[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For context, the Invision software itself is over a decade out of date and no upgrade path exists to either upgrade to current Invision board software, or migrate to other hosting platforms.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]

I've found a couple of forum scraping tools, https://nrsyed.github.io/proboards-scraper/html/index.html and https://github.com/mikwielgus/forum-dl , that seem to be able to read this board's format. But for various Python versioning reasons I haven't been able to get either of them to work on my system. What are the prospects of doing a forum backup looking like?

[djellison]

What are the prospects of doing a forum backup looking like?

I've not had any total success yet - I'll absolutely take a look at what you've linked to - thanks for the pointers.

I'm also going to reach out to the server hosts to asks if they can snapshot the entire system and send it to me in some way come the shutdown at the end of Dec.

[fredk]

I came over here from the "yellow forum" 20 years ago - the increase in S/N was like night to day. I've always been into the more technical side of imagery - night imaging, pulling out subtle DDs, triangulating few-pixel-tall features on the horizon (and that's with Phil-o-vision!) as Oppy made her way to Endeavour. What a blast it's been working with people like Tesheiner, Phil, James Canvin, to name just a few, on all that. And to get the technical insights from folks like Paolo and mcaplinger. I sure hope I can find somewhere else to do that kind of stuff.

And how cool it's been to see the infectious enthusiasm of members like Stu and ustrax!

And endless thanks for all the work from the moderators who kept this place so fantastic for two decades.

It's a real shame we don't have the people to migrate to and maintain phpBB/simple machines/whatever. I would've been willing to help out, though I'm not a (real) web developer. Is such migration possible without continuing maintainance, ie converting to phpBB and throwing the forum up somewhere, but in a frozen read-only state, ie no new posts, for the sake of historical record? Presumably that would be a lot cheaper than migrating to an active forum.

I'm also going to reach out to the server hosts to asks if they can snapshot the entire system and send it to me in some way come the shutdown at the end of Dec.

I'm curious - what roughly is the total size of the forum, obviously mainly the attachments?

[mcaplinger]

It's a real shame we don't have the people to migrate to and maintain phpBB/simple machines/whatever.

Honestly, while it would be wonderful to migrate everything seamlessly to a new forum, preserving all existing content, that's very difficult. And given that a lot of the time people ask the same questions over and over anyway, how much are we really losing by not having that going forward? (Completely agreed that preserving the historical record is important, but don't conflate the two problems.)

The thing that set this place apart is the well-defined set of ground rules and the aggressive moderation to enforce them. Setting up a forum is easy, maintaining that standard of quality is much harder.

[john_s]

I’m personally finding the Discord site well worth visiting- it may not be a full replacement for UMSF, but the quality of posts is just as high (given that it’s the same stable of high quality contributors), and its existence is, for now anyway, softening the blow of the impending loss of this place.

Though I could do without the animated GIFs…

John

[mcaplinger]

Though I could do without the animated GIFs…

You haven't used the Mars2020 internal team Mattermost -- if discord bothers you, MM is much much worse

See Calvin Kasulke, "Several People Are Typing" https://www.npr.org/2021/08/28/1031965187/-...k-at-the-office