What happened to the lifein19x19 forum? 😱

You’re welcome

We could just as well suggest that two people marry who have nothing to do with each other.

Sounds Like a cheap Reality TV show idea, haha

it’s an understandable perspective that We might sooner have Bicycles made from recycled oranges and Orange trees Grown with fertilizers from recycled bicycles haha, but at the same the other perspective that it is practically destined For us to combine and solve each others problems is also equally understandable, so there are Quite a few aspects to sensitively balance haha, the more perspectives the better things turn out overall

A site that automatically mirrors all the data from European Language forums Would have saved the data from the Forums that have lost data, and from here forward would save the data from current forums, then trying a harmonious approach seems best

Then we could include Semiconductor chess (Xiangqi and Janggi) and shogi, EastAsianmindsportstalk.Com or something of the sort

We can understand cases of those for whom would but it seems unlikely that we wouldn’t actively support a book, especially from gogameguru, but it also seems unlikely they couldn’t just hire someone to run part of the business using the surge in income from the AlphaGo Wave so still unsure what happened there

Can we please stop the noise here? This thread was meant to be about the L19 forum, and especially about how to revive it, and it would be good if we kept it about that and only that.

So, let’s please stop the off-topic chatter.

THANKS!

Lead by example maybe

Time to ask, is Life in 19x19 dead? No one here seems to give a damn. I understand what the difficulties are, and appreciate that to folks who have the data might not have the time or expertise to bring the site back. All good. However, if it is ever going to come back, we are going to have to get some communication going, somehow. No response here means RIP.

Agreed

It’s SUCH a pity … all those fine folks who used to write there, many of them perhaps not willing to search for a new home … to think of all the amassed information we are losing … I wish I had the expertise and the energy to bring it back, but trying to summon and connect the former mods here was all I had the energy to do. Terribly sad to “lose”, for example, John Fairbairn’s or Bill’s knowledge and stories, to name just two of the “Old Hands”.

Well, the admins ran it for 15 years out of love, so I think it’s fair to give them 6 months without being too maudlin about it. It’s just unavoidable, it’s probably a lot of work for someone to do without pay. And I’d imagine the data isn’t encrypted in a systematic way, so you can’t just give it to anyone to take a crack at it without exposing private user information (emails, DMs, private sub-forums).

Not to be negative about it, but once something - especially if it is a hobby - falls through the cracks for 6 months, it is very hard to bring it back to the top of the pile of your “to do” list.

The more work it requires, the less likely it is.
The more people involved, the less likely it is.
and the more time that passes, the less likely it is.

If there was any chance, then the owners would have gone around other Go related fora like this, communicated with other people and presumably other members of their own forum that participate in multiple sites to coordinate, set up a discord server, groupchat, social media page (or something similar) where they could coordinate and post updates about the website and so forth.

As far as I can tell, this didn’t happen therefore all the indicators are on the “it is getting less and less likely” that some group of people will eventually restore it.

Adrian has done some work to restore L19, but it is not complete.

If Adrian has all the data from the old site, is it possible for him to post it somewhere for archival and reading purposes, even without necessarily restoring the board to working order? I apologize if this issue was already addressed above. It seems like the key question.

As a former L19 regular (though admittedly quite less in the past few years), and having – albeit irregularly – donated several times for the maintenance of L19,

I strongly wish for information about:

• status of L19 restoration

• what is holding things up

• what is needed to speed up things

Not a phpBB expert, and not familiar with the specifics of L19, but my naive guess as a programmer: yes, all of the posts and history are sitting in a SQL database somewhere. Whether or not making that readable as a view-only archive would be feasible depends on whether someone has already done the work to say “given a database storing phpBB data, render it in a different way”. That code would also have to be capable of operating on the exact specific ancient version of the database that they’re already trying to migrate away from.

That code might exist! It’s somewhat unlikely it both exists and supports the specific form of the current database, but it’s possible.

If it doesn’t exist, the amount of work that would take to manually write that is probably large enough that it’s not worth doing over just doing the required migrations to get things properly running again.

Presumably you wouldn’t want to just dump the database and post that publicly for someone else to deal with because of the privacy concerns that have already been mentioned — DMs, specific sub-forums that were originally locked behind privacy permissions, user emails, etc.

the domain is still there. they can change the engine to wordpress and move their server.

2026, it’s time to pivot from forum to general blog site and get money from adsense.

I disagree – a forum still makes sense as being a place where many people can talk with each other. A blog usually is one person, and others can comment, which is VERY different from a forum.
Also, it is 2026, and we are using THIS forum here instead of a blog, no?

Nope nope NOPE!
It was one of the wonderful features of L19 that it didn’t have ads – i for one was very happy to donate every once in a while.