I've answered this a number of times in Discord, so I'm going to lay it out in a post so that I have the whole thing in one place.
Keeping the history from OG1 is very important to me. I want to make sure that we still have all the old threads as we move to the new site. The problem is that our old host doesn't allow me to transfer our old data to the new forum. (Their TOS says that all posts are technically their property, and don't belong to us at all. Needless to say, if I knew then what I know now, we never would have settled there.)
So, options:
-Monkey is going to be running a webcrawler over OG1 as part of her research project, and has graciously offered to give us the data she retrieves from that, which should give us more or less a full backup of the site. The problem with that is that this is against the former host's TOS, so if they get wind, they could shut the forum down. If this happens after we get the backup, fine. If it happens before or during the backup, we're screwed.
-To help deal with that, I'm also discreetly taking my own backups of the site via screenshots and text. It's not ideal, but if all else fails, we'll have something.
-We also can make links directly to the forum. This is basically a plan in case Monkey can't or won't do the webcrawl. I can make links that look like forum threads but direct to the threads on OG1. The danger here is the worry that if OG1 sits idle for a year or so, the host may decide to just wipe it. So backups would still be in order.
I think that more or less covers the situation. Again, I won't abandon our old game data. We will find a way to move the archives, one way or another.
Keeping the history from OG1 is very important to me. I want to make sure that we still have all the old threads as we move to the new site. The problem is that our old host doesn't allow me to transfer our old data to the new forum. (Their TOS says that all posts are technically their property, and don't belong to us at all. Needless to say, if I knew then what I know now, we never would have settled there.)
So, options:
-Monkey is going to be running a webcrawler over OG1 as part of her research project, and has graciously offered to give us the data she retrieves from that, which should give us more or less a full backup of the site. The problem with that is that this is against the former host's TOS, so if they get wind, they could shut the forum down. If this happens after we get the backup, fine. If it happens before or during the backup, we're screwed.
-To help deal with that, I'm also discreetly taking my own backups of the site via screenshots and text. It's not ideal, but if all else fails, we'll have something.
-We also can make links directly to the forum. This is basically a plan in case Monkey can't or won't do the webcrawl. I can make links that look like forum threads but direct to the threads on OG1. The danger here is the worry that if OG1 sits idle for a year or so, the host may decide to just wipe it. So backups would still be in order.
I think that more or less covers the situation. Again, I won't abandon our old game data. We will find a way to move the archives, one way or another.
