Might I suggest seeing if it’s possible to just migrate the data to a more modern format used by some sort of modern open source forum software?
I mean the genius of the OGS forums is that the OGS dev team doesn’t have to do anything. The only downside is that any custom code/plugins would be lost, but I wonder if it’s worth the trade off.
@Feijoa shared a way to do that: What happened to the lifein19x19 forum? It's back 🥳 - #16
Ahhh, I didn’t read the whole chain because I’d assumed that surely if someone had suggested that already the issue would have been solved.
While I’m not saying it’s a bad thing, I’m not following how that solves things - the current problem requires a phpbb expert. A migration would require a phpbb expert and a discourse expert, right?
*term “expert” is used loosely: someone who knows enough to get things running and keep it running
I’m afraid that the first thing that this problem requires is that those people talk with each other: @apetresc, @Brian, @Jordus, and probably @Uberdude, and @Joaz_Banbeck.
Unless they talk with each other, nothing’s gonna happen, and then L19 is dead 
I don’t think it’s even a multi-person thing. Just needs someone who can perform the upgrades.
I wouldn’t be so pessimistic - @apetresc has mentioned he could get to it in the next couple months if no one else can.
Ahhh, I didn’t open the link. It looks like it has almost a two hour read time. I thought it was just a simple ready to go script.
Any news? Have you L19 Admin folks given up?
I’m holding out faith! I personally can’t stand Discourse’s UI/UX, and hope they manage to eventually get things up and running and staying on (a more recent version of) phpBB.
Wish I could meaningfully contribute to the efforts, but it’s been a good ~2 decades (ouch) since I meaningfully wrote PHP or raw MySQL migrations.
The problem I see is that if something doesn’t happen soon-ish, all the valuable old contributors will move on and might never even come back to look whether L19 is up again
Last I heard (from you trodhe) was Adrian was doing some restore work last month, ahead of his previous estimate of October.
What is this read (presumably) only mode of which you speak? Is it a phpBB feature that exists, or your imagination? Do you propose keeping the phpBB software on its ancient version or upgrading?
Sorry, just tried to help. Ignore what I wrote.
I can be a volunteer helper, if such is needed. I am not an expert in the techs mentioned above, but have done just about everything in software dev at one time or another. Send me a reply if you want to get in touch. It might take me a few days to notice, but things don’t seem to be moving quickly here anyway. Hope this can be resurrected!
still lucky. unlike gogameguru
I’m not 100% sure but I think what really took GoGameGuru down was that someone distributed the PDF of their book “Relentless” when they had just published it.
I hadn’t heard that, I thought it was because running an international shop was too much hassle for a part-time hobby job.
Any news on L19?
The 1/16 German in me wants to combine Lifein19x19 with the German Language Forum into one, not because of any bias of course but for the sake of German efficiency saying it’s more sensible, haha, and preferably rather than having different forums for different European languages, combine all of them into one forum, reducing the chance of being shut down and losing valuable data as there would be more administrators from all the forums, and domestic conflicts in countries’ associations can be solved from the outside perspective
El0m, it might make sense to ask the German admins if you could do a read-only mirror of important L19 threads on a sub-forum of their site. However to get access to the data you’ll (presumably) need to wait for Adrian to restore it from the old database version, and even then there is no guarantee that the custom feature integration on L19 will load on the German forum (it’s also a BBCode forum iirc, but I have no idea whether they implement SGF players and diagrams in the same way).