[X] My Assistant

[djellison]

Dear UMSF Members,

It is with a heavy heart that I share the news that UnmannedSpaceflight will go dark at the beginning of January 2025.

Some of you may have seen this note from Nick just over a year ago alluding to long term challenges The Planetary Society had shared regarding the maintenance and hosting of the forum in its current form. Since then we have taken a close look at the technical state of the server and forum hosting software and have not been able to find either a technical or financial path forward to keep the forum operating.

For context, the Invision software itself is over a decade out of date and no upgrade path exists to either upgrade to current Invision board software, or migrate to other hosting platforms. Plans of migrating to a more inclusive URL have been on the backburner for over 10 years. Even if a path were obvious - finding new affordable hosting and migrating to run the forum independently of The Planetary Society would take a talented web developer a significant amount of time ( and thus money ) and admin team time to manage it ( which none have )

After talking with other veteran members of the admin team, we have therefore decided the better path forward is to give members 3 months notice to take copies of their attachments, discuss places they might like to hang out together in the future, and reminisce about some of the highlights of 20 years of stitching, mapping, discussion and adventure before bringing things in for a graceful landing on Jan 1, 2025.

I had no idea when spinning up a forum back in 2004 that it would last so long or that the breadth, depth and quality of creations and discourse would be anything like as incredible as it has been. For some, this place has literally been life changing. We’ve seen spacecraft, and people, come and go. Entire careers have sprouted from some of the out-of-this-world-ideation right here on these pages.

I want to once again give a huge thank you to Nick for being the de facto admin for more than a decade - without his care and attention the forum would have collapsed many years ago. Emily too deserve special mention for chaperoning this place when it became part of TPS. Jason, Ted, Dan, Glen, Stu, Bjorn, Mike and others have also been a major part of the UMSF story.

Further - I want to credit folks like Steve Squyres, Jim Bell, Alan Stern, John Spencer, Ralph Lorenz, Paolo Belluta, Mark Lemmon and others for sharing their time as part of this community or being pivotal in its origins and in doing so, inspiring others to keep the level of discourse as high as it has been for 20 amazing years.

So what’s next?

• New registrations are no longer being processed
• We will attempt to archive the forum as best we can around the beginning of December and upload it to archive.org (and will update this message with a link when it’s done )
• New attachments will be disabled at that time.
• For those that want to continue hanging out together - we’ve spun up a UMSF discord server ( https://discord.gg/hp3g3TKVRW ) - still an empty work in progress, but maybe folks might congregate there. Use the Ideas & Feedback channel there to discuss.
• A thread "Greatest Hits" has been spun up for people to share their favorite creations or discussions from the last 20 years.
• Another thread "Find me at...." has been spun up for people to share where they can be found moving forwards.

In closing - thank you all for being a part of this adventure....we’ll see you around the solar system somewhere.

Doug Ellison
Founder, UnmannedSpaceflight.com

[mcaplinger]

We will attempt to archive the forum as best we can around the beginning of December and upload it to archive.org...

Let me know if there's anything I can help with in that regard. AFAIK archive.org can't/doesn't crawl into any forum topic so everything currently there is pretty useless (top-level topic links you can't navigate into.)

[djellison]

Let me know if there's anything I can help with in that regard. AFAIK archive.org can't/doesn't crawl into any forum topic so everything currently there is pretty useless (top-level topic links you can't navigate into.)

At the very least, a dump of all the attachments and the fairly modest sized SQL DB that drives the place are easy 'gets' which I would zip up and throw on archive.org - you're right that their waybackmachine snapshots are marginal at best.

I'm trying a few web-crawling-download tools to see how well they do....if anyone has recommendations in that area, that would be great.

[mcaplinger]

At the very least, a dump of all the attachments and the fairly modest sized SQL DB that drives the place are easy 'gets' which I would zip up and throw on archive.org - you're right that their waybackmachine snapshots are marginal at best.

I came here in 2005 after the egroups lists "ISSDG" started dying (presumably after Yahoo bought them). Just for fun I tried to see what I could find from that list on archive.org, but since it was private there's no content, only metadata, even if you look at CSV and tar files. So all of that content is presumably "lost in time, like tears in rain."

It'd be nice to do better than that, but these forums that have dynamic content are typically hard to archive.