It's been obvious to me and I'm sure all of you that the site has had a pretty big drop in activity, starting about 3 years ago. Each month it dwindles a bit more, not because the Quake community is dying -- it's thriving -- but because it's moved elsewhere. Places like discord, quaddicted, slipseer, and twitter.

It seems that at this point, Func_Msgboard does not need to exist anymore, at least in its current form. I've been thinking of what should happen to it, and my current though is to turn it into a read-only archive for people to continue to reference when needed. There's no timeline for this and it will probably be a while before I pull the trigger, so until then I'm happy to hear other suggestions. 

FYI... if your curious about activity over the years, here are some quick ugly graphs I made.

This first one shows posts per year. This query excludes spam posts if you're wondering.

https://www.celephais.net/stuff/func_posts_per_year.png

The second graph shows unique active users per year. This means the number of registered users who posted at least once. This also excludes spam posts and spam accounts.

https://www.celephais.net/stuff/func_unique_active_users_per_year.png

The last graph shows spam posts per year. It really was that bad for a while.

https://www.celephais.net/stuff/func_spam_posts_per_year.png 

What "could be advised" about the future of Func_: good question. I think it is up to the owners to decide what to do with this giant database. Nevertheless, I think it would certainly deserve to stay alive: it has always been a great place with tons of information, point of views, with inspiring gamers/mappers, and that would be a pity to close it.

I cannot deny its current form is outdated (when compared to new places such as Discord, etc..), but I think it's hard to tell which way is better to make it evolve without breaking its awesome" old-school/old-fashion" look that reminbd all how Quake was awesome (and still is) when released in mid June 1996.

I sincerely hope a nice solution will be found to keep the Quake spirit alive ;)

Anyway: whatever will be decided, I just want to say a big thank for all these years supporting the Quake community, and keeping the Quake spirit alive. 

Let it never die!

metl - You are a legend of the sport. 

I pop by every once in a while and it's always cool to see the board still around and active. Well done, metl, on creating a something that has remained relevant for so long.
This place was a source of a lot of fun for me back then, thanks for your effort! 

Func serves an important role for me even if I don't post as much anymore. The fact that I can drop in at any time to start or to partake in a discussion is comforting. This site dates back to a time when the Web was still exciting and used as a tool to build communities rather than for commerce. Its continued existence provides a sense of normalcy in a medium that have been overrun with social media drivel.

I personally haven't been posting lately because my new job has eroded any hope of having a life outside of work. Some of the people who joined this community after me frankly turned me off of this place as well. I keep dreaming of coming back to mapping some day. If I ever did, this is the only place where I would want to share builds and get feedback from others. My mapping questions would be directed to the forum members here. I don't want to use Discord.

I know this might sound weird since I am relatively new to the community when accounting for how long it has been around, but Func still holds a lot of value to me. I would hate to see posting closed. It has already happened to a few other places where I used to hang out. I like knowing that I can comment on a thread for a map that is several years old in hopes that the author might see my appreciation some day. I did that for Honey. That being said, I know that luddites like me can't expect the lights to be kept on when we're an extreme minority. I still idle on IRC but realistically, people aren't coming back to it.

I don't see why posting has to be closed just because it has gotten quiet but I assume that it has something to do with spam and moderation. I continue to keep tabs on news via the RSS feed and it's going to be a real drag when the updates stop coming in. Thanks for keeping the site alive for this long. 

That’s all and that’ll do.

metlslime, Sock, CZG, Scampie, Tronyn, Ijed, Ionous, Sleepwalkr, Necros, Kell, JPL, spd, RickyT23, Kinn, Madfox, 5th, EricW, Qmaster, dumptruck, kipi, ORL, rebb, OTP and all you reading this.

I thank you. You are the best.

Go map!

Forever. 

Wrote and rewrote this post a few times, so I'll try and keep it simple.

Quake would not be what it is without func. Thanks to everyone for your work keeping this up for so long. If this truly is the end, it's the end of an era. 

How big is whole func_msgboard backup?
It's mainly text, so I guess it's quite compact. 

There's nothing quite like Func. I'm going to talk about it in the past tense (obituary-style), which feels sort of strange, but I agree that its salad days are over...

The fact that only mods could edit and delete posts here, gave the whole place a "carved in stone" feeling that I got nowhere else. This encouraged effort-posting, and some of the greatest and most carefully-crafted Quake-based essays and exegeses were writ here.

Func also had a visibility that you don't get in something like discord. Func posts came up in google searches for goodness sake. It just felt like a giant monolith that stood there in the landscape, an immovable brown tower, years of Quakey wisdom etched into its illimitable stone facets in arcane, banter-infused, and often beef-flavoured runes.

The "Submit" button held a power that was at once terrible yet infinitely thrilling. I find that our new world of endless edits and deletes and fast-scrolling feeds of valueless chatter has conditioned the modern poster into thinking that all talk is cheap and transient, and indeed it is now. But I'd like to see how such young, modern posters would change their discourse if they knew their words would be moulded permanently to become part of the structure of the internet, as if chiselled into a bas-relief of Abydos.

Func was also literally the only site on the entire internet that would load up on my ancient dumbphone whilst sitting on a train back in the 2000s.

#7 - aww, thanks mfx - I love you too, truly, and indeed all the others who have made this place what it was. 

If func goes down I'll quit internet.

So discorded I can't find my subject,
because it ratles like a springbean.
Don't spoil me with lack of intrest.

Thanks everyone who joined this board.
For the help, knowhow and energy!

Merry Xmass. 

The "Submit" button held a power that was at once terrible yet infinitely thrilling. I find that our new world of endless edits and deletes and fast-scrolling feeds of valueless chatter has conditioned the modern poster into thinking that all talk is cheap and transient, and indeed it is now. But I'd like to see how such young, modern posters would change their discourse if they knew their words would be moulded permanently to become part of the structure of the internet, as if chiselled into a bas-relief of Abydos.

Your choice of words is beyond me, I must admit. Still, I’ll gladly consume them whenever they appear. 

First of all, congratulations on 20 years. What an amazing achievement.

I am a long-time lurker who has only decided to finally muster up the courage to register and post after many years, so take any of the following with a pretty big grain of salt.

I am by no means versed in forum managing but I keep thinking that if the maintenance and upkeep isn't too costly, both time and resource-wise, why would there be any reason to archive this place?

Yes, the age of forums has long been over in favor of other places you mentioned, but I just don't think Discord or Twitter communities will have such longevity. They are places where the discourse flows very differently and very quickly - less time and thought is given to the messages, they are more expendable, you don't expect them to be read hours after posting, let alone decades. There is a reason why forum culture, that has been intertwined with internet culture for as long as one can remember, still remains, albeit with dwindling popularity. Forums are places that have not succumbed to the increasingly dispensable nature of the modern-day internet and perhaps, this is the optimist in me wishing, people will once again in the future come to appreciate that.

The sense of the shared history of the Quake community here is ever-present. I suspect for many of the guys and gals here this place is like that one bar you frequented with your pals and it's always nice to drop by from time to time, it would be sad to just look at the place from outside.

Any way you decide to proceed, we still owe you a quad thank you. This place has been amazing. 

This place has been the institution on Quake gameplay, mapping, modding, modeling, texturing, etc. for so many years. You name anything remotely related to "the game" and it has been covered here for sure. My endless appreciation goes out to the community that still surrounds Quake, that once coaxed me out of the shadows to do some speedmapping back in the day, you will not be forgotten. Func_Msgboard is that special piece of shrapnel so close to my heart that it can never be removed. Thank you all for that! Peace. 

Haha, cheers mfx, for me it's always been about the banter here - the poetry, as it were.

I've always seen social media and chat-based web communities as a sort of disease of the modern world.

Perhaps just as smallpox (Discord) caused the abandonment of the great cities of the Amazon (that we are only just discovering now via new laser-based, radar-like technology), we are seeing func fall victim in a similar way. 

First of all, congratulations for this incredible run, and thank you for keeping the lights on all these years. func has been around much longer than its predecessors (frib's electric fish board, the QBoard, PnF) combined. I believe that it is because you struck a good balance with the features and limitations of this board.

Anyway, on the question of keeping the board open - I am questioning the need to change anything, to be honest. Of course, traffic has slowed down to a trickle, and I imagine that to you and the mod team, the actual content getting posted doesn't justify the cost of moderating and clearing the spam posts.

On the other hand, the new "homes" of the community are not entirely under our control. Discord and twitter could go away or become unusable at any given point in time. I mean, it's pretty obvious in the case of twitter that its days are counted. What if discord changes its policies in ways that are incompatible with this community? What if discord goes bankrupt? Where would this community go, and how would it communicate until it finds a new home?

I believe that keeping func around as a place that is 100% under our control in every aspect is important not only as an archive but also as in case one of these other services goes away or becomes unusable for us permanently. In the very least, make it so that we can re-establish it easily. 

Yes, as a few have mentioned now...

Func doesn't actually need to shut down. It can carry on if we want it to, and as long as people are logging the important developments here, it still has an extremely relevant function, even if the general banter aspect has been largely replaced by discord. 

This site has been invaluable over the years to helping me find the latest quake/doom maps and mods. Hope it continues for at least that long. 

Congratulations on 20 years.

I'm a bit of a lurker here. Always find myself checking out the main news and what has been released, but never commenting.

It is hard to maintain an active site and even harder with spammers, spam bots (and now AI bots), constant code changes and security updates. All of which takes so much time.

The idea of no more Func_Msgboard is a sad feeling.

Whatever you decide, I would like to thank all involved with Func_Msgboard for all your time over the last 20 years. It really has been awesome! 

Thanks for all the kind words about func. I'm proud of what it's been so far and appreciate all the contributions of others that made it possible.

It's not just chat and banter that moved to discord, but all the other valuable activity of func too -- announcements of every new map release, organizing jams, posting WIP screenshots, getting help with mapping problems, and giving feedback on the work of others. These were the things that made it worth coming here. ALL of those have moved to discord. For the last year, if you only visited func and not discord, you have been missing out on a lot.

I share the concern that corporate-owned platforms like twitter or discord, and especially walled gardens like discord, are bad for communities, but, we do also have quaddicted and slipseer which are both community-owned and have forums, and might end up being more "sticky" since they are integrated with map/mod databases.

I'm sympathetic to the idea of "keep func going as it is" but... the spam moderation is an ongoing chore for me, which is one negative. Also, it feels bad to be putting time into a thing very few people use. But I recognize that some people still use it, just not many and not very much. Maybe I'll let it go for a while longer and see how it goes. 

i hope func will live in light_flicker mode. i visit it almost daily, it's automated habit already :>

thanks everyone for contribution! 

the spam moderation is an ongoing chore for me

Would enforcing user login for ALL parts of the board help with this?

I think right now the only audience that cares about the continued existence of this site are the "old soaks", as it were, the ones who are already part of the woodwork.

If all else fails, and the site essentially has to shut down... perhaps (and I'll probably get flack for this)... perhaps just do the above, and also close off the ability for new accounts to be made, so the site is still usable for existing accounts. Maybe trust a few mods to give people new accounts on request if they ask them in Discord or whatever, so we know it's not some bot or scumbag spammer.

That way the site can enter a new phase, that stops just short of the ol' "Grandad's Winchester in the backyard" trick.

An afterlife perhaps.

Or maybe dead...but dreaming. 

... and when Twitter blows up because of some US-politics related shitstorm, and Discord does something weird and disgusting, like getting all involved in AI-generated content, then this place can roar back to life. 

I understand that keeping this place running feels like a chore and that at some point, you gotta move on. I'd just request that, if you shut it down, please do it in a way that allows you to reinstate it quickly. And maybe leave a set of instructions with a few trusted individuals, just in case we need the place again and you're not around.

I think I'd also like to create a permanent backup and leave it with someone else in case I'm not around anymore at some point. I make regular backups of the database, but if something happens to me, it could all become inaccessible to the community.

It will feel sad to let this board go. In some sense, it's already gone, but still... it played such an important role for me over many years. And somehow, I haven't made the transition to the other community homes... I don't spend much time there. 

For spam filtering do Quake lore captcha, will filter bots and random spammers.