Those are hard choices we have to make to stay afloat. I don't know where you are doing your hosting, but the monthly bill to run BeyondUnreal the way we were before was well over $200. Fileworks was not sustainable, especially if we had been ad-less.
Because i have no idea how long i have to live i made preperations just in case. So i decided last year to extend the payment up to 2015 for my sites. And for a 5 year contract i payed 419 Dollars which is is 6.99 per month. But i could have had it for 4.99 per month if it wasnt for the fact i wanted to have the official Cpanel which costed an extra of 2 Dollars a month.
To be even more on the safe side i decided to split my site up into two sites being UnrealTexture and UTTexture, just to make sure it will survive after me being gone even without maintenance. But for that price you have a shared server with at least 500 gig of bandwidth a month, which i had before the split, and i never got complains about. Endless email accounts, 100 databases, endless inodes (my site had over 166000 inodes before the split)
The site(s) is running now for several years without any downtime or problems(except they hacked one of the sites end of last year, where they redirected the site to the worldfamous Canadian Pharmacy....) My host is
www.lunarpages.com (Basic webhosting). And i went there because i already found out upfront they allowed server redirects and lots more than some other hosts. Aside that they already did host quite a few large gaming/clan sites.
Well, I would love to hear a compelling argument to keep them separate, really. I can't think of a single reason to keep a forum open and separate that, on average, gets 5 posts per month. It just adds to the clutter and people tend to start posting things in the wrong forums because they will get missed if they are in the right forum.
I dont mind if it stays under games, and still have all subsections under the button Classic Unreal Titles. But merging the forums to solve clutter will only add to clutter. Basically you do what you want to prevent, in order to prevent clutter you merge them so it WILL become cluttered. This already is sometimes confusing on a site like UNrealSP.org, where Unreal and UT are merged. There its often unclear to me if they talk about Unreal or UT. So merging all versions Unreal into oné makes it impossible to follow anyhting. And certainly not for new users.
But other reason can be:
- You at least narrow the searches if you need something.
- For historical purposes the forums should stay intact.
- Most people do find the right forum, so its a bit pointless to merge the forums for the few that dont.
- I dont see how it will atract new people if everything is merged, as new people by definition will get confused.
- You basically do exactly that you want to prevent.
- Why would people go read a thread to find out its the game they dont even play. If that happens time after time people simply will turn their back to a forum.
If you eat ice, the one likes strawberry, the other banana, and the other vanilla. To prevent people from ordering the wrong flavor you mix them all together. So my question is, why do you think icecreams are still sold seperatelly? Well for the same reason they dont throw an entire cow in the blender and sell the meat as already mixed for use regardles what type of meat you wanted on your plate.........
I would say leave the subsections intact, and if needed have the main Classic thrown to a lower level, but for peat sake dont merge the forums.
Me and many other people disagreed with that decision but it was not ours to make. Suffice it to say that, if it weren't for the behind the scenes efforts of many people, even the UT files that were associated with NaliCity would have been ditched years ago.
I am certainly aware of that, but i have pointed that out in the past, the prices for hosting simply are too cheap, and when i first adressed it, i already kinda made that point. Because i dont believe that helds ground at current hostingplans. I think what happens here is that this site stuck with the old host for prices that were maybe valid untill 10 years ago.
And certainly for files this aplies, and even more for files for the games Unreal(for which i even offered redirect to my site) and UT. Unreal is about 12 gig of data, UT about 30 gig of data(by both i excluded the S3TC textures) All those years this site could have easelly hosted those files for a few bucks somewhere else, as i proposed years ago.
And dont get me wrong, i am absolutelly not aiming at the people that work on this site before and behind the screens!!! I am merelly pointing out there might be other solutions outside the current host.
And at this moment i have no clue how much bandwidth is eaten by UT2003/4 and UT3. But if you would rent a site for each game than the costs would still be 20 dollars a month(if you use LunarpageCpanel). And at the same time you would have 400 databases and 4 times endless email accounts, and 4 times 500 gig bandwidth.
No clue what you guys pay now, but you might wanna have a look into that. And there are other hosts that are reliable like HostGator, GoDaddy that have similar packages.
I think that just speaks to the unfortunate abandonment by Epic of all things Unreal. I don't like it, it is just reality.
And for me goes, i dont stick at old stuff easelly. But i do find history important as well. And i am a strong believer that the internet should also be preserved into history and that sites, where possible should throw in their dime. For that matter i think the people from Unreal certainly throw in their dime alot, and sites like the internet archive do that as well. And companies like Epic, they have servers running in their basements and have large internet connections. Nowadays you can buy a 2 terabyte drive for less than a 100 bucks, bandwidth costs 0 to nothing and they still cant keep an archive............. THAT really is living in the past with past tense reasons to not host a decent archive! (And by that i am really aiming at companies and not to this site in particular)
As said i even can pay for it, and would be able to host it, me being on disability.
If we sit on our hands, let our forum index become overly cumbersome and cluttered with empty and inactive forums, then we won't get any better and the people that abandon the site won't be replaced by new people at all. I really don't want to see that happen.
No i wouldnt expect that from you guys, you should always look ahead and see what improovements can be made. So you got my blessings. But at the same time i do think you also have a responsibility to also preserve the past where you can, and as said, if needed throw it down one level but keep the split it is now intact. That way you can add on the top levels new sections for other games while at the same time you maintain whats already made and keep if for history. You can do the one thing without harming the other.
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