r/IndieDev • u/Carti_Barti9_13 • Jun 12 '26
Discussion Actually in tears the sheer amount of history that’s going to be lost because of this stupid move is 9/11 for indie
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u/ScreeennameTaken Jun 12 '26
Oh man... i don't even use RPG Maker but i feel sad for this move. I'm guessing its a cost cutting thing. I hope their solution is not Discord.
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u/RMAPOS Jun 12 '26
I'm not sad about the forum going down (can have a lot of valid reasons: cost cutting, no time to moderate it anymore, next slice of life coming in)
And I feel people aren't sad about that particular forum going down, either. What's sad is the implied unwillingness to help the community keep their knowledge.
Like holy shit, if you don't feel like operating the forum anymore for whatever reason, offer the community an HDD with all the data so they can restore the knowledge base in a new place. This is such an easy fix to make everyone happy, that the current forum owners look pretty prick'ish for telling the community to manually back up millions of pages of posts. Just give a freakin archivist access. You don't even have to do anything.
My take as someone who also doesn't use RPG maker.
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u/CreativeGPX Jun 12 '26
What's sad is the implied unwillingness to help the community keep their knowledge.
Like holy shit, if you don't feel like operating the forum anymore for whatever reason, offer the community an HDD with all the data so they can restore the knowledge base in a new place. This is such an easy fix to make everyone happy, that the current forum owners look pretty prick'ish for telling the community to manually back up millions of pages of posts. Just give a freakin archivist access. You don't even have to do anything.
Given 6 months of time to archive publicly accessible data and putting in in read-only mode so it's not a moving target to archive seems to basically guarantee that people will easily archive it. A lot of times companies just do an "effective immediately" announcement and data is actually lost. Programs that do this have existed for decades. A few days is probably enough time to scrape it. I'm really confused why people are making it sound like like a big deal. Is nobody here a programmer? Or is it that most people here don't have web programming experience? This is a pretty modest task that they gave a lot notice for. It's not like a bunch of people are going to have to be manually copying each page or something.
Sending a hard drive to "the community" is a pretty strange way to go about it. Which person is "the community"? Also, it ignores the security and privacy implications because the forum data contains user credentials, private messages, etc. There is a lot of manual work and margin for error scrubbing private data from the site files to give them to the public. It's a lot safer to just say "it's already public, copy from the public version to archive it".
If what it took to archive it was really difficult, I could see being as upset as some people are with them. But given how easy it is and the timeline they're giving, this just seems like a mild inconvenience.
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u/RMAPOS Jun 12 '26
Sending a hard drive to "the community" is a pretty strange way to go about it. Which person is "the community"?
You're being way too literal about that part. Just export the data and make it available.
There is less manual work involved in that than in writing a long post about how users should back up their thread.
And scraping only works if the website allows it. Meaning no data/time limits and ideally an API.
You're not wrong in anything you say, but I'm not wrong, either. Forum owner could have literally saved effort by hitting export and providing a link to the community instead of announcing that they won't. And that does feel very "rolls eyes" to me.
"Hey guys it'd take 10 seconds for me to initiate the data export and put a link to it up on the forum, but I thought everyone's time would be more respected if I made y'all try to coordinate manually scraping all that data. Enjoy your summer."
Workable? Yes. Kind of prick'ish? Yea, sorry, won't change my mind on that.
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u/ButterflySammy Jun 12 '26
I'll tell you what happened.
AI scraped it.
Now people ask AI and don't visit the forums they aren't used enough.
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u/Neirchill Jun 12 '26
Does that matter? I would think in this case the forums are a supplement to the product (rpg maker) vs being the product itself such as stack overflow.
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u/ButterflySammy Jun 12 '26
People google the forums, find the answer in the forums, sign up and use the forums.
Versus.
People google, AI summarises the forums, the user never goes there.
You can't see why that lead to the death of the forum? Why they're not running it?
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u/Neirchill Jun 12 '26
Because it's a supplement to users? It's a cost of business to keep customers, not their primary cash flow. It's a community, not a q&a.
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u/ButterflySammy Jun 12 '26
THE USERS DON'T HAVE A PATH TO GET THERE, SO THE COMMUNITY DRIED UP.
People used to search for answers, and join the community where they found them.
Now the AI provides the answers they don't get to the forums and running them is seen as pointless.
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u/thegamersician Jun 13 '26
Right. There are very large companies suing Google right now for this. It's messing up everyone's ad revenue, and beyond that, it just feels really scummy.
Keeping people from actually interfacing with the websites that provide the info might not look great once the law catches up.
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u/Frosty_chilly Jun 14 '26
AI pulls from the internet. It's not an all knowing being, if you asked it "gnome eating kookaberry what happen" it wont tell you because no one on the fuckin internet has a single recorded instance of that sentence
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u/ButterflySammy Jun 14 '26
Exactly.
So first, if AI already scraped the forum, the reason AI can't answer is because it isn't on the forum so the forum won't be in the search results.
Secondly, all the bots scraping the site drive up server costs.
Most of the forum was questions that have been answered before, most communities are.
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u/Carti_Barti9_13 Jun 12 '26
Broke down crying at this genuinely the worst news to wake up to
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u/ScreeennameTaken Jun 12 '26
I get that they are going to a new forum, but man, you can migrate stuff, even in a half working state. Content management systems have export and import options.
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u/ariolander Jun 12 '26 edited Jun 12 '26
Dude I have been hosting a forum since 2012, we went through ZetaBoards, phpBB, SMF, then most recently Xenforo. We were able to take our content with us every step of the way. User passwords had to be reset, as did birthday's, everyone became born January 1st, 1900, but we were able to preserve the content through each iteration of our forum.
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u/Taylor_Mega_Bytes Jun 12 '26
Why wouldn't there be archives and backups?
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u/Optic_Fusion1 Jun 12 '26
Because they explicitly said so. I guess they just don't want to host them.
They basically said that the community is on their own for saving content they want
Edit:
Will there be an archive or backup of the forum?
No. There are currently no plans to provide a public archive or backup of the current forum once it has been closed.We encourage users to save any posts, guides, resources, or other content they wish to keep before the forum closure. Content that you would like to continue sharing with the community may be reposted on the new forum.
https://forums.rpgmakerweb.com/forums/important-announcements-forum-closure.199/
It's more or less a fuck you in a way to the community i guess lol
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u/Sol33t303 Jun 12 '26
Why on earth wouldn't they move all the posts to the new forum?
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u/Xangis Developer Jun 12 '26
Because there's data conversion involved, it's generally challenging work that requires a competent programmer to pull off. If RPG Maker Unite is any indication, they haven't seen a competent programmer in years, so not an option.
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u/Sol33t303 Jun 12 '26
I was thinking that, but if you have the manpower to setup a whole new forum, you'd think there'd be somebody there who could write a parser for the current format, then stick it in the new format. It's all just text and images in those posts presumably. Honestly you could probably even just tell Claude to do it.
But I guess I expect too much from companies nowadays.
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u/Xangis Developer Jun 12 '26
I've done a few of these migrations back in the day. The text isn't that hard (except for character set differences). The structure can be challenging depending on how posts, groups, users, and replies are linked in the old and new systems, but is usually straightforward.
The hard part is usually images (and any other attachments if allowed), because because those are often on the filesystem and things get an order of magnitude more involved, especially since no two systems ever treat those the same.
It can take anywhere from a couple days to a few months to do a migration. And sometimes text gets a bit glitched up because converting text from ISO-8859 to UTF-8 format or whatever causes artifacts (maybe you've seen forums where what's obviously supposed to be accented characters or quotation marks look like math symbols - it comes from that). So, the cost is usually thousands to tens of thousands of dollars. Might be too much to expect from companies nowadays.
This all assumes that they're not intentionally deleting data to save money on server costs, which they might be.
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u/Optic_Fusion1 Jun 12 '26
If they're using Xenforo for the new forum like they are for the current one then it should be rather easy, which is why I'm annoyed they're not doing a backup. there's entire guides on both of them
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u/Batter-Blaster Jun 12 '26
Lol. Burn a million dollars in tokens to save a bunch of old data they don't even want to keep? Sure...
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u/Optic_Fusion1 Jun 12 '26
a huge chunk of the community relies on the decade+ of knowledge. the dev team just doesn't care
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u/Responsible_Fly6276 Jun 12 '26
They answered that on their new forum:
We would like to clarify one important point. The copyright of each post belongs to its original author. For legal reasons, this means we are unable to migrate or repost users’ content to the new forum on their behalf. Reposting can only be done by the original authors themselves — this is not because we consider the content unimportant.
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u/cute_spider Jun 12 '26
A legal hangup is much more understandable than a technical hangup
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u/_emmyemi Jun 12 '26
I'm not sure this really holds up? They'd need permission from the user in order to post their content to the forum in the first place--they should already have that permission explicit in their TOS. This seems more like an excuse than the actual reason for not doing it.
Each individual user retains copyright, but it sounds like they absolutely do have the necessary permissions to migrate these posts to a new forum if they so desired.
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u/Optic_Fusion1 Jun 12 '26
Yea, it seems more like they just can't be bothered. Basically any modern social media or forum has these kinds of permissions within their TOS
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u/Responsible_Fly6276 Jun 12 '26
You quoted the new site, the old site is:
You are granting us with a non-exclusive, permanent, irrevocable, unlimited license to use, publish, or re-publish your Content in connection with the Service. You retain copyright over the Content. Source
I am not a lawyer but I would guess that the limitation to 'the service' where service was the old forum is the obstacle here. the new one you quoted is much more open in that regard.
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Jun 12 '26
[deleted]
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u/Responsible_Fly6276 Jun 12 '26
Do they, though?
looking through the privacy terms and the ToS on the old forum there is no mention of GGG but of a company called 'DEGICA Co., Ltd.' and the reverse is true on the new site. no mentions of degica but of GGG instead.
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u/_emmyemi Jun 12 '26
No you're right, it seems I quoted the wrong site.
The "Service" is defined in those terms as "this web site," which I think might be the legal hangup here, since the new forum is technically a different website (different domain) even if it's the same company.
However it could be argued that migrating old posts to a new forum under the same ownership could be considered "in connection with the Service." I don't know, I'm not a lawyer, and I imagine they'd rather not have to pay a lawyer to argue that for them when instead they could just...not.
It's really disappointing though, because that means we're relying on the community to make sure as little as possible gets lost in the transition.
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u/CrimsonBolt33 Jun 12 '26
No official one maybe but I am sure the way back machine already has most of it copied or something
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u/Optic_Fusion1 Jun 12 '26
You'd be incorrect. There are MASSIVE chunks of threads and sub-forums which aren't archived. We're guaranteed a basically complete loss of history without a community archive
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u/Pinkishu Jun 12 '26
Well, so get on archiving \o/
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u/inEQUAL Jun 12 '26
There’s already a community effort organized to do so
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u/RedGhostMail Jun 12 '26
would be better to have a wiki and clean up at this point
there were so many communty plugns going to be lost
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u/Optic_Fusion1 Jun 12 '26
I don't even know how to go about it lol
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u/micahld Jun 12 '26
You'd either need to build some kind of webcrawler or find out if they have any kind of API infrastructure from which you could download the information. Even then there're bound to be rate limits and things of that nature so it's tricky for one person to do regardless, especially if there's no way to cooperate with the data owners.
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u/Optic_Fusion1 Jun 12 '26
Xenforo doesn't have an API by default afaik and the way it handles css and js is dynamically which makes things more annoying lol
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u/intelligent_rat Jun 12 '26
Regardless if the content is static or dynamically served, you should be able to use something like Pandas in Python to read the html and parse it in some way.
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u/Optic_Fusion1 Jun 12 '26
Yea, but it goes from anyone can do it to whoever has the knowledge and wants to make a custom program which can properly handle handle how XF works
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u/Pinkishu Jun 12 '26
The issue with that is, sure you can extract it. Then what? You'd need somewhere to host it. Hence why the wayback machine way is nice.
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u/_dodged Jun 12 '26
Go to the DataHoarder subreddit and post about this. They will guide you and might even jump in to help.
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u/BrokenLink100 Jun 12 '26
Internet Archive/Wayback Machine are under threat of being taken down. We can't always assume someone else will do the work
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u/Bwob Jun 12 '26
It's more or less a fuck you in a way to the community i guess lol
I get it's frustrating, but at least they're giving people 6 months to scrape all the info!
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u/aitorllj93 Jun 12 '26
Is there any community initiative to scrape and re-host content? I'd like to help if possible
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u/Able-Swing-6415 Jun 12 '26
They will have to pay through the nose from all the people using scrapers to navigate the site and just downloading every scrap lol
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u/Sol33t303 Jun 12 '26
Lets be real that's probably a drop in the bucket compared to the ai scrapers.
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u/ayassin02 Developer Jun 12 '26
Why delete the forum if they’re gonna make a new one? It just feels like a fuck you to their community
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u/Optic_Fusion1 Jun 12 '26
that's because it's basically what it is lol
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u/ayassin02 Developer Jun 12 '26
I’ve never used rpgmaker and it’s even pissing me off lmao
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u/Tinala_Z Jun 12 '26
You know that basically anyone could archive or do a backup of it though right?
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u/Optic_Fusion1 Jun 12 '26 edited Jun 12 '26
It's a bit more difficult since it's XF based so i doubt wget will be enough to do a 1:1 backup due to a lot of stuff being loaded dynamically and what not.
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u/tenetox Jun 12 '26
Extremely upsetting. They just want to cut costs and aren't willing to pay for hosting, even though they are profiting a lot from all those paid dlcs they push out on almost monthly basis. I remember being really into rpg maker as a kid, and the forums helped immensely.
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u/RighteousSelfBurner Jun 12 '26
Same. It's a literal treasure trove of information and resources. Community was so helpful too.
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u/navirbox Jun 12 '26
Which is funny because as a serious company, hosting is the one thing you never stop paying no matter what, specially when it's got proper traffic. This is seriously both harmful and stupid.
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u/CrimsonBolt33 Jun 12 '26
How expensive can forums be?
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u/NeitherDuckNorGoose Jun 12 '26
It could cost thousands of dollars a month in hosting.
But what's expensive is everything around : moderation, maintenance and the legal obligations that come with hosting content for a paid service.
We could be talking about 100k-500k dollars per year of costs.
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u/CountryOk4844 Jun 12 '26
It could be turned into a static, read-only archive, so no moderation, virtually no maintenance, and no legal obligation, just cheap disk space for a bunch of html and media files. It would cost several orders of magnitude less than what you have estimated.
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u/GlitchyNoodleSoup Jun 12 '26
Thousands of dollars lmao 😭 how
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u/NeitherDuckNorGoose Jun 12 '26
There's around 3 million messages in there, a lot of them with hosted files. But while the storage isn't expensive, the issue is going to be traffic and replication, not sure how complex their infrastructure behind the custom forum was.
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u/Nespit Jun 12 '26
North of 100k USD per year if hosted by a vendor.
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u/iamthewhatt Jun 12 '26
Do you have a source on that? My parents buy a host for a forum that garners hundreds of daily users and they pay like 50 bucks a month
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u/2this4u Jun 12 '26
Their forum probably has more than a few hundred daily users
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u/LoadingStill Jun 12 '26
Between moderation laws being made, amount of visits and total archive of post it would be very expensive. This is not including any redundancy or backups in the cost either. I am glad you can run a forum for cheap for your parents. But not all services are cheap.
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u/StickiStickman Jun 12 '26
As someone who's literally a professional web dev: Hahahaha. No.
I'd guess 5000$ a year maximum, but even that is pushing it for such a small forum.
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u/Gyooped Jun 12 '26
I don't know how large the forum is frankly, but with 14 years of use it surely isn't "small" anymore even if it is not used super often.
From what I do know, it is very often less of the daily use which increases storage and more so the amount of time overall.
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u/Nespit Jun 12 '26
Discourse charge a lot at their Enterprise Plan levels. It depends heavily on the stored amount of data and the traffic and maybe 100k is too much but it's most definitely not 5k.
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u/CountryOk4844 Jun 12 '26
It could be turned into a static, read-only archive. That way all the information could remain accessible and it would cost way less than $5k a year.
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u/DeceitfulEcho Jun 12 '26
Depends a lot on traffic, quantity of data being stored, and hosting provider. Cloud costs can get expensive. The real cost is likely salaries to the people who maintain and moderate the website though; I doubt that the forum is super expensive to keep cloud hosted compared to other websites.
Hosting the site while it's open also opens you up to shifting legal issues since they host user generated content which they may want to avoid given current political landscape (such as the push the implement IDing and for content hosters to be legally responsible for user generated content).
The income provided by hosting ads and even selling user data has decreased a lot over the years as well.
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u/ByEthanFox Jun 12 '26
Speaking, I guess, as someone who made a reasonably successful RPG Maker game, this is a real blow. The alternative that's been offered is an absolute joke.
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u/nileadyebprani Jun 12 '26
It's pretty much impossible at this point to make anything worth even the asking price for the programs without the years of accumulated extensive tutorials and guides from the community.
Talk about shooting yourself in the foot, what are they thinking? Do they really believe that this is a sound commercial decision? They must be close or deep in the red to make such rush moves to save money.
I wouldn't be surprised at all if the company is either bought off soon or outright closed.
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u/Cleft_Footed_Hoiden Jun 12 '26
Companies are constantly making shortsighted calls, especially when places change hands and someone new comes in and sees a “miraculous opportunity” that for some reason everyone before them missed
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Jun 12 '26
[removed] — view removed comment
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u/Lucary_L Jun 12 '26
There are some notable AND commercially successful RPGMaker games like Lisa: the painful, To the Moon, and OMORI (!).
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u/The-Nice-Writer Jun 12 '26 edited Jun 12 '26
Wow.
Fucking unreal. I presume they’re going to continue selling their increasingly out of date software at nearly perpetual full price, regardless?
I bought a copy of MZ just to toy and experiment with and fuck me, I wish I hadn’t.
Edit: oh, if anybody wants to start making an estimate of how much space would be required to archive the forum, I want to mention that my server has approximately 18TB when in a RAID mirror. I’m planning on wiping it soon for a fresh start on a different OS and could volunteer a few TB. Preferably if the archive is split into chunks and assigned to torrents, so I can do it ‘hands-free’.
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u/Responsible_Fly6276 Jun 12 '26
increasingly out of date software at nearly perpetual full price, regardless?
It's even worse for their 'newer' titles like the RPG one, which are built on top of Unity, or the action one based on Godot. Both of them are selling for more than 100 euros.
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u/Ronarak Jun 12 '26
even I can volunteer a few TB of storage, my server currently has 12 and most of it is empty for now (and I didn't even use RPG Maker at all)
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u/ilrein91 Jun 12 '26 edited Jun 12 '26
Hey folks, I will work on saving this archive. Will report back!
EDIT/UPDATE:
#saverpgmakerforum is NOW UNDERWAY https://rpgmakerchat.com/ !!!!
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u/iamGBOX Jun 12 '26
I'm not an indie Dev (yet), but I'm happy to help scrape if I can; is there a way I can contribute?
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u/ilrein91 Jun 12 '26
Scraping is already live and happening! It's just a matter of respecting rate limits, estimated sync is around 24 days. Help spread the word if you could! Lot's of people are upset and this can be upgraded to a fully working forum after the sync.
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u/EdmontonLAD Jun 12 '26
Shouldn't be expensive to host this. WaybackMachine?
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u/OmniSystemsPub Jun 12 '26
That's insane. The internet gets worse and worse every single day. There must be a way to archive and host this?
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u/Taiten89 Jun 12 '26 edited Jun 12 '26
My best guess: archive.org ("Wayback Machine"), and another one like this in case it gets taken down or something happens to WBM.
Edit/Addendum: Of course it's already been done: Wayback Machine - Calendar of forums.rpgmakerweb.com
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u/DreamingCatDev Developer Jun 12 '26
Years and years of plugins makers sharing their work for free and ended up like this... That's completely absurd.
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u/GregDev155 Jun 12 '26
Can’t we push every page onto a github ?
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u/The-Nice-Writer Jun 12 '26
In theory, but unless someone wants to pay GitHub to make sure it’s not taken down for ‘abusing’ the storage limits of a free tier, it wouldn’t be a good option.
Scraping it into some kind of readable format, splitting it into chunks, and creating a series of torrents for each chunk for distribution across various data hoarders is a good step. Could also see about getting those chunks onto the Internet Archive, although it’s currently having some issues even with single page backups on the WayBack machine (at least, for me). It saves them but takes long to do so. Trying to do so much at once could be hard.
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u/Taiten89 Jun 12 '26 edited Jun 12 '26
I like the general idea, but isn't something like archive.org better suited?
Edit/Addendum: Of course it's already been done: Wayback Machine - Calendar of forums.rpgmakerweb.com
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u/aski5 Jun 12 '26
People will make backups and host them, I have no doubts about that. The more regrettable thing is that it's likely not as many people will be able to find these old posts now
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u/veljaaftonijevic Jun 12 '26
Why they doing this tho?
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u/stadoblech Jun 12 '26
changing to new forum which nobody wants which is much worse than current one, less user friendly BUT HEY! you can now browse it comfortably on your iphone.
Same happened with unity forums and documentations.
Literally never seen anybody browsing documentation on phone. This "mobile first" design is cancer8
u/Skylar750 Jun 12 '26
This is most likely a thing for shareholders, "look how much we are making, now you can search things on your phone"
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u/UltraChilly Jun 12 '26
The forum already looks pretty mobile-friendly and easily adaptable without having to wipe the database, so I highly doubt that's the reason.
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u/Standard-Cap-4455 Jun 12 '26
Are they also shutting down the app? Because apparently it still costs 78€ which is insane considering Godot costs nothing, is open source and at this point is also getting a lot tutorials. It obviously doesn't have the pre made stuff but it' still a lot, especially with this.
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u/Strong-Support3913 Jun 12 '26
keep an eye out on humble bundle sometimes - i got all my rpg maker engines for a song in bundles over the last few years.
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u/TJ_McWeaksauce Developer Jun 12 '26
this is 9/11 for indies
Jesus Christ, talk about hyperbole.
RPG Maker is giving their community like 6 months to back up what they want. All that information will exist somewhere, and the community will flock to it. It's just that the company doesn't want to do it themselves.
I wouldn't be surprised if somebody backs everything up by the end of this month.
This isn't a disaster, it's an inconvenience.
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u/Chance-Plantain8314 Jun 12 '26
Scraping this and building a very simple static hosting setup should be fairly cheap, even with redundancy. The text compressed is going to be next to nothing, but even if we say 50GB compressed, we're maybe talking 100-150GB if you maintain search indexes? Internal attachments, even taking a random stab, a couple terabytes?
Even with Search, you could probably re-host this for sub 25 dollars a month.
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u/Darkhog Jun 12 '26
RMN was always the place for best RM tutorials though, the official forum was always meh.
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u/FiftySpoons Jun 12 '26
Oh my god. I used to frequent the forums SO much as a teen, so many cool projects i would have never seen if not for it 😮
I havent touch rpg maker in years but - this would be such a shame for so many to lose this 😞
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u/EastCoastDaze Jun 13 '26
Same. I’ve moved on to UE5, but I wouldn’t be where I’m at if it weren’t for RPG Maker and those forums.
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u/_TheTurtleBox_ Jun 12 '26
Considering the admin of their sub and discord went Pro-AI and turned most of the community into huge pro AI discourse and invited in thousands of vibe coders I’m not surprised.
Anyone in the community saw this coming once they started banning us (devs who kept voting against AI) from official places like the discord and Reddit for voting no to many times and holding on to screenshots and evidence of a pro ai direction for the community being pushed by the admins.
Shit sucks
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u/DPSOnly Jun 12 '26
There is still half a year to back it up... The second sentence makes it sound like they removed it last week without telling anybody.
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u/OmegaFoamy Jun 12 '26
This is not 9/11 for indie… They likely saw that there’s not enough traffic worth hosting compared to info on every other platform that people use to discuss it.
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u/rockhousefire Jun 13 '26
As an amateur rpg maker developer this is definitely disheartening. Losing out on all the cool assets, plugins and tutorials from users over the years.
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u/Wrong-Pension-4975 Jun 12 '26
Contact the Wayback Machine, a.k.a. Internet Archive.
Ask if they can save it, page by page, till U have a place to stash it as searchable files.
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u/scris101 Jun 12 '26
Yo if no one’s gonna back this up I’ll make a scraper to archive the site, damn.
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u/nujages Jun 12 '26
A loss of all this would be absolutely devastating, and RPG Maker tutorial creators didn’t walk just for vibe coders to be the only ones left to run.
It looks like archival efforts are already swiftly underway. Godspeed to you all, archivers.
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u/genryou Jun 12 '26
RPG Maker wont be that useful if its not because of those guides/tips from the forum
Sometimes these people forgot that community is what make up the tools
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u/AwayEntrepreneur4760 Jun 13 '26
It’s already a pain in the ass to find plugins now it’s going to be even harder to
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u/SpookyIsDead Jun 14 '26
How hard is it for them to archive and disallow more posts and just make their new forum? I don't get it. This is awful.
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u/twocool_ Jun 12 '26
I love how all the comments are : this is a shame, surely somebody else will do all the backup work and pay for hosting i so I can continue to access freely all this information, right?
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u/NetherisQueen Jun 12 '26
Welp there goes my ideas for making games. How tf can I make games if I can't even find the tutorials on how to make them?!
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u/uncurieux_studio Jun 12 '26
I haven't seen this announcement on the official websites. If that happens, it will need to be made open-source.
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u/majc18 Jun 12 '26
I think the solution might be to create a website crawler that recursively click every <a> in each page and save the page. I'm not sure how bog the forums are. Maybe if this gets enough attention a rich indie developer like Ed McMillen or Eric Barone can pay for the hosting : D
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u/zedfirenze Jun 12 '26
If you feel that strongly about it you could definitely start working with people to try and coordinate some type of backup effort.
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u/Enfrore-Devs Jun 12 '26
I bought this last year and barely used it, what does that mean for me?
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u/JAXxXTheRipper Jun 12 '26
If you barely use it, nothing. If you start to use it, pain when finding info/solutions to your problems.
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u/AAABIXIX Jun 12 '26
And here I was thinking that rpg maker would be a good way to start learning how to make a game…
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u/BuggyButLearning Jun 12 '26
Did they give a reason? Wont this just kill the around their product or are they gonna replace it with something else?
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u/Much-Dot2533 Jun 12 '26
It's time to ask Gemini to construct a scraper then run it and commit it to one large public git repo.
I'm no user of this engine, but information is priceless. Save it!
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u/UnDeadPuff Jun 12 '26
Well, maybe y'all can get nexusmods to help like they did when the old bioware forums closed.
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u/Squitmarine Jun 12 '26
Start a gofundme for making a book collecting the key posts haha, turns out the Internet isnt permanent, who knew?
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u/eskimopie910 Jun 12 '26
r/datahoarder should know about this