SUP NERDS

So, serious proposal time.

I was looking over the Future of LA thread (I had it in active memory until I unplugged my laptop) and with a little distance...it kinda looks like a designed by committee groupthink mess. I also think I might've been pushing the content shtick too hard. 

I kinda think it would be better to just vote for one person (**cough** like Lena **cough**) who has our blessing to do what feels best. To come up with a plan, and for the rest of us to stick with it. That way, at least one person with influence in what's left of the community feels strongly about the end result. And let's be honest; Selena was the Admin who was at LAnon when it went down last week, she's the one spearheading the Future of LA thread, and she's the one here now. She's kinda the logical choice, and almost a foregone conclusion if it comes to a popular vote.

If you wanted to get really democratic, you could have several plans with a vote for the best. I think that's way overkill overcomplicated. It's not like people will die if we get this wrong, and the situation can't really get that much worse. Besides, more than two or three options makes voting complicated. No, one plan getting an approval vote is plenty democracy for me.

In fairness, that thread was designed to be a groupthink mess -- we are still firmly in the discussion stage. We're not at the stage where we come up with a super solid plan just yet.

Good news! Looks like your display name is independent of your username. I got my beloved diaeresis back, I imagine that spaces are possible too.

I AM HERE!

You can all stop panicking now.

My thought process from a couple of hours ago:

Crap, I've not logged into LA in ages. Better do that.

Huh, it's down. Better check ZL. Also down.

*checks LAnon* Looks to have been down for about a week. Okay, how do I contact people? MSN Messenger? No, it's not 2007. Facebook? No I boycotted it. Fuck, I'm alone! What do I do? I've known these people for 15 years, how do I not have a contingency in place?!

*types random usernames into Gmail search bar* Lena's address has popped up, oh thank god!



Anyone got a paper bag?

A sitrep for Vet:


LA has been suffering from a lot of downtime lately. We've discussed moving the boards to a third-party server. Like this one! Which is free and technically has more features than traditional LA does. I opened this board strictly to test it out, and then THESE PEASANTS STARTED JOINING. So it's our new glorified backup LA now.

We've launched a big discussion on ways to reinvigorate and reconstruct LA. Or, at the very least, discuss its future. Since I'm pretty sure Khuff is no longer legitimately interested in maintaining it. He's under no obligation to keep hosting the boards he doesn't visit, after all. That, and a lack of new members is slowly leading us into the grave. So, we're basically planning for where we want to go from this point on.

A few are against moving. A couple think LA is pretty much on its last legs regardless. A good chunk of the regulars are at least partially in favor of a permanent move here (or at least neutral). Multiple members are willing to make some kind of content stream -- Let's Plays, podcasts, game reviews -- etc. in order to try and lure in more people.

We're still discussing ideas and concepts at this point. Nothing solid. Wouldn't move forward with a solid plan without getting Councilman Vet's opinions!

The meaty discussion is on the real LA, but we can't access it right now. Might start an alternative thread here to keep the flow going.

Sounds good. It's been niggling away at me for a while that I'm not that involved any more and want to change that.

I have to admit, the hope of getting new members seems a little futile. Even properly trafficked websites don't really bother with a message board any more. We are a relic of the early 2000s. A board is pretty much just for our own amusement at this point. Serious talk: if Khuff didn't want to host anything any more I wouldn't hesitate to take over that responsibility. I'm in a position where I can afford it.

As I've only ever been interested in Zelda Legends as the gateway to new forum members, and (apologies if I'm wrong) if ZL is a dead Zelda website with no traffic, all I'm interested in is preserving LA on its own as an alternative to a Facebook group.

That said, none of this is up to me, and even if Khuff did give me the data to host, I'd want it to be what everyone wants and not keep it a graveyard.

I'm sorry that I've missed the original topic.

Should the original LA come back up I think we should consolidate all the different forums and trim it right down to something similar to what we have going on here. Preservation of the archive is most important to me. I like that we can search back for all the old topics and re-read the LA-that-was. Thousands of fun threads there I don't wish to lose. As I said in my email, LA's been a huge chunk of my life and I wouldn't want to lose it. However, that doesn't mean I'm against a fresh start if this current forum becomes the official one. I just don't want to lose LA's data.

EDIT: never mind, just read the above two posts. I'm silly.

I'd say I'm pretty solidly in agreement with Vet. I am quite neutral to where we post together as long as we keep doing it, and even if we move, I'd like to option to go through the archives now and again.

I think it's inevitable that we will have to switch servers, yes. The downtime has been getting increasingly worse and we have no ability to fix it. But we don't necessarily have to get rid of old LA. I THINK Old-LA could be transferred onto a new server host. It would be a little messier than just using this, but it's a theoretical option. We'd have to inquire with Khuffie. We would have to assume ownership of the domain name, too.



I'm all about archiving Old-LA. That's the plan even if we move to this forum. Archive LA, leave a redirect here (or wherever) for as long as Khuffie wants to keep the server going. Occasional downtime on a redirect link and archive isn't a big deal. We should poke around the ACP and see if there's a way to bulk-download our existing data in .xml format or something.




About ZL: It was very much our "anchor" for new members. So we were planning on launching a dedicated website to showcase all our produced content -- the Let's Plays and reviews and stuff. This would serve as our new anchor. If only for the sake of trying.

Fortunately, hosting is cheap these days. We'd probably be looking at a $50/year investment in keeping a website and the forums going. We could pitch in together or switch who pays each year (among a pool of LA-ers with a real adult job). If the proposed website does take off, we might also be able to full pay off the costs via something like Patreon. But getting successful will take a shit ton of effort.

So I asked this before, but never got a solid answer; how big is the LA server in gigabytes?

I've been curious about making a server out of a Raspberry Pi like this and this. It will take me a few months of prodding, but I'm willing to wager we could set up (slow) legacy servers forever for that $50 per year price point.

I don't know how big LA presently is. Can't check until it comes back up. We don't host many images on the server, so it's mostly text data. If that's the case, then people could probably just download LA onto their computers to browse at their discretion -- provided we can make a proper archive of it.

Somewhere, in the aether I presume.