RIP: The Old Forum

Some fun stats from the original 11 year run of the forum.

End of the last year stats:

Is that from Google Analytics? 100 users combining for 1.3 million pageviews seems… suspicious.

Users are users that are logged in. The forum is publicly visible. Those pageviews can come from bots, but also from people Googling for random things.

So only 100 logged in users hit a page in 2016? Seems low.

That’s month view. Those numbers are for just December 2016. See the date range?

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That’s some good eyeball you got there.

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The king is dead. Long live the king.

The last post, in the last thread, in the old forum before you close it down:

LOOK YE MIGHTY

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So when does the forum turn into some VR space where our avatars just interact with each other?

I hope HungryJoe makes it over.

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That MLP thread played a considerable part in creating Bronies. I’m not sure if to be proud or disgusted.

Let’s just start with Palace chat and see where things go

I decided to move from Firefox to Safari to take advantage of all the cool continuity features between my iPad, iPhone and laptop more easily.

The same day, the new forum launched. My muscle memory is working for most things, but other sites and browser features I’ve had to relearn. This forum feels like it came with the software switch on my laptop.

That MLP thread ultimately led to me doing panels at conventions, which is now a big part of my life.

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That MLP thread brought me into the Forum in the first place, which has been a big part of my life.

That MLP thread meant nothing to me. Meh!

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Ok, so I got a backup of the old forum database and loaded it up with the open source version of vanilla.

Anyone who knows how, please test it out. In your hosts file point forum.frontrowcrew.com at 45.56.108.112.

Mostly make sure URLs work, make sure you can’t post new stuff, make sure it will serve as a decent archive for all time. If that is the case, I will move the DNS to point there. I could even add https maybe now that it is self-hosted.

Then once I do that, I can tell Vanilla we are paying them no more money.

Links don’t appear to work. I was able to log-in but clicking on any thread brings me to vanilla’s error page (“Something’s gone wrong”)

Mostly seems in order, logged in fine, a couple of the announcement threads are erroring out with an unspecified problem, didn’t check much further than hitting a few random posts on the front page, two or three random threads from further back, only one of which failed. Ditto getting to threads from the “My discussions” tab. Will prod it more later.