The Terms of Service contain this paragraph under Copyrighted material..
Reuse of posted material. 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 license to reuse your posting in any manner it or they see fit without notice or compensation to you.
We do not own any of our posts. We can reuse our own posts and I assume quote others if doing so conforms to fair use but cannot do so as a whole without express written permission from STM, which is short for Sun-Times Media, LLC. (Assuming that STM is even the proper place to ask, with ownership blurred as in @Reply’s post.) Transfer of copyright ownership is legally permissible but, another assumption, lawyers would have to be involved and total agreement from STM sought. Does anyone here other than Ed Zotti have any idea who at STM to contact given that blur? And lawyers cost more money than servers.
As for the Giraffe Boards:
With heavy irony, discussion of that historical baggage is forbidden here per the rule on no board wars. If the GB bought the rights to the Dope, the irony meter would explode.
Giraffe Boards is not the answer – it is its own thing with its own unique culture. What GB shows us, along with the other example I cited, is just how easy it is to just start up another message board.
As for the legalities you cite, again, IANAL and incompetent to comment on what they might be, but what you cite reads to me like standard legal boilerplate and not necessarily an obstacle to amicably making the site an independent self-funded entity with the blessing of STM, with the entirety of the existing posting database. If they don’t care about us now, why would they care about their supposed IP rights later?
Scions of SDMB, my siblings! I read in your words the same fear that would take the heart of me. A day may come when the courage of dopers fails, when we forsake our friends and break all bonds of Straightdopeness, but it is not this day! An hour of trolls and smelly socks, when the age of fighting ignorance comes crashing down, but it is not this day! This day we Cite!! By all that you hold dear on this good website, I bid you stand, scions of this board!
I self host a small Discourse instance, and it is very easy to setup and manage, for someone who knows how to do similar things. It all runs in Docker containers, and setup is much more complicated than just editing a docker-compose.yml file, but the necessary documentation exists, and is easy enough to follow the instructions.
It works fine behind a reverse proxy, and seems to play well with others. Mine has it’s own hostname, and is hosted on a server that hosts web stuff, too.
The data is trivially portable. I’ve not yet had to restore my site, but it does make automated backups, which can be restored.
The technical aspects of recreating the board are very easy. It is only the legal aspects.
It would also be pretty easy to restore the board, and then strip the SDMB branding. So getting permission to use the content could be separated from using the trademarks.
I’m not as sanguine. IANAL but my interpretation of copyright law is that we can’t do anything with previous posts or the Straight Dope name without STM permission. Who would want to go ahead with that kind of liability hanging over them?
A new board? Sure. That’s doable and legal. But the GB was launched 16 years ago in a different era for message boards. And if you go over there you’ll notice there is no mention of the Straight Dope Message Board by that name even in thread titles discussing the Dope. Very sensible, but not a good look for an unblessed successor board.
GB would probably have to be just a way station. But most of the Mods have accounts there and several of us post regularly. I’m there mostly for the megapolls.
@hajario, of course I would help out. I suspect many other Mods would also. But a SDMB follow up board would probably need to be created on modern software.
I just hope that if this board does leave, some option will exist for users to retrieve their own posts for personal archival purposes, since there are multiple times in my life where this board was a pretty decent record of what was going on in my life at that time, and I’d kind of like to have that personal history.
How to download your entire posting history from day 1:
Click your avatar at upper right on any page. Click the person icon at the bottom right of the popup. That brings up your profile page. Click “Preferences” at the right of the upper row of menu choices. That should auto-select the leftmost choice on the second row of menu choices: “Account”. If “Account” isn’t selected, click it. Now you’re on the right page.
Scroll down and near the bottom you’ll see a heading “Export your data” with a button just below labeled [Request archive]. Click that button. An “Are you sure?” popup will appear. Click [Yes]. Another popup will appear saying “we’re working on it”. Click [OK] to dismiss that.
That’s almost all you have to do.
The system will do an export of all your work, make it into a zipfile, then notify you when it’s ready. For my pretty hefty corpus of work, that took about a minute then a DM appeared in my notifications. The DM is from “system” and is titled “[User Archive] Data export is complete”. Click that to open the DM. Which has a link to click to download your archive to your PC.
The zip file contains several files, most of which aren’t important to you. The big one is all your posts. The format of that file isn’t too friendly to a non-IT person, but even if you can’t make it all pretty, you can at least find all your prose organized by date.
If you can see it on Discourse now, it’ll be in your archive.
You might try doing a Discourse search for [@me before:2001-01-01] to see what it shows. If nothing, move that date forward in time in the search until it finds whatever are the earliest posts it has.
ETA: I beleive the export will contain all your Discourse DMs. But … I believe that when we came over from vBulletin, the PMs from vBulletin were deliberately not transferred. So your PM/DM history begins with Discourse in June 2020. And has been that way ever since the cutover.
I worry about this sometimes. This place (and all of you) mean a lot to me. I have been a member of the SDMB for nearly 25 years now, and according to my stats have visited the board for over 4,000 days over that time period.
But I have no doubt the board could go dark…I just hope it doesn’t happen any time soon.
(It’s not the same thing as a message board community, but just a few weeks ago, Intuit/TurboTax eliminated their whole ItsDeductible product line and website that I have been using every year since 2003. I found this out one week after it went dark…and one week too late to download my information before they deleted everything.)
Anyway, I would really miss this board if this ever comes to pass. I guess my plan is to check out the GB, Facebook page, and Reddit page if this happens.
I seem to recall discussions years ago that the only reason we exist is because accountants at our owner company/newspaper apparently have never looked deep enough into the books to realize that we’re costing them $4,000 a year (or some sum like that.) Is that true? That somehow, someone’s credit card or bank account is being set up for automatic payments on a regular basis to (some other entity that needs to be paid), and we’re just 1 audit or missed payment away from going dark?
