Quote Originally Posted by Steve View Post
But I wouldn't miss the EOFF that currently exists, if I'm honest the EOFF that presently exists makes me more than a little sad. Sad because it was such a big part of my life and helped me so many times over when I was at low ebbs in my life and was always somewhere safe online to share the glories of the high points with too. I would miss the EOFF of it's heyday when this community was huge, diverse and genuinely funnier, more entertaining and engaging than today.

Now don't get me wrong, I don't blame anyone here for the situation with EOFF; the fact is that times have changed, we're all older with real commitments in our lives and that means that most of us don't have the time to be sat around for hours at a time playing video games and gassing about them to random people online (or not so random as so many of EOFF became). Because of this, members have slowly faded away in to the sunset. If this was a camp fire party, the campfire is burning low and more and more have finished their last beer and said "Right, well that's me done for the night guys, it's been fun but I'll see you around" except the seeing us around is no longer at the camp fire and the circle of those around the fire grows ever smaller and pretends not to notice the emptiness around them or the lack of people coming back.
This summarizes my feelings pretty well. To be honest, for a number of years now, coming here has felt a bit like going to my home town over the holidays and running into people from high school. Some people stuck around, some people are just passing through. But ultimately, all of our lives have moved on. Even though it's *really* nice to see everyone, and to know people are doing well, it's not where my life is now.

I saw this thread on Friday and actually tried to use the weekend to collect my thoughts. Obviously the way people use the internet is very different nowadays. There's modern, self-hosted social media software - I suggested something like an EoFF Mastodon a while back, but there wasn't a particularly enthusiastic reception, which I think is just because people like the forums. Which is sort of an impossible catch-22; 99% of our online lives now are on Facebook, Twitter, Reddit, etc., all of which have been modernized and streamlined to integrate into your life as easily as possible. But the magic of EoFF as a message board is in a format that is just clunky relative to those other monolithic platforms. So in a lot of ways, the EoFF that we all remember and love is something that *only* could have existed and thrived in the time that it did, and that time seems to have passed.

The saddest part of realizing that is knowing that what remains of the community would scatter to the wind without this central location to tether us. Obviously there will still be clusters that keep in touch, but it will always be fragmented. People who want to keep in touch on Facebook might not want to use Discord; people who use Discord might not want to exchange phone numbers, etc. etc. (Personally, I don't even use Facebook, Twitter, Discord, etc., simply because I disagree with the way they run their businesses. I also think moving the community 100% to them is a bit short-sighted, because you ultimately cede any control to the company. Zuckerburg is never going to post a heart-felt thread asking for direction.)

To me, it's not that important to keep the content of the forums itself alive. Realistically, you could probably figure out a way to throw the whole thing into archive mode, zip it up, and share it around as a torrent if people wanted to be able to still browse it without dealing with the hosting costs. But still, there's value in having a central meeting ground for all of us to at least be able to keep in touch. Maybe that's a forums v2, where you just start from a blank slate. Just throw up a phpBB on a tiny Linode plan. Or set up something like Lemmy for EoFFers that keeps the discussion style but modernizes it. There are options. You do seem a bit weary about dealing with new platform migrations - and I completely understand that - but for what it's worth, I'm willing to lend a hand as much as I can if you want to do something to keep the lights on without maintaining 20-some-odd years of post history.

Just my thoughts. I might have too idealized a vision of how much technology could keep us all together. I'm ready to acknowledge that the era of the EoFF forums may have reached its end, but it'd be a real shame for us to lose this place as a central hub. Like I said above, even though I'm usually only passing through, it's still really nice to see you guys.
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