So I heard you guys want me to shut this forum down and force everyone to move over to knockout, a short term pain to benefit the community long term - is this right? Is this what I should do?
While it would be a sad way to go, there's only one way to truly kill anime Facepunch.
if facepunch is actually closing in the future, might as well rip off the bandage now and be done with it
You're the bossman here in the end of the day. The forum updates are non-existent and the community has been largely waiting and preparing for this moment for a while now. Might as well do it to get it out of your mind since you're working on other projects.
Just leaving a redirect to Knockout would be cool or something.
I personally never wanted you to close down the forums. I'd much prefer your initial idea of open sourcing the frontend and let people contribute to it, since I don't see myself going over to KO, like many others. I feel the community will fracture and just die, even more with Hezzy not being in the KO team.
The problem with this current forum is that feature development was taking a long time without anyone working on it. There's a lot of very bright and involved people in the community to pick up the slack - so much that some decided to make their own forums from scratch, after all. I'd much, much prefer that if that was an option.
Im not going to move until this forum flat out doesn't exist anymore. I don't really have a reason to use an alternative until that point.
I'd obviously prefer if Facepunch is kept around and improved upon, but if that's something you're not interested in doing anymore than it's more or less inevitable.
I think a good portion of us would hope not, but it does feel like it's where everything's going.
If Facepunch isn't going to improve, I'll take a short setback in features with the promise of a development team invested in the future of the community.
Allowing FP and KO to run parallel to each other for as long as possible would be better I think.
Give KO a chance to catch up to the feel and functionality of FP first, if it has to go that way.
Moving over there suddenly would be jarring and unpleasant.
Or just keep this place going
No one wants this forum to go - it's the reason why Knockout exists! - but given how the general idea is that it will go at some point and that it is on the backburner and left to its own devices, it has to
That said, the only way for KO to get a consistent user base is for Facepunch forums to die off, so that users will hopefully move over.
So at this point pulling the plug (and leaving a redirect to the KO forums) would probably be for the best.
I'd be much happier if we could just be given a date. I've come to terms with the fact that this forum is going, but the uncertain halfway house is doing nobody any favours.
If you fortress is under siege, you can always come to me.
That is, of course, at the cost of running the risk that people just don't move over. GAF (as far as I can tell) successfully iterated into ResetEra, but GAF is obviously way bigger than FP is. I worry that if FP goes down the community won't be big enough to transplant somewhere else with all of those who choose not to move. The community is small enough as is, it can't afford a fracturing.
I agree that KO isn't up to snuff yet, but it's close. Let's put a big month-long countdown at the top of the site and switch when it hits 0 or something.
ok where's the rat who prompted this
no, just keep the forums but let someone manage it
I, and others too (such as PacificV2 above), think it would still be worthwhile to pursue your original plan of doing some backend work on the forums so that people could make their own clients, and have the main client on GitHub allowing people to contribute. At minimum, implementing such a system could be beneficial for future Facepunch Studios games, as it would make integrating the forums with the games an easier job.
But if the community wishes for it, or you wish to concentrate on other projects you're more interested in, I'd suggest again making the forums a pseudo-archive (sans GMoD/Rust/S&box/etc, considering your talk of integrating the forums into the games) rather than just completely shut it down. That is, lock the non-Facepunch Studios forum sections and allow users to just read through them (whilst also bringing back the Oldpunch redirects, which haven't worked in months last I checked). In such a scenario, you could even enlarge the character limit for non-OP posts and fix any remaining migrated posts that were otherwise broken by the move, since no new posts could be made that could use the enlarged limit. And of course, it's merely a pseudo-archive, since users can still come in and delete their account and data as per the forums' implementation of GDPR (taking out other people's posts too if said user was OP of a thread). At that point, a pseudo-archive Facepunch could include a banner redirecting users to Knockout.
But I feel as though folks would rather Facepunch continue to exist, as Knockout is just the largest part of the broader reaction towards the increasing lack of attention the forum has received development-wise (or at least, seemingly increasingly lack) and the fear for the forum's general stagnation, the two aspects being rather intertwined. Whether it be to allow Knockout to develop further, or to finally see the Facepunch Studios forums receive the attention and improvements all (including the mods!) have been waiting for, I think most would prefer Facepunch's continued existence as a usable forum for general discussion and discussion on Facepunch Studios games, aside from those who had grown so frustrated or disillusioned with developments that they'd rather see it die.
garry pls keep forums
a lot of FP's charm seems to be in that it was a cruddy internet forum. "modernizing" it wasn't going to grow the user-base, because anyone who wasn't already on FP wasn't going to come to it, - they were just gonna stay on whatever discords/subreddits they're in. but on the other hand, the modernization made FP feel like something other than what we were all attached to for so long.
so i don't know. i don't want to lose FP, especially as someone who grew up on the forums, like many others. but it doesn't feel like the forum i grew up on, you know?
In my opinion this forum isn't really moving along anymore, there have been signals before that you wanted to drop the FP forums and as a result someone else took action and made sure we have a place somewhere else to hang around in case this forum would (suddenly) go down
Knockout was meant to be an alternative in case these forums got shut down for other reasons, forcibly shutting them down because the people running Knockout asked for it will just result in tons of people getting (rightfully) upset and never moving over.
I still think the open source front end or whatever it was supposed to be is the best idea.
Yes please, Ive very much enjoyed my time on Facepunch but of it's going to sit idle like this I'd much rather the community move to knockout.
if i could do anything i'd wave a wand and just have vb4 facepunch back. i miss that strange charm
I think people hanging onto the open source thing are a bit too optimistic. It doesn't sound like a great plan for future development or community growth, and it ultimately still has us beholden to Garry who isn't much interested in this forum.
In the end I just want this community to stick together, so I wouldn't want anyone to be driven off by a forced move.
Still, it's slightly frustrating to have prepared and gotten excited for knockout purely because Garry has spoken about a shut-down, only for him to delay that shutdown and for the community to become split on the idea of knockout.
Be it here or knockout, I just want this community to stick together.
Same, the styling of oldpunch has aged really well. I don't mind newpunch really, but man do I miss my old 65x130 avatars. So good.
80 x 160 actually
It's 2019. Internet forums aren't going to see much community growth regardless of what you do. I'm far more interested in preserving what we already have than gambling on some fleeting platitude of development and growth.
Overall we don't particularly want the forums to shut down, but I think everyone wants a concrete decision and a timetable.
Uncertainty harms both FP and KO more than committing to either option.
Lol, thanks. It's been a while, and I was only gold for like a couple of months before newpunch.
I'm glad that we moved away from it because vb4 had many issues. I'm fine with the new look of Facepunch today, but there are still some missing features that I find quite important. Profile comments were really nice, and PMs were quite useful.
I'm sure the community can be held together, we just need better communication between the one who manages the forum and those who actually use it. That way we won't keep getting changes that nobody asked for and Garry won't have to deal with all the blame.
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Knockout
