Hi all: Did you notice that you couldn't access the site yesterday? I contacted Miko on MeFi mail, and she got in touch with chrismear, but she also pointed out that this place is a bucket of bolts with a small group of users. Unless we can get a dedicated group of admins -- and frankly I couldn't do it because I don't have the computer skills -- maybe we should consider migrating to another format like a blog.

We should discuss. Also, happy New Year to you all!

I pop in every day to do clean-up and pin posts to the side bar and such but I have no access to server. I wonder if we could move the database to a newer platform?

I noticed it was down earlier so I kept checking to see if it came back.

From what I know, a lot of the issues come from extra bits that have been stuck on to the most basic form of what is. As I'm not sure of the whiches and whats of what that is but that many of the extra features that had been stuck on no longer working, it would seem that the quickest, easiest solution would be stripping off the extras.

If the basic form is no longer a functional go and just a countdown to ultimate failure, we should get a countdown clock and see who wants to help keep the bomb from going off. With as many functional presets and templates of things out, it doesn't seem like a big time sink to find a better boat unless we've got an island in mind.

I really hope chrismear is around and weighs in, because I think he's got the database and would know whether it's even easily possible to migrate it to a new platform. It seems like b2evo is still around, so maybe there's an update we could move to? I think we need a tech consult on that.

But in my eyes, if it is to continue, we should move away from reliance on one or a few people with coding ability because it's just not sustainable and makes the whole thing inherently unstable. It would be easiest to use something very simple which makes it easy to share under-the-hood access, like WordPress. We don't need something that can support 3000 user profiles any more.

I would like to see this place continue to run. That said, I have nothing to contribute to the technical side of things, so would endorse anything that admins come up with to keep the lights on.

So what's the software stack for MeCha? I see PHP in the source but not sure if it's just a hand coded thing or is built on some old framework. It's using MySQL, I assume?

I got no computer skills neither.

b2evolution uses a MySQL database and the standard LAMP stack. We have ver 0.9.1. The latest is ver 6.6.6.

Also I don't know if it is self installed or available from the ISP's control panel.

We have ver 0.9.1. The latest is ver 6.6.6.

heh.

Yeah, I'm sure that's a supported upgrade.

I would miss these parts but I know nothing lasts forever. I've known some forums to move to Proboards.com, is that something we would consider?

I have no computer skills at all, but wherever we go, I will follow. I was upset when I couldn't access it yesterday.

I'm still baffled over why this place went down so quickly. What happened? Was it really just a matter of "nothing lasts forever"?

I'll miss this place too.

Melismata I guess that the role of "an online place to hang out and catch up" has been taken over by Facebook and Twitter.

With regards to the platform; what I like is that it's from an aero where you'd set up your own site. There's something creepy about the corporate alternatives with all their data mining and targeting.
The DYI internet vs the consumer internet. Of course there are many more consumers than DYI tech people. So the consumer internet had to win in the end. Can't beat that economy of scale I guess.

It should be possible to migrate the data to a different platform. But it wouldn't be fun or easy. F.i. it probably would be hard to set up the relevant accounts.
Maybe it would be easier to use the current data to generate a static html archive. Static html would be cheap and easy to host.
Which would leave us free to choose the best new platform that we can think of.

What would be the best platform?
I guess the few people who keep coming here are looking for something apart from their Facebook presence. I myself I'm not on Facebook so I don't know.
So; what do you look for when visiting metachat. And how does that relate to present day alternatives like FB&T?

No more MeCha? Bummer. I know it's been waning for a long time. I'll miss it, though. Life will be just that much lonelier. I follow a few folks on facebook, but it's not the same. You don't get that same rapport and response. Metachat's always been a bit of a refuge for "weirdos" like me, a chance at times to move beyond the usual smiles and hellos of the day. But I admit, I haven't posted in a long time and often don't have a lot to say these days.

It is a mysterious thing in general, how folks can be such great friends, for years even, and then just fade away. I think it's often when they make new friends. Started with Beth Meriweather in high school. Beth had scoliosis and wore a hard back brace 23 hours a day for several years, and we were great friends that whole time, watching our soaps at her house after school, practicing our clarinets together, going to the movies. Senior year, Beth got her brace off and hooked up with the "popular crowd," including Monica, the class president, and dropped me like the proverbial hot potato. Such is life. These days I can't tolerate most people and their nonsense for long anyway, so there's that.

(I blame foxhat, by the way. Foxhat shows up, and Metachat goes away. Coincidence? I think not. ; )

Clearly Foxhat is a witch!

Pips the fading of good friends is so sad.
I think most of us have some stories like that.

There's a difference though I find.
With real life we forget a lot of what went on.
With online communities though there are all these old threads with handles that you saw continuously. And you can still read all the fun goofing off. And of course at some point most of them just stopped showing up.
It's a bit strange to me. I've been on mefi and mecha for 10+ years. So I know some of you for about that time. And some of us we write down some pretty personal stuff. (Not me though because I'm paranoid about it affecting my work life) But at the same time I have a hard time placing most of us geographically beyond the right continent. Nor do I have for most handles a face before my minds eye..


I guess this is me sending my computer bytes into the aether saying mefi and mecha meant something to me. And I'm not sure whether that was glorious in a way or misguided and sad.

Oh, yes, that's the explanation. Foxhat is a witch who has the Evil Eye. We should put pictures of the Horned Hand and such on metachat.org. And everything will be fine!

I would offer a talisman if I could, but have no skills for the task. Sigh.

Misguided and sad. Story of my life. I sure will miss you all. Email me at pips123@gmail.com if you'd like to keep in touch and/or would like my "real" name to "friend" me on that annoying thing called facebook (warning: I don't really post, but maybe I should start-- if you can't beat 'em...). Who am I kidding? I'll never see any of you folks again. Were you ever really there? Maybe I've been talking to myself all these years.

Down with foxhat! *lights the torches*

(and if you ever make it over to this continent jouke, more specifically, NYC, jon and I would love to show you around/hang out-- we've been lucky enough to meet and become friends with quite a few Mecha/Mefite folks in person-- I'll miss that, too :(

I need Mecha, if for no other reason than to post anonymous rants about my family and stuff.

I will miss Metachat, but sadly it has been circling the drain for a long time.

I'm still baffled over why this place went down so quickly. What happened? Was it really just a matter of "nothing lasts forever"?

I agree that Facebook is 80% the reason, but nothing does last forever anyway. Sad as it is, there is no real reason to anticipate that a group of people that came together for a social purpose at a time when lots of folks were at different places in their lives than they are now could carry on unchanged, especially when the distract-o-verse has gotten so much richer. I would say that what bascially happened is that there was the natural attrition as group members matured, had their lives change gradually, and fully or partially moved on, and as happens with most communities that don't actively work to counter the phenomenon, they were not replaced with new users. It may be there was not as much to offer new users after critical mass waned.

The only communities, IRL or online, that can avoid this have two things that prevent decline: a) a viable and unique value proposition with appeal to a sizable number of people, and b) a way of working actively to recruit new participants. Honestly, I don't feel we really have either any more - we have some wonderful people that still use this as a platform for chatting and sharing, but that's not unique for new users and it's not easy to show any value to that when they haven't built any relationships yet. We've made a few attempts to generate new excitement, but they've fizzled, mainly because of a).
It's nothing really unique to MetaChat; organizations and communities have life cycles.

I think we need to decide this: is it sufficient to have a fun place, like a blog or the forums TPS mentioned, where people can carry on chatting and having fun? Or do folks really really want to migrate the entire database so they can have access to the entire site history? Right now it really does have thousands of individual user accounts, the overwhelming majority of which are inactive. I just don't think we need that firepower to accomplish 90% of what people want to do, which is chat and trade links. It's much more work, time and money to figure out how to move the whole site, but it's easy to set up a new place to interact. The question is how critical is all that to everyone - is it worth pursuing the funds and time to keep this now ten-year backstock of content all available online?

Nope, not in my estimation. Having the ability to peruse the archives is not something that I anticipate that I would miss if I could no longer do it.

I would miss the archives.

Me too.

It may not be entirely Foxhat's fault, as I'd been away for a while and came back then, about 24 hrs later the lights went out.

I'd hate to see MetaChat die. Hate it dreadfully. Acknowledging the fact that it will never again be the hive of activity it once was, it still means a lot to me and, I believe, to others. It's clear it's not practical to continue as the site is now, from a technical standpoint - it's simply not feasible and the site will go permanently dark one day unless big changes are made. The way I see it, we have some broad choices:
1. Just let it waste away and, whenever the hosting runs out, it will be gone forever.
2. Retain the content in archived format, if it's possible to generate HTML files.
3. Start up a new forum using a standard forum package.
4. Establish a (shudder) Facebook group, private or otherwise, or maybe Google group thing.

My preference would be a combination of 2 and 3, for what it's worth. For any outcome that sees the site and/or content remain in existence other than our memories, I will provide hosting. I don't really see the freeforum etc platforms as a useful outcome - I'd rather see us drink the Facebook kool-aid.

We are using a standard forum package. We just haven't upgraded it ever. I don't see why we couldn't migrate to a newer version. We would lose a lot of formating but it would still be alive.

I thought the reason it couldn't be upgraded was because the extensive custom code, which would require all that to be revised to retain the functionality, not just the appearance?

It would be good to get chrismear (or seanyboy?) to weigh in to get a clear idea of the state of play, including when the current hosting arrangements are due for renewal. We are hosted with Rimu Hosting, I believe.

To clarify what I said above, I'm prepared to provide and pay for hosting for any solution that keeps the existing content (even if separate to an ongoing solution) and allows us to keep the site going on a stable platform.

I've been thinking about getting back to some Web things I've had in mind for years anyway, so need a hosting account. Unless something changes dramatically, it's extremely unlikely the site would take up much in the way of resources, so doesn't need a heavy-duty hosting solution. Rimu Hosting is more than I want to pay, based on their advertised prices, so we'd have to move hosts, which likely brings its own challenges.

I don't believe it's viable to keep operating under the existing code base, given we don't have someone with the skills, time and interest to maintain and update a custom solution. Seanyboy and chrismear have done an awesome job, but they have lives and other priorities. Any solution needs to be based on a platform that doesn't need an expert to keep running so that maintenance can be shared and/or handed over as needed. A bit of thought (no doubt guided by familiarity as I've set up a few sites over the last year) suggests to me that a standard WordPress install with maybe a little customisation to something like the Twenty Sixteen theme would work, although I'm not completely clear on how we'd manage user accounts - leaving user sign-ups open on WordPress seems to attract spammers like flies to shit, but it's not like we're inundated with new users anyway.

That's really all I've got to say at this stage - just wanted to make it clear that there is a solution if we want to keep this thing going and some initial thoughts as to how it could work.

Hey everyone, I'm visiting family at the moment, and only have my phone with me, but I'll get back to this thread with answers to the technical questions when I'm back at my desk on Monday!

If we lose the archives, we will lose the legend of jouke the junk food fairy.

Thanks for your smart, supportive comments, dg. I also like a combo of #2 and #3 as a direction.

We would lose a lot of formating

I wonder what exactly? It seems like such a basic forum that I'm not sure what customizations are. I have a feeling we could live without a lot of them. I share your goal of retaining archives info somewhere but not sure whether that means having to migrate everything into a live platform.

leaving user sign-ups open on WordPress seems to attract spammers like flies to shit, but it's not like we're inundated with new users anyway.

We could do approved signups - we do it now, actually. Gaspode currently gets the email when someone new signs up and approves their account. Since the trickle is slow it's not a huge burden, though sometimes it means someone needs to wait a day or two to get approved.

Looking forward to chrismear getting back to us Monday. I like dg's suggestions too.

Miko, I could be wrong, but I think some of the site functionality is tied up in the custom code, not just the appearance. I think the posting page/mechanism and new user sign-up page are in that boat, as is the 'recent comments' page. These are, of course, 'nice to have' functions that we could likely live without given a much smaller volume of activity. Also, platforms such as WordPress have a lot more of this kind of functionality than they did 10 years ago.

I know about the user sign-ups, as I get the emails as well. I don't see it as a barrier, just pointing out something that needs to be considered. I don't even remember the last time someone wanted to join, so a minor issue, albeit an important one.

I don't want anyone to just accept my suggestions re platform - there are lots of alternatives and I was just brain-dumping what seemed like a simple and easy to maintain way of doing this, based on my very narrow experience. There are lots of free forum platforms, although I've yet to find one that doesn't look like it was made in 1975. WordPress do have an in-house forum platform, BuddyPress but, while it looks better than most, getting it to work is not much fun. I think GameFilter runs on this (I know one of the wonderchicken sites does) but I understand that took massive amounts of customisation.

dg take a look at this. We still need to hear from chrismear but take a look. It may still be a good a good choice. I just don't know as I have never seen under the hood. The hosting does seem over priced. I'll contact you soon via email.

Because I was both bored and wanted to test how far away from actually working an out-of-the-box solution would be, I set something up on a server I have access to. This is temporary only and will be deleted.

Here. I have set up a few user logins with different permission levels - all passwords are M3tachat and user names are:

mc2admin (Administrator)
mc2mod (Editor)
mc2user (Author)
mc2user2 (Contributor).

New users can register themselves (email confirmation required) and have a default role of subsriber - can comment, but can't publish new threads. There are plugins available that can give finer grained control over user permissions than the default.

Anyway, I'll shut up now until we hear from chrismear.

arse_hat, you can demo b2evolution here.

There was a time when the people here felt close and knew each other very well, such that the communication ranged deep and wide. We didn't just have questions and answers and exclamations of support; there were real conversations, sometimes bracingly argumentative ones. I wish we could get that back somehow -- Facebook and Twitter don't really work for me -- but I don't know if it's possible.

I'd miss the archives. I hope we can keep going.

I have made a static html version of metachat.
The zip is about 1.2 GB.
It's from the logged in state of metachat. So it contains the user profile data. That means we can't just put this online without any authentication in front of it I don't think.
The html export isn't perfect: some of the older threads didn't get exported very well. So we'll have to experiment with other tools than the one I tried. Also there's the concern of pulling down the server when you do this. So we may want to set up a temporary clone, preferably locally, just for the purpose of exporting the html.

Pls send me an email and I'll send you a link to the zip.
I'm not putting it up here directly because people who get the zip need to be responsible with the profile data in there.

Regarding a new platform; would it be an option to move to a Google+ group?

Of course G+ is also a corporate data mining platform. But everybody is on FB instead I think. So it would fulfill the role of a place away from FB.
Of course G+ also tends towards real world names instead of handles. I don't know if that would be a problem.

Ha, JL, I had forgotten about the junk food fairy. That doggerel poem is really funny!

Pips, too bad that you both probably won't be able to visit Europe. I think you would have enjoyed Amsterdam. And I would have enjoyed showing you around.
Thank you so much for your invitation to NYC. I've visited NYC only once. And I wasn't immediately captured by its charm; I mostly noticed a lot of traffic and high rises. So it would be awesome if a local could show the locals view of the city!
Tx for your email address: I'll send you an email so that you have mine as well.

Hartelijke groet to all mechanisms!
(I really like HJ's sobriquet for us)

We'll make it over to Europe one day, jouke, fates willing, but probably not for a few years, I'm afraid (new car/emergency and retirement savings priorities). I think we'd love Amsterdam, too. Appreciate the tour offer--

Sounds like something of this place may be saved-- pleased to hear it--

Random observations:

-- IIRC, seanyboy is not around and has deliberately stated that he's not interested in being around.

-- I still think that this place declined right around the time Metafilter Chat was introduced, so people weren't looking for a chatty home anymore, but maybe it was a coincidence. Who knows.


-- 4. Establish a (shudder) Facebook group, private or otherwise, or maybe Google group thing. I think we have one already.

-- I think a lot of us like the model of this place, in that it really is a descendant of Metafilter. It works in the same way: we have the same usernames, access to archives at all times, we can do searches in the same way, etc. When I first came here, I liked the idea of being able to talk to people who knew the mothership and occasionally talking about issues there. (We don't do that very often, but it's nice to once in a while say things like oh, remember the emotional labor thread?)

-- Alas, if we're no longer interested in connecting that way, then yeah, we'll have to go elsewhere. I know a lot of people feel strongly that this place is definitely NOT part of Mefi, and if that's the case, let's just find a cheap solution without all the features and go there.

So, where exactly is the source code and how does one get to look at it?

Hi, I'm back!

MetaChat's currently running on a RimuHosting virtual server. It's running a custom-modified early version of b2evolution, on PHP and MySQL. The MetaChat wiki runs on MediaWiki.

I'm not 100% certain what the custom modifications are, but I think they are things like allowing single-login between MetaChat and the MetaChat wiki, and some tweaks to the admin system (paginated list of users, comments on user profiles). Probably nothing that we couldn't live without if we were to move to a modern version of b2evolution, or another modern forum software.

We probably could move to cheaper hosting. PHP and MySQL is all we're using, and that'll run anywhere.

As it is, MetaChat is pretty stable (just the occasional thing were the database server falls over and I have to restart it). The software is old, and that sometimes makes applying server security updates trickier than they would be if we were running on a more modern platform, but it does run and so the age of the software is not in itself a problem.

I think we can assume that we want to keep MetaChat going in some way, and that we don't want to migrate to a service that's hosted by a 3rd-party. That leaves three questions:

1. Where will it be hosted?
2. What software do we move to now (if we change at all)?
3. What do the long-term responsibilities of running it look like based on the above decisions?

More later, I've got to get back to work!

4. When does the current hosting arrangement come up for renewal?

Thanks chrismear - seems like we have lots of options to move forward. I do think that, longer-term, we are better with an out-of-the-box solution to remove the need for someone familiar with the specific back end, but it seems like we're not too far from that anyway.

5. Are there any risks created by using a platform that is well and truly out-of-date?

allowing single-login between MetaChat and the MetaChat wiki

We can definitely live without that. Don't think we need a Wiki at all at this late date. Or even if we do, no need to have a common login. The last time anyone touched that Wiki was 2012.

paginated list of users, comments on user profiles

Same same. Nothing there is critical. We could jettison most of the inactive profiles...there are thousands.

Are there any risks created by using a platform that is well and truly out-of-date?

I think the main risk is that the site just keeps becoming more and more irrelevant to users. Already, when we have a new user or two, they ask why they can't like/favorite or post images more easily or have some other feature. It's a primitive site compared to what people are expecting from elsewhere, and since we can't really update it easily, we're sort of voting for obsolescence by staying with this platform, IMO.

we are better with an out-of-the-box solution to remove the need for someone familiar with the specific back end

I totally agree with this; it allows for the greatest degree of flexibility, which will be necessary if there is to be any sustainability. It needs to be possible for someone who's not a coder/developer to manage the site, so the group of people who love it and are most active can actually consider possibly taking a role in managing it long-term. As long as that takes unique skills, it will severely limit the pool of potential stewards.

4. When does the current hosting arrangement come up for renewal?

I pay for the Rimuhosting account on a month-by-month basis, so that can change basically at any time.

5. Are there any risks created by using a platform that is well and truly out-of-date?

Yes, there's potentially security risks due to our version of b2evo not being patched, and also if the age of that software means we have to run older versions of other software on the server to stay compatible with it. (For instance, a while ago I had to switch from PHP4 to PHP5 on the server so that we could keep getting PHP security updates, and I had to make a few changes to our b2evo code just to make it run on PHP5.)

Sooooo ...?