Re: what should we do if the forum, Whent down with out any warning?
Did a bit of thinking, research, and soul-searching over the last day or so, and have decided to walk back my offer to help build a next generation of this community.
Put as diplomatically as possible, the kind of community I'd want to build wouldn't look much like this. It would have a mission statement, something along the lines of "advancing gaming for the blind" or similar. It would have a code of conduct to keep discussions civil. It would have a governance process to ensure that the code is followed. And the code and governance would certainly be up for debate, but only in the context of whether or not the mission is being helped or harmed, not "just because I don't like the rules, they don't let me get away with the kind of shit I want to pull. Free speech!" And, at the end of the day, we'd all have voluntarily chosen to be in that community to talk about accessible gaming, so anyone who just shows up and immediately complains about the rules would be unapologetically shown the exit.
I came to the conclusion that my effort would fail, in which case I'd be out energy and money which I need right now...or it'd succeed, and I'd get a bunch of people from here migrating there, complaining that they can't share their latest nutjob political opinion because it isn't on-topic, or complaining because acting out their mental health breakdown would get them told to seek help from somewhere that isn't a random internet forum and removed, and I just don't have the bandwidth to be 100 people's dictatorial dad. Sorry. Maybe if 5-6 more folks want what I do and are willing to shoulder the load, but my vision for what audiogames.net 2.0 should look like is probably too big of a leap for many to handle. I hate walking that back, but it's better to do it now rather than after I've committed.
As to what to do about audiogames.net: I say someone should set up a cron job to run wget or something similar on a regular interval to scrape the entire site. There's some good info here, and it shouldn't be lost. And I certainly don't advocate nuking the site prematurely. We need to treat this place like it's on borrowed time and could go away at any moment, which is why I'm not building Lights Out Games here and am pointing people elsewhere. We're one bus accident or worse away from losing this place for good.
But if someone *does* launch a successor, I'm not sure it should be built with even the implicit expectation that folks can just pick up their drama here and drag it over there. It should start from scratch, and grow organically with a different set of expectations and a separate history. It's much easier to build a new community where expectations grow over time, than it is to have 100 people just show up and act as if the only thing that's different is the domain name.
Anyhow, sorry to flipflop like that. I hate watching this place circle the drain since I think it is a necessary and invaluable resource, and wish something could be done about it. I just don't want to create another internet forum where people whine about not being able to talk about the audiovault, or shit-stir about leaving for the half dozenth time and get a bunch of replies and attention as a reward. Life is just too short.
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