Goodman Games

Hello everyone!

It's been a long time since I posted on here. I still remember about 20 years ago when we first started these forums!

I'm here to let you all know that we’re migrating our comms elsewhere! Goodman Games has outgrown its web forums. The software we use for these forums is incompatible with the direction we’re moving for the rest of our site, and it's been causing problems. So we will be shutting the forums down in about a month.

That’s four weeks to migrate important information elsewhere, stay in touch with contacts, etc.

We still do most of our communication through our Facebook page: https://www.facebook.com/dccrpg/

You can also keep up with us at our official discord site: https://discord.gg/bSR5SGg

Thanks for all the support from the greatest fans in gaming over the many years of our forums — we look forward to seeing you on Facebook and Discord!

It certainly had a very hey-y heyday in it's time -- perhaps the heyiest -- the obvious precursor to the amazing modern DCC RPG Community.

If we provide a disk, can you download the internet for us to use -- or at least this forum in its entirety?

goodmangames wrote: ↑Thu Apr 25, 2024 1:14 pmThat’s four weeks to migrate important information elsewhere, stay in touch with contacts, etc.

Sorry to hear that you are having to close down your forums.

I'm an admin at another forum, called The Piazza. Our founder Ashtagon set up The Piazza, back in 2008, when Wizards of the Coast decided they were unable to provide forum support for out of print Dungeons & Dragons campaign settings

We have expanded well beyond that since then. There have been a number of people talking about individual Goodman Games products, in various different parts of our forums, over the years. It's not quite got to the stage where something like a bespoke DragonMech forum or a bespoke DCC RPG forum has become viable for us. But if anyone wants to migrate a topic from your forums onto our forums, so that they can continue the discussion in a phpBB forum environment, we would be happy with that.

We did have a number of TORG fans migrate to our forums in 2020, when their previous home got shut down. And that worked out pretty well. So maybe we might be able to have bespoke forums for some old and new Goodman Games settings and systems on The Piazza in the future...if that is something your forum members are interested in.

(We do also have an industry news forum, if Goodman Games staff want to come and announce new products, Kickstarter programs, etc.)

I logged on here for the first time since 2016, apparently.
According to my account profile, I joined these forums all the way back in 2002.
So long, and thanks for all the fish. And the memories.
Good times.

Is there a way to archive the forums before they go away? I know a lot of people talk about everything that was lost when the G+ forums went away. Maybe it could be hosted on the Internet Archives?

Well, so long & thanks for all the fish.

I might see some over at the GG discord, but there are so many notifications I had to silence all of them so I can sleep during the day.

Unfortunately, I won't be seeing anyone on facebook, as I have reduced my web presence to the bare minimum for close friends & family there.

Hope you continue to have a forum in some capacity.
Driving your community engagement to third party platforms, instead of using the platforms to funnel to your siteis a bad decision IMHO.

Archiving the old forum and starting afresh is understandable.

Engagement on those platforms is specific to age ranges and susceptible to the platforms own ensh*ttification which is gradually making them untenable for the people who do use them.

Best of luck. So sad to hear it.

So, I've webscraped the forums, and seem to have a complete copy on my machine. It appears that I can move through the forums locally on my machine (although I cannot login or the like). I just let my machine run into it was done, sometime over night. As there have been new posts, I can update the archive periodically. If we get a hard shutdown date, I can be sure to update the archive the day before.

So, unlike the losses from Google+, most everything will be saved. I have come across a post where the initial post was deleted by its creator. As the conversation wasn't backed up on the internet archive, things like that are just gone.

<Having mentioned that, to avoid vandalism, I'll be making a second copy of the archive next - in case other posts are deleted moving forward>

...and I've already found a problem. It appears that, when there are multiple pages showing as 1 2 3 4 5 ... 14, it did not grab pages 6-13. I'm going to need to see how to fix that. So, everything isn't archived yet.

Back to the drawing board.

Ceronomus wrote: ↑Fri May 03, 2024 7:12 am...and I've already found a problem. It appears that, when there are multiple pages showing as 1 2 3 4 5 ... 14, it did not grab pages 6-13. I'm going to need to see how to fix that. So, everything isn't archived yet.

Back to the drawing board.

Good luck!

I remember someone doing that with the Gleemax forums, thinking they got a working copy and then finding out it was not working afterwards.

So a word of advice would be to specifically disable your Internet connection, when testing your archive, so that, if you have anything that hotlinks over to here, it will appear broken when you still have time to do something about it.

Yeah, I'm still having problems. It is getting strange my last attempt actually ended up storing the smallest amount on my drive after reportedly downloading over 110 GB. Something really strange. I keep getting a PANIC: too many links error, which might be what is killing my attempts.

I encourage everyone to keep trying. If need be, I'll try doing this a forum topic at a time.

Wait? What?
Oh no. I'm finally not working two jobs any longer and am interesting in setting aside time to start getting back into the forum boards and they are being shut down? That is terrible news.
Doubly so as I'm not on Facebook or discord in any real sense.

goodmangames wrote: ↑Thu Apr 25, 2024 1:14 pm Hello everyone!

It's been a long time since I posted on here. I still remember about 20 years ago when we first started these forums!

I'm here to let you all know that we’re migrating our comms elsewhere! Goodman Games has outgrown its web forums. The software we use for these forums is incompatible with the direction we’re moving for the rest of our site, and it's been causing problems. So we will be shutting the forums down in about a month.

That’s four weeks to migrate important information elsewhere, stay in touch with contacts, etc.

We still do most of our communication through our Facebook page: https://www.facebook.com/dccrpg/

You can also keep up with us at our official discord site: https://discord.gg/bSR5SGg

Thanks for all the support from the greatest fans in gaming over the many years of our forums — we look forward to seeing you on Facebook and Discord!

Very sorry to hear it, Joseph! These boards are wonderful documents of their time and hold a lot of treasure, and I'm glad to have had time to delve into them. They helped a lot in my transformation from TTRPG-curious dillettante to full-on Judge. Facebook (personal data cartel, don't use it myself) and Discord (too cluttered) just aren't the same.

Is it possible to leave the forums up at least through the end of May (two more weeks) so that everyone can have time to make their backups? I just saw this notice yesterday.

Ceronomus wrote: ↑Sat May 11, 2024 7:02 am Yeah, I'm still having problems. It is getting strange my last attempt actually ended up storing the smallest amount on my drive after reportedly downloading over 110 GB. Something really strange. I keep getting a PANIC: too many links error, which might be what is killing my attempts.

I encourage everyone to keep trying. If need be, I'll try doing this a forum topic at a time.

Yeah, it's tough with the phpBB format as everything links to everything, and there are a lot of links you have to be signed in to see. I'm trying too, using some commands someone online recommended for it, and it's deleting a lot of the fluff but also not rendering the style and formatting, so it's a little hard to read. Better than nothing though! There's a lot of great stuff on here and it's important that people are backing it up in one way or another.

Would it be possible for these forum boards to make their way to the Wayback Machine located at http://web.archive.org/ ?

JediOre wrote: ↑Wed May 15, 2024 12:36 pm Would it be possible for these forum boards to make their way to the Wayback Machine located at http://web.archive.org/ ?

A lot of the older stuff is backed up there already, and I'm submitting some extra URLs now to try to fill in more of the gaps. Hopefully, the forums will stay open for another couple of weeks so that it all can be properly crawled.

Ceronomus wrote: ↑Fri May 03, 2024 7:12 am ...and I've already found a problem. It appears that, when there are multiple pages showing as 1 2 3 4 5 ... 14, it did not grab pages 6-13. I'm going to need to see how to fix that. So, everything isn't archived yet.

Back to the drawing board.

Sounds like it's not going deeply enough into the links, only grabbing one order of what's visible? In other words, it might be grabbing page 5 from that screen (page 1) but not going deeper and reading the links on page 5 itself (or 2, 3, 4, or 14, which would link to pages 6, 7, 12, 13, etc.).