Future-proofing the forum

[tokra]

I have noticed the forum being sluggish/slow the last few days and sometimes I even get a "429 Too Many Requests" error. I emailed joshuadenmark who is the admin and he mentioned needing to ask Jeff for login details. This got me thinking: Right now the forum seems to depend on quite some people who all are a "SPF" (single points of failure) and this may lead to the forum becoming orphaned or broken without possiblity to repair. A similar thing happened to the popular "Landover" C128-forum some years back and the replacement-forum https://c-128.freeforums.net/ is without a true admin for some time now as well as he has not been seen in years.

I think all the knowledge that has been accumulated in the Denial-forum is too precious to be dependent on just a few persons and we should fine ways to make it more resilient against people leaving, hosting issues and whatever.

I am not sure what the current backup-schema of the forum is and if people other than Jeff actually have full hosting access. Just wanted to get the ball rolling.

[English Invader]

I think most forums are controlled by only a couple of people. Denial actually has a similar administration model to Lemon 64 - Jeff and Kim Lemon are founder members/figureheads who don't tend to post very often while TNT and joshuadenmark run the respective forums on a day to day basis.

Jeff used to be more involved but I would still like to think that Denial remains very important to him. We're talking about a body of work going back 30 years if you include the original newsletter.

Denial doesn't seem to get as much traffic as it used to but it seems to have changed into a smaller, more technical group. Lemon remains more open to gamers who don't have any technical skills.

[Wilson]

Jeff came to VCFMW just last September and even brought a new game he made the night before IIRC. I'm confident this community and the Vic-20 are still important to him. I talked to him a bit, and it sounds like he's simply been focused on other things lately. Time can slip away very quickly when life gets busy.

I agree with you, Tokra. This forum is the most important pillar of the Vic-20 community, and it's a little scary when it experiences downtime. It would be nice to have a plan in case Jeff cannot maintain it for whatever reason.

[RobertBe]

A similar thing happened to the popular "Landover" C128-forum some years back...

Several months ago, it returned at https://commodore-128.org

Truly,
Robert Bernardo
Fresno Commodore User Group - http://www.dickestel.com/fcug.htm
Southern California Commodore & Amiga Network - http://www.portcommodore.com/sccan
June 21-22 Pacific Commodore Expo NW 2025 - http://www.portcommodore.com/pacommex

[joshuadenmark]

I currently don’t have access and have asked Jeff if the login details have been changed or what might be going on.

I fully support the idea of having more people involved in maintaining the forum. Based on the discussion in the thread, it’s clear that others share the same concern about the forum’s future. Tokra raised a valid point about the risks of relying on a few key individuals, and I agree that we need a plan to make the forum more resilient.

It would be a shame for all the knowledge and history accumulated here to be lost, so I think we should explore options like creating a backup system or expanding the number of people with administrative access to ensure the forum can continue to thrive.

/Peter