Currently, as a super moderator of another old forums that's an affiliate of Blizzard Entertainment (I don't acknowledge Activision in this case.), we are logging our forum history, along with old members' stories and how they joined our forums, I wondered about some other old forums, and sought about looking for their own forum histories. (For those of you interested in our forum history layout and the structure of maintaining a timeline, you may visit this portal here.)

This is one recent thread that smacked me with this idea. Thanks to those who came from 2003 and before, I realized that even this heavily moderated forum is also unable to contain its fun times. And I do get curious about those events from time to time, wishing I was a part of it in some way.

So, I was thinking, those who are forum staff members of any forums you have joined over the years (10+, 20+, etc.), how would you think if you were a part of history? That you influenced the way your forum(s) went, and become an irreplaceable part of it?

Especially since the recent takedown of an old (10.5 years) site called isoHunt, many followers of that site felt like Demonoid is down all over again. Then there's the ArchiveTeam that wishes to preserve the site, so it is remembered by writing it down into Internet Web history.

Would you also create a GameDev.net history site? Maybe us newcomers can learn a thing or two about its history and evolution, because that would be great for web designers who studies the evolution of web designs, from the past, bland-looking monotone colors to what it is today.

We still have posts from way back in 2000 available on the site.

We've preserved most everything through the ages, even if its not always easy to access.

In fact, the oldest post I can find is from 1999... http://www.gamedev.net/topic/2420-the-davidrm/

back in 2005, i joined qj.nets forums, had good times, mod staff was cool for a few years, however in 2009(iirc), there were alot of disputes between mods and admins, the admins were pretty much absent from the buzzing forums, and the owners of qj just were out for making money, the forum mods didn't have any say in how the site was being ran, but were the only ones who cared about the thriving community at the time. this caused the mods to split from qj, and create mformature.net, alot of regulars and mods migrated to there simply because they now had the capability to make the community better. this lasted for a couple years, before we merged with exophase.net. this revitalized both exophase and m4m's communitys for a short while, however, for whatever reason, exophase's community seems to have just vanished over the years. most likely because while we maintained many regulars for a long time, we coudn't seem to get new members to stay around. over time those regulars(myself included), simply stopped visting regularly. in short, most of my enjoyable forum history is spread across three sites, and while it probably all still exists, it'd be quite hard to follow.

honestly, most of it is pointless. the only posts/threads that should be archived are those which provide some type of substancial value.

I'd say keep it all. Forum text archives hardly take up terabytes of space and they contain a piece of history, which in my opinion is always worth retaining if at all possible. So many valuable forums and websites blink in and out of existence, left to be forgotten, without a single bit of information about them remaining soon afterwards, and I find it rather sad that all that content should be lost rather than conserved in some archive somewhere. It doesn't even have to be maintained to the standards of a virtual museum, just being there is enough, those who are interested in the archives will know how to get to them.

And before someone mentions it, archive.org is not bullet-proof and occasionally completely misses some websites due to configuration errors.

I'm not sure I get the question.

Data is supposed to stay there... or not?

I'd be interested in knowing how much data is gdnet forum content.

Storage space is cheap enough that preserving forum posts is pretty manageable. But I also think that in the context of a social forum, deep archiving is of kind of limited value. A lot of stuff is "you had to be there" type stuff. For a technical forum, a lot of information becomes obsolete and more so the further back you go. So a site like GameDev, which is both, is one for which I'm unlikely to look back too often (though some people are having fun reminiscing about 2003 right now).

But if you can save it, even without any sort of routine free access, why not? Some future grad student will be thankful.

Choose carefully case-by-case which threads to keep.

Some technology is obviously obsolete and threads about them need to be taken out the public eye to avoid misleading people.

Select wisely because some threads have timeless advice.

Choose carefully case-by-case which threads to keep.

Are you jocking?

Look, Krohm

Most people are aware of the careless (as in sloppy) trends in the world as people look for shortcuts, throwing things and people like blankets into over-generalized categories, such as stereotyping. Face it: This is a throw-away world!

IT,and in particular game development, needs to buck the trend in the world to deal with information on a case by case basis. There is a trove of useful and interesting information from threads a lot of years ago.

As for the world, it is in grave danger in the future of forgetting much of the great things which are timeless due to the easy-come-easy-go nature of the information age. With each generation of new technology, knowledge base and sometimes profound understanding kinds of heritage are gone forever.

This website may or may not be able to resist its own nature to quickly acquire and discard information, but the few people who aggressively use the Search utility would be glad that good information was preserved. The worth of the Search function would be less if the data base is shallow, in my opinion.

We live in an increasingly shallow thinking world, but game development is the opposite in requiring developers to dig deep to get what they need.

I say keep the knowledge base!

Yes, thank you for the reality check. Who is going to decide what's valuable and what's not. How? When? And with what resources? This task is daunting.