What happened to the lifein19x19 forum? 😱

https://lifein19x19.com gives me “404 page not found”

At least since the 15th June

I’ve seen some people talking about it, sending an email or two to the owner etc, no update that I can see so far.

This reddit discussion (https://www.reddit.com/r/baduk/comments/1l5wbzv/lifein19x19_down/) suggests that it may have been down since earlier in June

copy of pages about OGS on LifeIn19x19:

https://web.archive.org/web/20230729194453/https://www.lifein19x19.com//viewforum.php?f=69&sid=49287cf063e511ed468bddd18362dd7f

https://web.archive.org/web/20241109110953/https://lifein19x19.com/viewforum.php?f=69&start=25

some topics have copy

This would be such a massive loss. For a magazine you can still find old issues in libraries etc. With the internet (unless archive.org managed to save everything) we just lose chunks of history. Stupid future.

It rarely does. It saves instances of the main page, but the deeper you go in, the less links are saved for each instance. I was a member in a similar PHPbb forum and out of around three thousands of my posts I could barely find a hundred after it went down. Similar case with another custom made forum. I lost 8000+ posts there.

I’d expect that the only useful things left will be the cases of topics that were “top-heavy”, like guides or collections of information and resources.

Example in OGS:

The rest, that would require multiple pages to be archived to be useful, will mostly become a slog to go through or will have significant portions missing.

I haven’t checked how OGS forum gets archived, but with its way of loading the posts, it might appear that the pages are saved, but once you start scrolling, they might be mostly empty/not-loading.

Like my holiday journal where I met my now-wife.

You met your wife via that forum?

Don’t worry, I’m sure you can ask our lord and savior ChatGPT about contents of lifein19x19.

No, I met her in real life at BIBA (a go school in Korea), but I was writing about my trip on L19.

AFAIK Adrian Petrescu is/was the last L19 domain owner, his last (re-)tweet is from June 6th: https://x.com/apetresc
I’ve sent him a message there and asked what’s happening, and whether we can do anything.

Does @Joaz_Banbeck know anything perhaps? I hope you get notified, Joaz …

UPDATE

I have contacted Adrian.

Apparently there was some hacker incident, and while the data seemingly is NOT lost, “we” need a phpBB expert to repair things and migrate the whole thing to a current version of phpBB where this specific vulnerability has been removed. This probably is a lot of work because the L19 forum software hasn’t been updated in a decade or longer, and there apparently are customizations.
So, we’re currently looking for a phpBB expert.

So stupid, what’s the point to hack a go forum??

Probably was not selected specifically for being a Go forum but instead for using a terribly outdated (i.e. vulnerable) version of phpBB.

Some script kiddie assumedly turned the MySQL server into a crypto miner.

PhpBB can be converted into Discourse!

What version were they on?

Isn’t OGF running on Discourse? Why not just merge with OGF lol

L19 is technically far superior than Discourse/OGF for discussing go, with support for go diagrams and eidogo sgf player plugin. There’s a vast amount of high-quality go content with diagrams and sgf examples written by myself and others on there that would be lost if converting to Discourse, unless it was a very special conversion that migrated all that custom content.