Hello, my name is Pierre, also a user of lifein19x19 forum with the same username (āpnprogā, also used on reddit, githubā¦).
About 2 days ago, I sent an email to Adrian, to propose my help to migrate the forum to the latest phpBB. I am not an expert of phpBB, but if we wait until we find one, we may wait forever. I spent some time playing with phpBB, setting up the old version used on lifein19x19 running on my computer and reading about the update process. My conclusion is that it would still be easier and better to update to the latest phpBB (instead of migrating to a different forum technology).
I have a āconcept of a planā so to speak, and now awaiting for Adrianās reply.
This is just to report that following my email to Adrian 2 weeks ago, I did not receive any reply. I sent one more email early last week from a different mail provider (in case the first one got flagged as spam) but no answer so far.
Maybe someone from the forum that knows how to contact him can help? Maybe @trohde ?
We are starting the Chinese New Year break here, and I have plenty of free time on hand this week, I was hoping to start now.
Hello, @pnprog ā Iāve just sent Adrian an email too, to the address that I have ā¦ asked him to please follow up here, even if it is with bad news and/or maybe tell us what he thinks is needed to revive L19.
I was never on l19x19 (maybe had a user, but never regular), was the value of that forum mostly the ongoing discussion, or are there lots historical threads and stuff that would be valuable to be able to reference?
Creating some kind of read-only archive sounds way easier than restoring the full r/w forum, but I donāt know if itās worth pressing for that at all, if the value of the forum was in the community and place for ongoing discussion.
Yes there were high-quality contributions from John Fairbairn, Robert Jasiek, kvasir, Knotwilg (although he was less active recently),ā¦ A few years ago, Bill Spight and Kirby were prolific contributors. But I feel that the forum has become much less lively these last few years, and Iām afraid that even if it is repaired, being disconnected for one year will kill it.
Yes, this ā because, how will the members even learn that it has been revived, if that ever happens? The forum admin would have to send out an email ā¦
Meanwhile Iām afraid the main admin resp. owner of the domain have other interests ā or are inconvenienced in some way ā¦ we cannot know if they donāt communicate with us.
Hey everyone. Iām recovering as much of Life in 19x19 as possible from Wayback snapshots and rebuilding it into a publicly accessible, read-only archive.
Iām not involved with lifein19x19 in any way. Iām not sure if I even had an account there. However, I hate to see it go down.
For the past days I set out to preserve the information and present all there is in an easy to browse way, in a single āforum styleā archive, rather than scattered accross waybackmachine snapshots.
Scope: recover the forum content (categories, topics, posts, users) and make it easy to browse.
Out of scope: Any form of posting or reviving it as a working forum.
Status
21000+ posts are recovered in 2800 topics. This seems to be everything waybackmachine has.
Posts are generally well-preserved.
Forum categories and usernames are partially okay. Some are correct, others are just a number. Iām currently improving this.
Attached SGFās are preserved and downloadable. (~50 sgf files found).
The custom Go diagram/editor is remade, so SGF/diagram posts remain readable. This generally works. Some diagrams are offset by a line or a stone, that needs some extra attention
It will not be the same as a proper backup of the forum, so gaps are expected. But the goal is to make the historical content easy to browse for the whole community.
If an original backup becomes available later, I can integrate it as well.
Access the Life in 19x19 āreaderā:
Let me know if you see issues other than the ones Iāve mentioned above.
As for myself, I wasnāt contacted by Adrian after I emailed him. So still waiting.
I am still volunteering to help migrate the forum to a newest version whenever Adrian has time, but for the time being, if I donāt post an update here, you can assume that Adrian did not contact me back.
It turns out Claude was the missing phpBB expert Iād been missing all along. Over the course of a few dedicated sessions with a prod snapshot I set up locally, we were able to meticulously migrate 100% of the database to a brand new instance of the very latest phpBB (3.3.15). As far as I can tell, nothing at all was lost (with the exception of 15 āorphanedā PMs between deleted user accounts).
Thereās a few loose ends left to tie up, mainly around the [sgf] and [go] tags and the theme files, but these should not prove to be a big problem. I expect to bring the site back up live within the next 24-48 hours, so stay tuned!
Thank you again for your patience. I will be responding to @pnprogās generous offer for support later this week to hopefully onboard him on the development process moving forward so the bus factor for the board is never as low as it has been up to now.
For the future, I think the best course of action would be to publish the php code that runs the forum (especially the custom code that display the SGF and gobans) on github, together with a small testing database (a few threads that uses our custom features) and instructions to run it locally.
This way, every time there is a new phpBB release, itās easy to download the code, try a migration and patch the php code appropriately, so as to not let the forum version lag too much. And when the migration to a new version has been tested, then the migration of the full database and updated php code can be pushed to the real server.
and/or maybe tell us what he thinks is needed to revive L19.
