<div>Contiuing the off-topic discussion from this thread:</div><div><<node,10239>></div><div><br /></div><div>I, too, prefer this site (and forum sites in general) for many of
the reasons already mentioned: organization (mostly - current side
discussion not withstanding), depth of discussion and ability to format
responses instead of a single large paragraph, search ability,
visibility, and most of all permenance.</div><div><br /></div><div>And I
also like the other platforms for their rapidity of communication, and
ease of connection. Network effects are not to be discounted. The
Facebook group is steadily growing by about 2 new members every day,
it's easy to find and join. In fact, I now think there are more members
there than on this site. Definitely more active members. Discord is
nice for the various channels that allow you separate the discussions
somewhat but both are very fleeting and more ephemeral. <br /></div><div><br /></div><div>The
truth is we have to evolve if we want to stay engaged with the
community. I'm also on Twitter and more and more I'm seeing people
mention Star Frontiers there as well. Shold we recuit people here?
Definitely. Will they come? Who knows. If we want to talk with the
widest audience, we need to go where they are. I also think the
pendulum is swinging back as well. The closer of G+, which was a
bastion of the RPG community if not specifically Star Frontiers, has
sent people scattering to the winds. A lot of people ended up on MeWe.
but a lot of people also went back to blogging and sites more like this and posting links to the social media. This has also been compounded by the increasing lack of trust in social media sites in general.<br /></div><div><br /></div><div>This
site does have issues. It's almost a teenager (was started in 2007)
and is basically running the same code base which was a hack that Bill
put together as his first ever attempt to build such a site. He freely admits it has issues. I have
tried a couple of times (since it was passed off to me) to update it and
fallen flat in the attempt. It cannot be updated as is, at least not
easily. To upgrade and keep all the content requires a completely new
site and then converting all the data to the new system. This is a
project that a company would normaly spend tens if not hundreds of
thousands of dollars on. I could do it if I had the time but I'm spread pretty thin.</div><div><br /></div><div>One of the problems with it is that it requires such an old version of some of the software that you can't host it on an on-line hosting service. Thus it runs on a virtual machine on my home server running an OS that hasn't been supported for several years. It is limited by the hardware I can afford and my home internet connection. Which aren't that bad but not as good as a hosting service (at least the internet speed).<br /></div><div><br /></div><div>More and more I considering just building a new site and archiving this
one. It would still be on-line, slow, and searchable but no new content
could be added. The newer portion of the site could be faster and more modern. And over time I could convert all the old threads here to static HTML pages that could quickly accessed and searched on the new site. Or build software to do so. As always, it's the project functionality that is the hardest to replicated and transpose.</div><div><br /></div><div>I would love to see the site used more, and want to fuse it with the wiki aspects of the starfrontiers.info site. It won't go away but maybe it has to evolve to stay relevant. Anyway, that's my thoughts on the matter.<br /></div>
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