The Escapist Countdown to Shutdown Thread: What’s Next?

[sXeth]

Honestly, Escapist heyday activity would kind of suck too. Like 2009-2011 era, when there could be tens of thousands of users online all at once, and threads moved so fast that by the time you finished writing a post the thread could be several pages ahead already. I have a lot of fondness for those days, but despite the discussion value rule, it was actually kind of hard to hold one.

Kind of the problem with using Discord too. A community of any size will basicaly blaze the feed fast as you can type (IE the only time you can have an actualy conversation on the Wayfinder (a single game that has currently a pretty minute playerbase) is like, 1-4am.

There are comparitively hundreds (if not thousands I didnt bother scrolling down past the patreon backers group) of people in the Second Wind discord

(and yeah just glanced and at 3:08 there were already the 50+ new messages in the videogame section lol)

 

[hanselthecaretaker2]

From the discord page -

Discord - Group Chat That’s All Fun & Games

Discord is great for playing games and chilling with friends, or even building a worldwide community. Customize your own space to talk, play, and hang out.

discord.com

https://vxtwitter.com/nickjcal/status/1722613420959453658 @everyone let's try this again. We are well on our way to being completely self-funded on Patreon!

This is a separate accomplishment from funding our first year via the planned Kickstarter and Investment. We had zero expectations to be at this so quickly, but I think by next week will surpass our internal target to hit!

 

[hanselthecaretaker2]

I just threw my proverbial hat in the ring for Second Wind and became a supporter. Hoping for a forum or something other than just the discord mishmash of “discussions” down the road, but also realize that’s a longer term luxury item.

 

[CriticalGaming]

I just threw my proverbial hat in the ring for Second Wind and became a supporter. Hoping for a forum or something other than just the discord mishmash of “discussions” down the road, but also realize that’s a longer term luxury item.

did you donate to that "Get my original name back" tier?

 

[hanselthecaretaker2]

did you donate to that "Get my original name back" tier?

Guessing that tier would be about as effective as it’d be here.

Technically though I’m still the og hanselthecaretaker on discord at least.

 

[CriticalGaming]

Guessing that tier would be about as effective as it’d be here.

Technically though I’m still the og hanselthecaretaker on discord at least.

How did you come up with the name?

 

[SilentPony]

did you donate to that "Get my original name back" tier?

Which tier is that? I'm not seeing that as a feature on the patreon

 

[Thaluikhain]

What’s pretty shitty is I have a feeling if this forum does go under that we won’t even get a warning. It’ll just be gone.

Yup. You'll try to access the site and it's not there, or you'll hit "post reply" and, nope.

 

[Chimpzy]

... 404

 

[Elvis Starburst]

Kind of the problem with using Discord too. A community of any size will basicaly blaze the feed fast as you can type

Exactly my issue with Discord servers. I'm either in ones that don't have much going on at all, or am in ones that go by too fast and I can't be bothered to try and keep up. It ends up with me just hanging in the servers for when I need them rather than really trying to actively engage.
A younger me might've been able to go along with the flow, but not these days. It's why these kinds of forums are nice. Even Reddit wasn't too bad for my required kind of flow, but then we all know what happened with them earlier in the year... and now I'm off of there.
Though, oddly enough... even though Brawlman's suggestion with the SpaceBattles forum sounds like what I'd want, I'm looking at it and seeing it's waaayyy more active than here... almost to a point of being too active for me. I'm at a slight loss on this whole thing.
...
Am I getting old?

 

[CriticalGaming]

Exactly my issue with Discord servers. I'm either in ones that don't have much going on at all, or am in ones that go by too fast and I can't be bothered to try and keep up. It ends up with me just hanging in the servers for when I need them rather than really trying to actively engage.
A younger me might've been able to go along with the flow, but not these days. It's why these kinds of forums are nice. Even Reddit wasn't too bad for my required kind of flow, but then we all know what happened with them earlier in the year... and now I'm off of there.
Though, oddly enough... even though Brawlman's suggestion with the SpaceBattles forum sounds like what I'd want, I'm looking at it and seeing it's waaayyy more active than here... almost to a point of being too active for me. I'm at a slight loss on this whole thing.
...
Am I getting old?

We all are.

 

[meiam]

Is running a forum really that resource intensive? I though it was just something you left alone adn only checked if it started to smell moldy nazy.

 

[Bartholen]

So uh, is there any kind of way to draw all of my post history to some sort of doc that can be stored offline? I have literally 1,5 decades of messages on this forum and its predecessor. It's the closest thing I've ever had to a diary or a journal. Would be a shame to lose it all.

 

[BrawlMan]

So uh, is there any kind of way to draw all of my post history to some sort of doc that can be stored offline? I have literally 1,5 decades of messages on this forum and its predecessor. It's the closest thing I've ever had to a diary or a journal. Would be a shame to lose it all.

I suggest you start copying and pasting into notepad or Microsoft Words. Once this entire web site and forum is gone, that is it.

 

[hanselthecaretaker2]

How did you come up with the name?

Lol it’s been over twenty years ago now but IIRC it was after a night of drinking/smoking at school and thinking about a character whom I’d half misnamed from a movie I had just laughed my ass off over. I think I first used the handle at the library signing up on a fitness forum and then it just carried over to nearly everything else.

 

[Gordon_4]

Here's to us, lads.

 

[BrawlMan]

​

 

[Chimpzy]

Is running a forum really that resource intensive? I though it was just something you left alone adn only checked if it started to smell moldy nazy.

I don't think so. Gamurs also owns Destructoid and Siliconera, and their respective forums are still up, tho the former is abandoned by its userbase for a couple years now, and same for the latter but also overrun by bots. So it's possible Gamurs don't care enough to do anything more than turn the website proper into a content farm and leave everything else as is.

But I don't feel comfortable leaving it at the whims of soulless corpos, who would probably flip the lights without warning.

If there's any impetus to keep our thing going, we should be looking into a backup plan, sooner than later. Migrate to one of the few active forums left, set up our own Discord or subreddit, or move to Second Wind. Or whatever other idea.

 

[sXeth]

Yeah running a forum is pretty painless, but if you were here, remember when they stopped paying even loose attention to the old Escapist forums and almost every section was overrun by thousands of bot posts.

 

[Chimpzy]

Yeah running a forum is pretty painless, but if you were here, remember when they stopped paying even loose attention to the old Escapist forums and almost every section was overrun by thousands of bot posts.

That's actually already true, minus the overrun by bots part. There's been no admin since december 2022. JoJo is the only left with any ability to manage the place, if only limited.