Lachesis, on 13 February 2018 - 10:34 PM, said:
I don't think you're necessarily wrong that the community would benefit from having an active subreddit or that it could replace the forum. My thoughts on this:
- There is a fairly active Discord server for MZX. The majority of MZX-related conversation occurs on Discord these days.
- The subreddit is run by (relative) unknowns to the community who don't seem to be particularly active here, on Discord, or on their own subreddit. The last thing posted on r/megazeux is a hip retrospective from 2 years ago about how MZX sucks and is dead. Having more users in the subreddit would be great, but I don't think the current base is about to move there. First, many MZXers have found Discord infinitely more convenient than a forum (particularly phone users) and the Discord server is already well-established, so they might not want to move or split their attention. Second, the subreddit has next to no activity. I'm not against getting myself an account and cross-posting MZX releases there, but I don't know how much it will help.
- The forum does need to be replaced for other reasons. Just retiring it would be less work than a migration, but...
- The vault is tied to forum accounts, and decoupling them—or more likely finishing my vault rewrite, which has this built-in—would require more work than I can take on at the moment.
- As a board plugin, the trackers are significantly tied to the forum. They have giant redirect links on the forum front page and still few enough people report anything there as it is. They could be migrated elsewhere, but it'd require users to get another login somewhere else. I'm not against this, and I even opened up the issues section of the Github repository to see if we'd get any reports there (so far 0). This might happen regardless, but we'd need to find somewhere else for our non-MegaZeux trackers or bin them.
- The wiki is tied to forum accounts (yes, it still exists). A significant amount of MZX info, tutorials, and Day of Zeux archives are stored here, and while some of this info—i.e. development instructions and tutorials—would be a good fit for a Github wiki, the rest wouldn't be. This could probably be decoupled with less effort than the vault, but I don't know enough about MediaWiki to say for sure.
- It's useful to be able to log into the forum and search it for historical purposes.
- Significant overhauls regarding these are being actively considered.
tl;dr i'm intrigued, but not convinced
Reddit also offers subreddit wikis, but a lot of the material we have there (about archived competitions and whatnot) just doesn't seem like a fit. Like, is
Winter 2014 Dualstream Day of Zeux suitable to be on a subreddit wiki? Or
Cans or
Ripster88? I guess it's up to the way we organize it, but... eh I dunno it would seam weird to have the products of such a tight-knit group on a big open thing like the subreddit. Who the heck are the owner and mods there anyway?
On the other hand, migrating MediaWiki to another MediaWiki install is fairly easy; they offer a bunch of scripts in the install directory, at maintenance/grab*.php, just had to do that recently though I cannot speak for what happens to user accounts.
So yeah, the concerns are:
- the Vault, The Vault, The Vault!
- Ownership of subreddit
- Dichotomy of community history versus executable-related content and where that would fit in "someone else's turf" i.e. reddit
- Moving MediaWiki to wherever it's going
This post has been edited by CJA: 16 February 2018 - 12:24 PM
Need a dispenser here.