User blog:Chris Lang/Beyond CBR

As I'm writing this, the CBR forums have experienced some form of failure. Links to valid threads no longer work.

This is bad. This is very, very, bad.

We at the Traitor Games put WAY too much into the one basket that's the CBR forums. The Traitor Games as we know them only exist there and on our drives. That is why I was initially hesitant about the creation of this Wiki, let alone promoting the games on TV Tropes. Wikis and TV Tropes mentions are for media that stick around for a while. Internet forums, though they keep data a LOT longer than they did ten years ago, are more like beaches and the forum threads are sand castles. Sooner or later, the tide will come in...

As much as I'd like to believe this is something that'll pass and everything will be back to normal, and we'll be able to continue 'Traitor Game of the Living Dead' as if nothing happened, this does NOT look good.

I've been at work saving just about everything I can. I believe I have all the Traitor Games and Traitor Tales up until the holiday offering Traitor Tales: How Larfleeze Stole Christmas saved. But some, alas, are only saved from the CBR archive, meaning all formatting (including colors and quotes) is gone. If you depended solely on colors to differentiate which person is saying what, then those posts have become a lot more difficult to follow.

Anyway, I sincerely hope I'm not the only one who's been saving Traitor Game threads. The mortality of Internet forums isn't something we've discussed much, but the possibility of some form of failure has always been there. And of course there was the whole problem of what to do when the principal administrator of the forums retires, or VBulletin goes out of business or upgrades to a format that won't allow the old threads to continue.

That's quite a lot of elephants in the room there.

Anyway, if the Traitor Games are to survive, they need to go beyond the CBR forums. What good IS saving all those threads if we don't have a place to archive them? However, that would require quite a lot of 'bandwidth' or whatever.

But one thing is clear: We cannot put all our eggs in one basket.