slack user shiihs, spoke to us about a SuperCollider forum that disappeared, taking all of its valuable, potentially informative / educational user interactions with it into the dark abyss.
the forum used to be located here.
I was wondering if anyone had any information about what happened to it?
are there measures we can take to prevent the same thing from happening here?
Discourse has the ability to do backups.
So do we not know anything about what has happened to the old forum? That was at least a decade of problems solved, it would be a tragedy if it was all lost.
I can partially answer that as James Harkins sent me a mail explaining a little, and that the old forum (at least on Nabble) wonât be back or to quote him âNabble is dead and itâs not coming back.â
As for the old forum, the problem was the change in laws for Data Protection. In this case the forum, from what I understand, fell in-between the cracks and was thus considered not in order.
By the way, if you have questions for the community at large you can still send a mail to everyone via the sc-users@lists.bham.ac.uk mail link. I have to say it seems to me a bit of a clunky fashion to communicate as it leaves no trace, just emails in your email box. One of the nice things about the forum was the ability to look through the archives for information and solutions.
Hope that helps.
Iâd like to correct some confusion and misinformation in this reply. First, Nabble was really just a wrapper around the mailing list, and everything sent to the mailing list is archived. The forum mentioned in the original post was a completely different one, and their information is lost forever. It disappeared long before GDPR existed.
Second, itâs not true that sending mails to the mailing list (in the past via Nabble/email or currently only via email) leaves no trace besides emails in your email box: all mails you send to the mailing list are archived and can be browsed (and - to some extent searched) in the mailing list archives. Use the âbrowse archivesâ links here https://supercollider.github.io/community/mailing-lists
But since the discourse forum is not legally allowed to use the existing mailing lists as backend, I too am curious how this forum will prevent just disappearing in thin air when the owner decides itâs too much work, or too expensive, or ⌠just disappears for whatever reason.
I mean itâs good that discourse can do backups, but that doesnât solve the problem of needing multiple people with access rights to the backed up data so it can be restored. Iâm not a laywer, but it should also be carefuly double checked if you can just restore a backup on a different server (probably the privacy policy should mention that possibility somewhere explicitly? The privacy policy one signs when registering here was âlast updated May 31, 2013â - 5 years before GDPR even existed.)
Better make sure these things are water tight, then make everyone sign the new privacy policy, otherwise I foresee trouble.
Just my 2 cents of course 
Thanks for the update.
Iâd like to just add that everyone keeps saying âbrowseâ the archives. I looked at the archive, but unless I misunderstand something, browsing the archives could be a very long process. I went looking for something, couldnât remember the year Iâd posted my question (and got the replies), and realised to find the page could take months.
If someone has an explanation on how to use the archive quickly please let me know, Iâd love to dig back in.
Thanks in advance - Joesh
Brilliant, I thought (since everyone mentioned it) I was missing something.
Thanks - Joesh
This discourse is backed up daily - both locally on the server and also on the shared s3 storage we use for builds. The backups are private (for obvious privacy reasons) but are accessible by various core team developers if we ever need them.
The archive search seems to be decidedly average in comparison to the search that was available on Nabble. For example I know that I had few saved posts that related to dbap but if you search the archives nothing is returned. Are there other ways to search it?
Afaik Scott Wilson is getting the university to fix some of the things about the archive / search, so this may improve in the future.
