Jesus to-the-fucking Christ people,
what gives.
Can we move past the petty drama shit and focus on what is important.
First of all, mods aren't saints, their just humans, slip-ups and mistakes happen.
No need to pull any smear campaign tactics.
Not saying that it shouldn't be discussed, just that this might not be the right thread nor the right time.
To get to the actual meat of this issue.
How do we as a community want to proceed further
No-one here wants to just throw what is essentially the spirit of the FP forums just away,
Garry said as much as I am quoting
I get that there’s a community of people there who know each other and have been communicating this way for 15 years, and that’s a precious thing [...]
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.
There are 3 possible outcomes, two of which require we get our collective heads out of our asses:
Make the Switch to Knockout
Convince Garry to realize the front-end / back-end separation mentioned in his blog post in his last paragraph
Bicker about meaningless shit in the grand scheme of things and drive Garry away for good and/or make him kill FP
The people are what make the Facepunch Forums,
no amount of "treason", "coup" or any other bullshit is gonna change that.
Everyone for himself and also as a collective need to make that choice,
this is as democratic as it gets people.
(Heavy-handed actions will backfire as we have seen.)
We may split on these crossroads,
everyone participating here carries a tiny fraction of what makes FP what it is.
If someone leaves or if we split, a fraction of this spirit would be lost.
Everyone would approach this question differently, there are alot of views, opinions and interests in the mix,
which is where most of this tension is coming from but please can we focus on the task at hand.
I've already stated that I prefer the move to KO, if we can keep FP alive with the second option I would be down as well,
but my faith in Garry isn't the greatest, shall we say.
right most people are confused with tech terms most of them are referring to making facepunch be a backend that receives pull requests. and it's coming straight from garry's mouth so he wouldn't have said it if it would cause problems. i highly recommend reading the blog post i linked in my previous post.
a semi open facepunch is great but we stepped over that in favor of what? A fancy reinventing of the wheel? I'm not saying it's the worst thing because obviously adapting whatever software we use to accomadate our needs and to deal with problems that come up is important. And i'm not the most knowledgeable with the solution garry wrote about so i don't know if it would be able to provide like a custom made software like knockout. but i don't know apparently i might just be screaming and kicking without providing much in return 🤷
Option 2 all the way. I’ve been bouncing off other people’s points really, but if there’s anything to take away it’s I and many others don’t want to sit back and have the main site disappear just to make a different choice for us
i don't want to put words in inacio's mouth so don't quote me on this
there was a discussion bounced around long before the azure downtime of making knockout open source, and it wasn't in the cards then, but it was definitely something being considered as it got closer to feature complete.
the biggest issue with just saying "oh we'll make a better front end for fp" assumes that all the features you need to make it better are actually implemented on the backend
a lot of the mod issues that were mentioned by mods in this thread may very well be backend issues, so if garry is 100% hands off, switching to a better implemented front end wouldn't get around the issues
I think having FP just redirect to Knockout would be fine since it would keep most of the community together. . Knockout is in a pretty good state and is definitely usable, but it's the people that matter the most here. Been lurking on these forums since 06 (jesus christ) and would hate to see the community dissolve. Reddit just isn't the same.
Can't say I blame Garry for not having much interest in maintaining the place. I'm sure he has way more important things going on in addition to raising a family now, and as he's said in the past, FP doesn't really benefit him at all. Having the community carry on the torch with Knockout seems like a great alternative.
Personally, I have an account on Knockout but probably won't use it much until FP goes away, and it would be really great if FP just redirected to Knockout instead of vanishing completely.
I really do appreciate all the work Garry has put into FP over the years along with everyone else who has moderated and developed it. I've really enjoyed wasting a shitload of time here. Looking forward to being a useless sack of crap on Knockout as well.
If there’s any preserving this place it’s preferable. It would be real odd to me if an attempt to lifeboat just sunk the ship instantly when theres still a chance to swerve the iceberg
It only "becomes suspicious" if you're a paranoid delusional to be honest. People are starting to get tired of the forums sitting in limbo, Knockout has been in development for a fair bit now under the pretence that the forums are likely to shut down. But the "early 2019" deadline garry gave as to when he'd make the decision came and went, with no news at all.
This puts the continued development of a backup plan in a weird place. Do you continue to dedicate time and money into it? FP might not die after all, as we've heard literally nothing about a concrete plan yet. Just "well maybe" desires. What if you throw all that time and money at it and nothing comes of it? You've got some fairly decent forum software now, but nobody is going to use it. Knowing whether or not FP is actually going to shut down at some point makes the decision as to whether to continue development of an alternative actually possible.
I'm pretty sure everyone involved in Knockout knows that even if it does replace FP, it's not going to be the same as not everyone is going to move over. And new members are probably going to be far and few between. There's no real benefit of "pushing people into 'your facepunch'" when it's literally just the backup plan to try and keep the community we have now in some form of existence.
if we assume that garry wants to do no further work than allowing third party endpoints to connect to the FP backend
before any things got fixed it would require:
discovering all the API endpoints
figuring out what actually works
figuring out what annoyances in FP are due to backend issues and not frontend issues
to me that's the problem with this argument. you're assuming that the ability to swerve the iceberg is possible, but until you go down and look at the engine room, my guess is a lot of the bugs that make newpunch a buggy POS are backend issues, and following garry's blog argument, he wouldn't be fixing anything with the backend
If it’s the backup plan and it’s ultimately harmful to push it then we’re in agreement and there’s no point in hastening it by asking Garry to shut it down
This thread and how it evolved has certainly nailed some pain points the community has
Calling what happened a coup is twisting the truth to fuel the hate machine, I think. The situation stunk to hell and the responses given here aren't very satisfying to say the least (let's not go into it, but overeagerness seems to explain what happened better than malice, and all in all everyone involved is mostly a good person), but the people involved have had come forward with what happened back then since it was a shitstorm back when, and are still being forward right now - to a degree, since there's been a lot of throwing people under the bus lately :/
The point is everyone admits it was a mistake, and that they recognize the damage they self-inflicted in the execution of the plan to move to KO. However I can't fault them for trying to come up with an alternative instead of waddling in drama. They've professed they love FP as much as anyone, if not more since responsibility weighs down on them, and the whole plan came out of a want to safeguard the community out of their own personal time and pocket. Trying to get the mod team unmodded over this drama won't achieve anything of substance besides throwing FP in even more chaos than it is now besides driving away some of the most pivotal members of the community. I wouldn't be surprised if some mods just throw the towel shortly after this, to be fair.
However we shouldn't be focusing so much on the past and what people did back then and generally being assholes to each other without knowing what comes next. Not losing focus would be pretty neat.
@garry is open sourcing/sharing code part of facepunch and letting the community improve the software a possible move? You mentioned that in the forums discussion thread back when the announcement of the KO move happened, but didn't share any more details. How would that work?
what is this even about
itd be cool to have new features but right now it’s functioning in a way I don’t think I’d have a problem with it in even 4 years. Look at newpunch and where messing with passable has gotten us.
Swerving the ice berg is Garry not shutting it down. I’m not referring to anything else with that analogy
but wouldn't it be more harmful to not push it and one day FP is just dead and a blank white page?
The "asking garry to shut it down" posts are a symptom of people being fucking done with this state of limbo. People want him to make a decision, finally, and commit to a plan of action. As it's the Internet of course there are going to be people pushing for the extreme side of "nuke the place right now, no survivors". But don't twist that into some deep seated conspiracy to try and kill the forums quicker entirely for the sake of KO.
Pretty much everyone would prefer FP to survive. Because KO isn't a perfect replacement (the software is sure as shit functional compared to some parts of newpunch mind). People just want an actual answer as to what's going on.
No.
its already there and we already have discord’s and other communications. If that happened it’d be super easy to find why and what to do. It’s not like people are going to lose contacts, Garrys media, or forget what knockout is.
Part of the community hasn't been sitting around, if we all wanted, we could all make the switch to KO right now,
but there is a split on what should be done which is almost guaranteed when dealing with alot of views and opinions.
Having Garry make a choice makes it easier for one path or another to go as a community
but it ultimately isn't necessary. Out hands aren't tied in this matter.
For anyone that's interested this is the initial explanation for the FP successor Discord;
https://files.facepunch.com/forum/upload/99/bd315873-4d44-4e10-8f29-dcb80931f4ca/qaw.PNG
I wanted to keep it secret because I didn't want to get anybody's hopes up just in case the project fizzled out.
Craptasket is in the process of going through all the chatlogs (The FP successor chat, the KOC chat and FP mod chat) to establish a timeline of the development of KOC, so everyone can get a good idea of where our hearts were.
basically here's my thoughts on it as someone relatively out of all the drama
the way i see it, there's really only the will to do this once.
lets say garry says "okay you can make your own clients, and connect to the FP backend", so inacio and friends wind down development of knockout to take a crack at the client, because by your own admission you wouldn't want to split the community
so a month goes by of people making new clients to the FP backend, and there's a lot of problems in the backend, and a lot of the the pain points that exist in newpunch just exist in the backend
well now all the pain points can't be fixed, the will for inacio and friends to pick development back up after all of this is kind of gone, so now you go from having an option to not really having any options
i just see the garry backend solution as tying the community to someone who really doesn't care about the community, and a team of people who spend their weekends and after work trying to build something that could replace it is a better choice than trusting someone who doesn't really care anymore
that's just me though
I keep getting called paranoid and anxietial but I don’t feel this limbo worry at all. Things are going to work out. If that ultimately ends up being knockout, fine, but I really think it’d be a mistake to invoke ragnarok due to a fear of it. I don’t see knockout going anywhere in the meantime
The way I look at it is a lifeboat pulling up next to the Titanic as it's sinking and going "well you can get on if you'd like" and most of the passengers are glaring at it going "your crew looks shifty what's your ulterior motive, awfully suspicious you're here right as we're sinking" and I don't get it.
i don't have any doubts that the people behind knockout were only doing it to keep the forum alive, but having been a part of forums that have been through this kind of thing in the past, what will knockout have that will draw new people in? i'm afraid that once this community loses the draw of being related to facepunch games, it'll stagnate and eventually become a small clique, just like with the other forums i've been on. sorry if this has already been addressed, or if i should post this somewhere else
i believe they had plans for growth
it just wasn't the first priority at the time
We've been talking about porting space station 13 to run in a web browser for a while now, and as soon as knockout development slows a bit we want to get started on a prototype.
there's exploits on newpunch right now that are backend based
no amount of letting anyone connect to the backend and display the threads in their client will be able to fix that issue
i just don't see it as a sustainable option
Yeah I like to speculate as well.
Not all of the backend needs to be completely open sourced, specially since there's the apparent facepunch games backend that's private and unsharable. I can imagine that part can be refactored away or hidden behind a layer of abstraction, and the rest gets shared with the community, which allows us to deal with ghost posts better, allows us to build mod tools, and allows us to fix the exploits the forum apparently has. With that, we can have as many light frontend clients as we want, as well as having a centralized repo to deal with backend development.
Of course this would mean having to coordinate features and deployments with the community, which can be seen as a hassle. As much of a hassle as sheperding free labor as a hassle can be, I guess.
I agree though, this is so optimistic not even a gaybow could handle the optimism. But it sure would be nice. I'd like to find more about that before planning where I'm gonna be in the ship as it sinks.
right, but the argument of "keep FP the backend alive" is garry provides API endpoints, but doesn't actually do any further work on the backend
he wouldn't be open sourcing the backend, just providing endpoints
so we wouldn't gain anything
I'm not expecting garry to be completely hands off, but I don't imagine his involvement to be more than setting this up then yelling at bad code like linus in code reviews. He doesn't do further work on the backend, but he needs to guide development.
In the end, it's still his Azure account and his software. If he made this thread, I imagine he's having second thoughts on the move, or if he sees a better way forward than the course we've been through.
if he cared about guiding development, he would have done it months ago
fact of the matter is i wouldn't expect any more than the bare minimum of "here's the endpoints, have fun"
Guess since we won’t gain anything we should lose everything instead
if the entire active community migrates to knockout, what do we lose?
i'm asking a serious non snarky question. i know it may seem like it due to the lowercase font, i'm just trying to see where you're coming from. i've seen garry make choices enough times where that he just does shit and we're expected to go along with it, and randomly dropping things because effort. right now we're all posting on a thing that he can just randomly drop because effort
People need to go to Knockout for the community to survive as a whole if Facepunch is no longer receiving updates. That will never happen if people are clinging on to a half-working Facepunch that will never get better. Therefore the KO community will never get built, and the whole thing will fade into obscurity. Like I said earlier I've been a bit inactive lately so I missed a lot of what went on in the mod discords so I didn't have a part in the closing of the discords. The transition can definitely be done better but we can't have two. We either pick one and build it the way we want or ride this baby to the ground and call it a night. (Unless Garry starts working on FP again in which case :toot: )
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Knockout
