which the DIscourse admins/developers must have, if any legal issues have been resolved.

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A few years ago I saw that the subreddit was dead, so I posted a topic just to say there was a new topic. And got a handful of replies. I suspect that there are lurkers there who are waiting for someone to say something.

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I suppose we could meet up over on the Giraffe Boards; I probably post there about once a year, under a different username (and I have seen what some Dopers have said about me over there; oh, well).

Is that a real possibility with this site? Not the first time I’ve seen a thread like this in recent days.

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It’s probably the current owners we’d have to get on board for any possibility of a seamless migration, not the Discourse staff/developers.

Discourse, the software, is made by the Civilized Discourse Construction Kit, Inc., but what they sell is just the forum software and hosting. They don’t own the board contents or branding.

The actual SDMB brand and content, as far as we know, is instead owned by https://www.chicagopublicmedia.org/, who in turn owns The Chicago Sun-Times :

In January 2022, Chicago Public Media, Inc. formed an entity called Chicago Sun-Times Media, Inc. (CSTM), a Delaware not-for-profit corporation, that acquired the assets of the Sun-Times Media Group, LLC. and STAcquisition Holdings LLC. for the sole purpose of extending its reach in providing news and information to educate and inform the public through local and independent journalism through print and digital publications, websites, mobile apps, social media, and community engagement.

In October 2022, CSTM transitioned to a membership-supported donation model and removed its paywall from chicago.suntimes.com to make its digital content available as a public good.

Through an Administrative Services Agreement, Chicago Public Media, Inc. and Chicago Sun-Times Media, Inc. share resources to conduct business related to further their charitable and educational purposes. Shared resources from Chicago Public Media, Inc. to Chicago Sun-Times Media, Inc. totaled $3,225,254 and $2,433,803 as of June 30, 2024 and 2023 respectively, which are eliminated upon consolidation.

The Sun-Times itself is a 501c3 nonprofit, but CPM is the sole member and seemingly has full control over its board.

So I guess that’s mostly good news? Hopefully CPM and CSTM (Chicago Sun-Times Media) see the value in having a community like this, but who’s to say? It’s possible they don’t even know we still exist. As far as I can tell, we’re not mentioned directly in their Form 990 report to the IRS, so maybe it’s just rolled up in their ongoing expenses…

Several contacts are listed there and we could reach out to one of them, but that has a risk of backfiring… not sure we’d want to draw that kind of attention to ourselves. At least not without substantial buy-in and some sort of realistic plan/offer from a large portion of existing board members first.

But it’s tricky. Act too soon and maybe we cause the premature death of the boards. Act too late and maybe it dies without warning when we could’ve saved it. I’m not sure when the best time to take action is, if ever.

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well, we could ~~exile~~ host it in Ecuador or Bolivia and forget about the legal aspects of the problem …

(yep, I have been living in LatAm for too long, and acquired a certain pragmatic sense of the normative power of factual realities)