Notice how Dumpshock is ad-free? We like it that way and want to keep it that way. But, even a free little board like this has operating costs. Ours are $25/month to the hosting company for the site and backups. I've moved the board several times over the years and am very happy with the current hosting provider.

Notice that some of the other members are in a group called "Dumpshocked" instead of "Members"? Those users have contributed one month (or more in some cases) of hosting fees towards the operation of Dumpshock. The last funding drive, from a number of years ago, ran drive long ago; I've simply been paying the tab out of pocket.

Here's what I'm asking. Help me keep Dumpshock ad-free: Contribute one-month of hosting fees ($25; paypal: redjack@dumpshock.com). I'll change your group to Dumpshocked. Send me a custom avatar and I'll link that to your account as well.

Heck I'm even open to changes around here to spark some new life into the place. Let me know your thoughts and help me keep Dumpshock around a few more years.

-Redjack

Sounds reasonable. Just sent you $25.

Everyone else - time to step up. Dumpshock is a valuable resource, let's help keep it around.

Have you considered registering with Patreon? I'd be happy to add you to my "$1 a month" list.

Send me some banking data via PM or something and i'll see about wiring you some monies.
Interest is at an all time low anyway, so the money loses its worth in my bank account, might as well support dumpshock with it . .
i do not do paypal.
and seeing how i am located in germany, moving money to other people/states is a bit more problematic than i'd like <.<

Donated ^___^

Appreciate the support.
I'll Look into the Patreon idea.

Are there other changes, within reason, that we could do? Or do you like it just the way it is, don't change anything?

-RJ

Don't you dare change anything.
We are Grognards, we react badly and maybe violently to sudden change.

Although, getting a bigger Message Storage would be nice for many i guess.
Well, if they were still using the Message Box System enough for them to make a difference at least.

Hey! I resemble that remark.

Message store doubled for Dumpshocked group members.

I will put some money in the til at my full size terminal.

Donated. Patreon doesn't sound like bad idea, might even be able to fund some extras.

I have talked to my people to wire you some paypal monies.
Could take a few days though.

I'll bite, this place has been good to me over the years.

I also highly recommend Patreon, if you haven't looked at it. I have a couple friends who are fanartists who pull in enough to pay for art supplies at least, if not occasional profit.

As I said last time, DUmpshock certainly provides more SR goodness than any single book, so it's totally worth less than the cost of one



HTTPS maybe?

25 Nuyen coming right at you!
Thanks

Glad to help. I've certainly gotten my nuyen's worth.

Tossed it at you the other day, It'll be from my username @ gmail.

Thanks so much to all!

Nor do I. They spam me with emails insisting I disclose personal details. I have been to their website to staunch the sporge but it says the only way to control email they send me is to sign up with them, and disclose personal details. I'm not going to sign up to stem their "sign up!" spam! So that's put them firmly on my "do not touch with a telescopic staff" killfile.

I have a friend who does use PayPal; you should have received a transaction with my handle as the subject (or something; I don't know how PayPal transactions work or what they look like).

I echo that sentient!

I was only registered briefly on the earlier incarnation of the forum (a couple of years at most) and my post-count here is lower than many*. Partly because I don't have thick skin for my hobby (no dermal deposits ) -- do you remember when ISPs would chase up reports of their customers swearing on usenet? More and more it seems civility is the exception rather than the rule... And partly because I get a great deal out of the (constructive) discussions here that show passion for a story setting regardless of (sometimes despite) rulesets imposed over it. As later editions are discussed and I have precious little time / motivation to learn a new system, I remain a happy little lurker, and contribute where I can, if I can. By not "upgrading", I know I'm less and less equipped to contribute anything new - but I've directed many people here over the years who were aspiring roleplayers or runners and I can count the number of sites that applies to on one finger.

I do have a number of suggestions though.

1. the search feature blocks searches for phrases that include words of three or fewer letters. So it is not possible to search for "Hand of God", and searching merely for "Hand" isn't want you're looking for. Can you configure the search feature to proceed if there are four or more non-space, non-punctuation characters submitted in a quoted phrase? Better search means fewer duplicate questions we've covered before.
2. in The ISCP thread ThatPaolo "removed all the dead links from the archive now" before people started pointing out that the Wayback Machine could have cached those pages and we can preserve them from its cache... but we need the links to do so. A backup of the archive prior to the links being purged would allow the community to work on this. Fatum made his/her own archive to preserve this information.
3. in a similar vein, this thread being to "keep Dumpshock around a few more years" is realistically concerning. There are a number of places offering colocation of Raspberry Pi computers (often for free). I've set up mediawiki on RedSleeve on a RPi B and it is slow. Likely IP.Board would be a similar story. However, it would be cheaper. Would you consider making available (to "Dumpshocked" or freelancers only) a database dump every six months so that if at some point in the future maintaining Dumpshock becomes unworkable, some of us can pick up the torch? This wouldn't be as trivial as the backups you make at the moment: it would need to have passwords, email address, and board mail scrubbed prior to being made available. But it would mean we could set up static, read-only mirror sites of Dumpshock (even on a cheap RPi at a minimum) to preserve the wisdom concentrated here.
4. speaking of which, do you still have the backups of the old forum? There were some stories and discussions there I really wish I still had access to. Like this one for example.
5. now that high speed Internet access is more widely available than it was, say, back in 2002, (I am guessing your "Joined: 2-July 89" has been customised since Adam's profile says Feb 2002) and now that traffic to Dumpshock is less than it was and quota is cheaper than it was, would it be worthwhile to have dumpshock.com hosted on your own hardware with its IP address updated via dDNS? It'd be cheaper.

Just some ideas. Long live Dumpshock!

* Remember "Emo Samurai"? What he lacked in restraint he more than made up for in enthusiasm. Sometimes the whole of the first page of the forum showed only his polls! I even got him a portrait at one point...

I did get a Paypal from an email address not tied to a user today. Thanks!
Several people have said they added messages to the Paypal donations, but I'll be darned, I can't seem to find them. Seems to be even worse than Dumpshock's Search engine.

I think I'm going to try (when I get a chance) to perhaps link to google search. Google does search and it does it well. Far better than I could reinvent that wheel.

Last I remember, Mark tried to find backups from back then but couldn't.

At this point, the community is really stepping up to keep DS alive. If we ever get to the point where I begin to consider stepping away, I pledge to take the route Mark did and find a predecessor.

See above.

What? You don't believe that's legit?

Sadly, the 90's called and they want my bandwidth back.

Honestly, I have hopes for Dumpshock being a going concern again.

Unfortunately at this point I think it'll be sometime around when we see SR6, because SR5 seems to have sapped the life out of every community around SR I've been around.

Reddit seems really gung Ho for SR5. Like almost weirdly so, it's kinda creepy actually.

Kids these days...

Huh. I don't Reddit, but glad someone's enthusiastic about it!

The Paypal payment would have had "energy" in its email address, but since it isn't my email address, that should be sufficient.

Excellent to use Google search if we can. If that doesn't work, please do consider tweaking the search configuration within the forum. Certain terms like FAB are hard to search for otherwise as they are used more often than people type out the whole Fluorescent Astral Bacteria term verbatim.


A number of times, Dumpshock have offered to proof-read and validate for free new source books prior to final print so that the material is professional and polished, more people buy it, more people play it, and we get to game more. Because in order to play, we need to make sense of the rules anyway; might as well make them make sense prior to publishing rather than having a FAQ released introducing new rules, instead of errata to cover a fraction of the contradictions Dumpshock exposes. This offer hasn't been taken up, to my knowledge, so it's a case of community to the rescue after the event instead. Cure > prevention.

It's more your successor(s) I'm thinking of actually. Sometimes when Reality rolls for initiative, there isn't time for smooth plans and not everyone gets to take an action.

When circumstances changed for someone on the other side of the screen, Earthdawn and Shadowrun history was lost. The community tried to save what was possible, but so much was dispersed or dumped in a remote town in a remote country before a conservation effort could be coordinated that not much (if any) made it through a scanner onto FTP and available for the community of the future.

When jive became unavailable, members of the community mirrored some of that content and the wayback machine archived it. When Plastic Rat's computer was being uncooperative members of the community offered mirrored hosting that is still making that content available today. Site admins are not immune to that fate and the community again comes to the rescue. Cure > prevention.

They were variously at invision.dumpshock.com and jive.dumpshock.com/default/ (read-only) from 2003 to 2004 and two months in 2005:

Blackjack's archive pages were popular a decade ago as they still are in 2016:
within weeks, Neuron Basher had delivered on that promise: within a week, Neuron Basher had delivered on that promise: So if Mark wasn't able to locate the backups, maybe Adam or Neuron knows where the physical servers are (at least two generations of servers held the data, and the services were virtualised by that point). Ideally we could recover:

• warthog.dumpshock.com and then lists.dumpshock.com - ShadowRN UBB
• invision.dumpshock.com and jive.dumpshock.com - previous forum
• hlair.dumpshock.com
• Pistons' (Elissa's) Dystopian Visions dystopian.dumpshock.com would be good too for completeness
• some subdomains should just remain ancient history

Perhaps if there had been more backups distributed to more people, when inevitable atrophy removed a proportion each year, at least some would still remain. Because putting all your backups in the one basket is only a step away from not having backups. I know the community volunteered to help with this: This offer wasn't taken up, to my knowledge, so the community can't easily come to the rescue this time. No cure > prevention?

I'll take a stab in the dark roughly in the vicinity of 30-December 06, give or take a few. Back when the skin / theme was blue. It became green and black in Feb 2008 when the SR4 forum got folded into the Shadowrun one. The old system there could have been the most recent server to host the jive content. It did still have the ShadowRN UBB (at lists.dumpshock.com) and that's worth salvaging.

Please be sure there are at least two current off-site backups of all data before starting the upgrade (see above). I'm sure I'm not the only one but I'm offering to be at least one node in a distributed RAID. Storage is cheap but information isn't. Would SSH access to a box with 2Tb of dedicated storage be more attractive than putting up an archive freelancers / Dumpshocked can download periodically? Would using SyncThing reduce the data load sufficiently? Prevention > cure?

... ... I can only tell that was not a clear "yes", but if there was any meaning apart from that, I can't figure it out.

Been quite a while since that was an option, though on a positive note I am excited to see Ray heavily involved with production. I hope that extends not only to Missions, but across the entire product line. He is quite the bulldog as an editor.

Speaking of need for editing.

I have a colleague who is both an avid Shadowrunner and a wage-slave decker by trade. It would be prudent to insure contingency planning with him. I will make that happen.

The last I was told they were lost or in some cases removed at the owner's request. To be honest, I would restore any that the creator doesn't explicitly request be removed.

Ancient History requested to have his dumpshock site turned down, despite my multiple personal requests to him to simply leave them. I understand that many people still are unhappy with that. I am as well, but I respect him too much not to honor his request.

This will be a side-by-side upgrade, not an in-place upgrade. I am confident in the migration. The worst case scenario will be working to tweak system settings for character set issues or changes in functionality due to a new version of PHP.

So if a community member did pipe up now with a tarball of 2006's jive and warthog would you accept it?

If so, please clarify what dissuades you from taking advantage of the community for distributed backups of the current forum? If 100 community members took a backup now; ten years pass and only 10% of those people are still active and have their backup; that's still 100% more available backups than DSF might have at that point under your successor (or their successor, etc.) What's the disadvantage from your perspective? I'd like to understand.

I am not familiar with either jive or warthog. The version of jive looks pretty old and was superseded by Neuron Basher to the current software. What security concerns exist with those old versions? Will they drop and run on the current (and seen to be: newer) Linux host?

Two things are an impediment:
1) Distribution of a database backup would include user account emails, passwords, etc.
2) The software the forum runs on is licensed. Distribution of the software is a violation of that license.

In this case, I think establishing a succession plan to a technically capable and willing individual is probably the approach that respects both of those.

Redjack,

Can you sticky this? I'm flat broke at the moment, but want to donate as soon as I've got the cred. It could be a month or more, so I don't want to lose this info.

I second this. This thread needs to stick around and be visible.

The software can't do a dump of just the public posts? Sure, that wouldn't be a full backup of the forum, but at least the information would remain if rocks should fall.


Anyway, why I'm actually visiting this thread is this:

Maybe Dumpshock could have one?

My initial suggestion would easily be scripted: but RedJack suggests doing that isn't "enough" to get rid of emails, passwords, etc. so I don't think your suggestion would qualify either. It's pretty similar to my own in end result.

Of course - my suggestion was: I realise now I was unclear. I wasn't suggesting providing any programs, OSes, VMs running services, or licences for any of those that are currently cooperating to deliver the whole DSF experience. I was only requesting performing a database dump - the data used by the licenced software to store user-generated content in the forum. If DSF does go down permanently, there are plenty here who would pony up the price of a new licence for the same software and get the database dump backup back online. It wouldn't look as good or run so smoothly, but a community backup is better than no backup and a great advantage of using licenced software rather than open source is that you are paying for them to provide you with support using the software and getting it up and running. That can only be a good thing when it comes to resurrecting either the current forum or jive.

Indeed -- noticing this thread today reminded me to finally get myself fixed up with paypal and give some support. I hope this thread stays up on the main page (possibly in the Welcome to the Shadows forums too -- after all, the people playing games here are getting a of benefit from the site, and might also benefit from an occasional reminder? In other words, I'm there more often than on the main boards, and might have remembered to do this sooner if there was a reminder on that forum)

50 Nuyen, if just for the memories. Thinking about getting back into Shadowrun, and this is one of my old school resources.

It's been a year, so I just sent you another $25.

Has it been a year already?

My how time flies.


Donated. ^_^

Redjack, have you given any further consideration to Patreon? Just setup a quick $1-a-month program. 25 of us sign up, costs are covered going forward.

I look into it this weekend when I'm back home; traveling for work this week. I should also try to set some time aside to migrate to a new server. Been a few weeks since an issue, but I need to just take some time and get it migrated.

Redjack, have you given any further consideration to distributed backups of what data remain? Again, it would need to have passwords, email address, and board mail scrubbed prior to being made available. I don't mind whether it'd be to "Dumpshocked" or freelancers only or to people who have demonstrated their commitment by setting up mirror archives already (eg Fatum). It'd just be a shame to have a single point of failure leading to another, "oops - don't know where that server went" moment. Making a backup is worth it; making several off-site backups is even better.

Hi, Redjack.

Any further thought on this?

Hi, Redjack. Just thought I'd ask about this again.

Gah… a bit late.

Donated, plus any update on the Patreon idea?

JanessaVR and I have discussed that quite a bit. I was looking for another site, but in the end I think it will have to be Patreon.

It does look like the other options either aren't viable or are still in development. Patreon it is (for now). Please let us know when you've got it setup. If you're looking at $25 per year per person, just setup a handy $2 a month option.

Hi, Redjack.

You still out there? Hope all is well, as I hadn't heard back from you on this. Also, there's a new subscriber site available for you to investigate:

https://www.subscribestar.com

I'd like to begin supporting Dumpshock regularly, so please have a look if your schedule permits.

Thank You,

Janessa

$25 heading your way Redjack. Thanks for keeping the lights on, and giving us a home. Appreciate it.

I've sent him emails, and gotten no response. Actually starting to get a bit worried at this point.

I'm here, keeping the site running. Just not finding options other than PayPal for site donation that seem stable, other than Patreon. I haven't looked into the one you sent the other day.

Day job is finally winding down for the holidays, so I hope to focus on that during the downtime.

-RJ

Subscribe Star is up and running, and I've been moving over a lot of my Patreon pledges to that platform, as fast as I can convince creators to open an account there as well. You might go have a look at it here.

That time of the year again,

Sending Nuyen and best wishes.

seeing how i have a new job, i will do my part again as well at the end of this month.

Much appreciated! The account is dipping pretty low.
On a positive note, the server has been very stable over the past few years since the last provider move.