Continuing the Forums/Website?

[Raceboat Racer X]

Hey all, so I have a bit of bad news.

As you may have noticed over the weekend, or from the group announcement yesterday, the FAP forums and website were down. There was an issue on the web box that the forums/website was hosted on, I'm suspecting some sort of data corruption. To cut to the point, the bad news is that the entire box was lost, the data unsalvageable. I may be able to dig up a backup somewhere, but odds are it will be months, if not years old, unfortunately.

So, I wanted to gauge the interest in rebuilding the forums. We still have the domain, and spinning up websites is what I do, so I would not mind setting up the Forums:Reborn. Hosting the forums for me is a negligible cost, since I use the same box for my own personal projects/web hosting.

I set up a poll[strawpoll.me], so please let me know if that's something you'd like to see. We've been on the same phpBB installation for years now, and I'm open to alternatives (at the very least we will be able to upgrade our previous phpBB installation) so if you have a preference/recommendation, share it below!

Love,
-Raceboat

[Ultimate Cookie]

As Jager would say, a FAPival...or something.

[Raceboat Racer X]

BTW, please spread the word about this discussion as much as you can among FAP and FoFAP members. Steam only really allows me to create the Announcements, but I'd like as many people as possible to contribute to this discussion. I'll make a follow-up Announcement later in the week, but by the end of this week I'll see what the results say.

Even if you don't care about the web site/clan anymore, please vote!

[Incognito Mosquito]

Well here's my situation: I don't play TF2 much at all anymore. I played a bit for the halloween event but the game has mostly run its course for me, and I'm on to bigger and fallout-er things. However, I still enjoy reading the forums and visit them almost daily. If it's negligible cost and you're willing to set them back up, I'm definitely in favor and will continue to visit and occasionally post.

[Typo Hui]

I'm kinda in the same boat with incog: I still on rare occasion visit, lurking, the forums. You gotta yes from me

[Ultimate Cookie]

It's my homepage. Yes from me :D

[Klepto]

I too am caught. It has been a pretty long time since I seriously played TF2. I seem to show up for a couple of hours every six months or so. But I had a great time when I was invested in FAP. It was, and still is a great community. I think keeping it going as long as possible is a good thing.

[SirfyBee]

Due to how FAP itself seemed to have changed over the last year or so, might be a good idea to rebuild anyway! Get all the old drama off and start fresh :) Let me know if you want help with anything!

[Hooked]

Yeah I still visit the forums pretty frequently as well. Playing GW2 at the moment but maybe I'll come back to TF2. Interested in seeing how competitive will affect the game.

[-FAP- Jägerbomber]

Thanks for the contact, guys!

I still want to see it up.

As for TF2, it's been with me for so long, I'm not planning on leaving it. I'm never going to not like it and I'll never grow completely tired of it. It's just not going to happen with this game. So I'd still like to fill the server again, and maybe even keep it that way at some point. Unfortunately, matchmaking was the early first nail from Valve against custom servers (or non-Valve servers), even if it meant well. Then came contracts, and probably soon competitive matchmaking to further cement that. I'd kind of hope that Valve would make the availability of custom servers more obvious to matchmaker users, but I don't know if that's going to happen. I even saw a reddit post from a player asking what happened to all the custom servers? Why did they die? All the responses were because of the matchmaker, of course. It would be nice if Valve made the matchmaker kick in harder for less than a minimum of 10 players on non-Valve servers...

And then there's Overwatch... Simply put, TF2's been around for so long, people just want a different IP. Even if it's the same genre and whatnot. No matter how much TF2's game modes change, it isn't going to change that a lot of people feel tired of TF2, the name/IP itself.

But Valve has managed to keep TF2's player count steady and even with a bit of an increase over a very long period of time. And with hints of possibly bigger stuff coming again (maybe...) and a competitive addition, it might keep living. Even after Overwatch's launch. But who knows how custom servers will go...

I'm still going to be there to try to fill the server. Though, (again) I haven't been around during the evening because I'm repairing my sleep schedule again. And I also tend to give a week or so of attention to newly launched games that I've gotten, but I usually try to be on in the evenings even then (if... I'm not asleep). I want to see the server going again, but it is extremely difficult to get it to reach just 10 players and hold it long enough for the damn matchmaker to kick in.

If anyone has any more concrete info on how the matchmaker actually works and ranks, that would be great...

And the forums. Getting new games onto it certainly won't hurt it. It's just that not that many people have tried because of the extremely low population. But I think they should try anyways.

Anyways... The forums are back up now. Raceboat's going on his stoopid honeymoon or something.... and I've got admin, so if you need something or have a suggestion, I might be awake to do something...

[(◔) Neville]

is the clanfap.com domain still owned by one of yall? I feel like it would be nice to put up a little static site just explaining servers are down and maybe some fap clan history idk

[-FAP- Jägerbomber]

Long ago I think it was run by Hank(inator), then maybe by Razzle? Then Raceboat but he had mostly gone to do other things by then. I was never knowledgeable to actually "run" it. But I was surprised nobody ever kept a backup (it's had several complete wipes over the years, Even accidental, LoL). :(

But the site's probably gone for good.

[(◔) Neville]

yes but at least make a bare bones new site to just have something at that domain

[Typo Hui]

Similar to what Jager said, I remember at some point Razzle telling me he owned the domain; he might have a backup archived somewhere. Doing a whois: looks like the clanfap.com domain is available for anyone to claim/purchase which kind of shocking given the shorter name.

Going to any website hosting service, you can purchase it for around 12 dollars (per year). Depending on where you purchased the domain from, they likely have basic website hosting tools to get something up fairly easy.

Edit: extra note: web services might tack on extra costs that are more than the 12 dollars a year. Often there is some first year promotion that keeps it pretty cheap, but just keep a note on the monthly/yearly costs. I've never personally owned a domain: this is more second hand research I've done a couple years back to purchase a domain for email.

Edit2: Doing a quick search it seems the normal price is around $9.99 dollars per month. Some places like godaddy (7 dollars/mo) and web (3 dollars/mo) have promotions that make the first year (or couple years) cheaper but go to the normal 10 dollar per month price. I've heard good things about squarespace, but I also hear they are moderately more expensive.

[-FAP- Jägerbomber]

I'd stay away from godaddy if I were me.

[Hooked]

Oh jeez wasn't expecting to see this in my notifications today. Blast from the past.

Godaddy is awful. I use namecheap personally. There are a few essentially free web hosting services out there if you know what you're doing. Azure and aws both, as well as other PaaS services like fly.io.

But I'm not sure how interesting it would be without an archive of the old forums.