I was going to post this in the other thread about Campbell and the future of ADRIFT, but figured I might as well make another one. Hey, it’s not like we’re drowning in new threads these days, is it?
Let’s imagine the worst case scenario: Campbell has gone and isn't coming back. There isn't going to be a new version of ADRIFT, bugs present are going to be here for all eternity and the website, at some future point in time, is going to go kaput. Which means goodbye to all the games and the reviews and every single forum post. Including this one.
Now, there's no guarantee that any of that is likely to happen. Campbell might very well return while I'm typing this post and announce that he’s been feverishly working on v6 and it’ll be released next week and take the IF world by storm. ADRIFT’s glory days are back!
But, realistically, that isn't very likely to happen. Even if he’s not given up on ADRIFT, Campbell visits the forum very rarely (the last time was two months ago and he’s only posted three times this year) and updates to ADRIFT have slowed to a crawl (the last update was in July 2016, before that it was November 2015 and before that May 2015) and as he’s the driving force behind ADRIFT, without him it’s pretty much dead in the water (pardon the pun).
So what can we, the community, do about it?
With ADRIFT not being open source, there's probably not a whole lot that can be done about the program itself. There are a few forum members I know of with the coding skills to be able to update ADRIFT and / or fix bugs, but as a non-programmer myself, I'm not sure how easy it would be to do any of that (even if they were willing) with the program not being open source. I know Saabie is working on his own version of the v5 Runner – which hopefully will be a godsend because I've never liked the v5 Runner – but could he also work on the new versions of the Generator if he was so minded?
The website itself is hopefully something that we can handle, though. Funnily enough, the games themselves aren’t that much of an issue – Rotter has them archived on his Delron site and I'm guessing the majority are available on the IFArchive, and any missing ones I'm sure we have on our hard drives somewhere – but the forum itself is a problem. If it goes offline tomorrow, that’s 15 years of posts gone up in smoke. That would be bad. I remember being annoyed when the old forum disappeared after Campbell migrated ADRIFT to this one and I’d only been a member of the old forum for about a year. Losing 15 years of posts would be a tragedy.
So, to the technical folk among us, is there a way of migrating this forum to a different website? Basically taking all the old posts, user logins, etc and moving them to another website in the event of this forum going down? I'm sure there is software that can do that sort of thing, but I don’t know of it myself. Assuming the software exists, is it something only Campbell would be able to use (being the admin here – in which case we’re probably screwed anyway), or could any of the moderators handle it?
While I'm brainstorming, moving to a new website would also allow us – i.e. someone with the necessary web design skills – to bring the main site kicking and screaming into the modern age. Get rid of the old drab design people have been complaining about for years and give it a nice new look which actually might encourage newcomers to stick around. Personally I’d be in favour of integrating the website and the forum into one as there's a bit of disconnect between them at the moment. Games get posted on the website but there's no corresponding announcement on the forum unless the author specifically makes a thread, which most of them don’t seem to do. Integrating the sites – having a separate, but very visible, location on the forum for games – would solve that problem.
At this stage, most of the above is just food for thought. Even if Campbell never comes back, I doubt he'd just let the forum and website go down without some warning to the people here, but in the event the unthinkable happens, it makes sense to at least have a plan in place. After all, I'm sure no one wants to try to log into the forum tomorrow to find that it’s gone.