There's literally nowhere this community can go.
Discord doesn't lend itself to long form discussion because it was intended to simply be a replacement for Skype, a place for people to talk to each other while playing games or doing something else.
Reddit is atrocious for long for discussion because if the community disagrees with you, you could easily have anything everything you post be downvoted into oblivion, even if it's actually useful or has a point.
4chan is an unorganized mess. Something Awful is a circle jerk you have to pay $15 for, and I'm not paying for that. ResetEra is the same way, but free.
People on this forum have become best friends in the real world, have started relationships with each other, and have gained experience and jobs here, so saying "Who cares, this is a forum, go get a real life." doesn't apply because people here have real lives.
this is just another idiot cull guys, don't worry.
Why was videos removed without any reason behind it?
whyd you spend a year creating a new forum to delete it
I kinda understand where he's coming from with wanting to get rid of the forum, but I disagree with him. The forum has grown far from anything I think he imagined and like he stated before he doesn't use it hardly anymore, nor does he feel like he's gaining anything from it. But I highly disagree with him about not "gaining anything from it."
While the forum has diverted a lot from Garry's mod and Rust over the years, it's frankly the biggest public relations entity that the company has. In a lot of ways most gaming companies would die to have a diverse community that revolves around their company. Facepunch in a lot of ways is an anomaly. It's not normal for indie companies even medium size companies to have such a diverse community around it.
I own every game that Facepunch has released and continue to plan on supporting the company. That means you Garry and all your employees. I hope you can see the merit in keeping the forums and realize that the forum is great PR for your company. Even if it has diverted a lot from the games itself, Facepunch is a lot of different things. But ultimately you gotta do what you gotta do. I'll respect whatever choice you end up deciding to do in the end. I just want to say that I've really enjoyed this community over the years and while I don't post nearly has much has others, I do really appreciate this place and you.
I'm not a frequent poster. I have a decent job and social life and I go on reddit, I use discord, I browse twitter and I generally spend a lot of time on the internet when I'm at home.
My internet habits have changed a LOT over the past 10 years in regards to the places I requent, but there has been one constant since I found it - facepunch.
I come on every day to have a read, have a browse, get some news watch some videos and generally have a look around at content I know I will be interesting in seeing. It's like having a curated piece of the internet made for me that isn't recreated anywhere else (yes, even the shitposts).
It's silly the amount of times I hit the bookmark and tried to access facepunch when it was down the other day.
It would be hugely sad for me if this place disappeared, and I know a lot of people feel the same too.
Ill be ok if you decide to wipe the forum clean with enough warning to archive posts, and hand a blank forum framework over to a community leader. So long as the format remains the same. We can rebuild posts and threads anyways.
Like using facepunch has ever been full of guarantees with their 'change it whenever however with no warning' policy.
Let's not transfer the files.
Let's physically move the server.
Lets push Facepunch somewhere else
Dude, this is like the only online community I even participate in anymore. :/
<3
Maybe not call it Facepunch if he wishes to kill the forums, since Facepunch still refers to the development team behind Garry's Mod, S&box and Rust.
My suggestion on what to call a new home is still outstanding.
I meant to support the costs of the message boards, if it is indeed a financial drain on garry. I know I would donate in a heartbeat, per month.
Or perhaps do what Bay12 Games does with their own little community and run purely off of donations and such?
If Garry thinks the forum isn't worth it, imagine moving over to a website with hundreds of thousands, if not millions, more users.
Imagine the people who comment in the Rust forums, and just multiply it by hundreds.
Bringing back megathreads with reasonable post limits will help, but ultimately unless we solve the problem of bringing in new members, this forum does simply have a timer ticking down before there aren't enough people to keep it going. This is essentially an nerd lifestyle forum with an insular and familiar community that people have grown up with. The problem is that no one else coming into the community can grow up quite the same we all did with each other. We have a connection that it will be difficult for new people to establish. Facepunch is a dying nerd lifestyle clique.
I'm not sure how we fix that. Ultimately I would say that the community of the facepunch forums has survived and thrived despite Garry, rather than because of him. Sometimes it really feels like he brought us all together and then proceeded to mostly ignore and sometimes stamp on this community of people because he doesn't have the same connection and understanding that we all have as a group. That said, I feel sorry for Garry. It's a shit situation to be saddled with us when we essentially contribute nothing but increased workload. How many of us who were into garry's mod immediately bought into Rust? Judging by the way we treated the players that joined facepunch from Rust - we definitely weren't enthusiastic, as a community.
My suggestion would be that everyone joins the facepunch discord right now. Even if you don't use it. Mute it, and if the forum goes down you'll be able to follow the exodus to the continuation.
Even small facepunch communities that survived the original custom subforum purges years ago managed to survive on as friends on their own forums.
I think ultimately the only choice is for us to exodus off into a community run newnewpunch and slowly reduce down into a more insular community until we disappear for good.
Just read the latest blogpost of @garry (Forum Downtime – Garry's Blog).
The first paragraphs are what we know, but it later explains in more technical details WHAT happened. That's pretty nice.
And near the bottom:
I’m still considering what to do with the forums. Whatever I decide
won’t happen overnight. I’m not just going to switch them off. It’ll
happen early next year.
If the forums exist they need to be agile and evolving. I can’t be
the chokepoint there, so there needs to be a way to let the developers
in the community improve it themselves.
I’m leaning towards making the front-end site a SPA with a websocket
connection and accepting pull requests to it. We could COORS localhost
so people can develop locally but with the live data, and any legit
community alternatives could also be COORS’d.
That’d make the backend the only chokepoint – which is a tiny part of it.
Just swooshing right in to show my support for it. It's known a lot of people here (many web developers included) want to help you develop it, so it's great seeing you warm up to the idea!
To be fair I think a lot of developers do this, making projects for funsies and experimentation sake and then just moving on to something else once you're bored with it.
But, then again, most developers don't have thousands of users who will be impacted by said experimentation.
I thought the "New Facepunch" was aiming to achieve development lead by the community anyway? Either way, I full support this endeavour if Garry choses it.
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