Efforts for preserving KSP's Forum for the posteriority if the worst happens.
We are hoping for the best, but expecting the worst. The hard part will be to expect the worst without causing it...
Forun's was down since 2024-1016, but finally came back to life at 2024-1028
Check the News section bellow.
With the (at the moment of this writing) recent news about the Private Division's staff being sacked and the Intercept Games (Studio that was carrying on the KSP2 development) shutdown, the whole franchise entered into a limbo - causing fears that, perhaps, support for the Forum could cease.
Losing more than 10 years of historical content, as well know-how on how mod the game would be, well, terribly unfortunate to say the least!
We already have the Internet Archive but, as a matter of fact, it's unwise to have all your eggs on the same basket (most of us have only two, to be honest!) and the bigger the guy, the worst is the fall. IA had already suffered a (unjust) big loss on a lawsuit that ended up with the lost of 500.000 ebooks that were being (legally, to be clear) available.
Concerning Kerbonauts are, so, gathering together on efforts to preserve that wonderful content if the worst happens.
However, doing that indiscriminately will hurt Forum, prompting someone to take down the initiative - being the reason I decided to go WARC on the thing, so we can share between us the archives saving Forum's some bucks in bandwidth. Additionally, since anyone can do their own archive and compare the results, this will keep people (including me) honest. There're legally abiding terms published on this Forum, and any change on some of them would be considered fraud - having more people with the same data is a safety measure for everybody involved, as we can support each other in the case of a dispute.
Plain mirroring the site is a bad idea. In order to have a chance to survive, the Archives must try their best to be plausibly considered fair use on a Court, not to mention gathering people to support on our case, prompting TTI (or anyone that ends up buying the lemon IP) to consider any earnings on taking the thing down versus the drawbacks on P/R and deciding it's their best interest not to intervene in a destructive way.
However, we need to help them to help us (willingly or not). So we need to address some elephants in the room:
Given the above considerations, I concluded that going Internet Archive is the most viable solution. The Look and Feel makes absolutely sure you are not impersonating Forum or TTI, the content is preserved (preventing plagiarism) and since the Internet Archive managed to legally publish their archives, this is a precedent that we may use to do the same.
TTI (or whoever ends up buying the lemon IP) will always have the right to file a DMCA on anyone publishing such Archive, however. To tell you the true, they can do it even on our personal sites about the franchise (see Nintendo. So let's discourse about what would prompt them to do that:
Going Internet Archive style mitigates the Risk 1 and Risk 2 - as a matter of fact, having this content preserved in case of the worst may even salvage some of the IP's value, as invaluable content to reboot the Community will be still available to anyone owning the Franchise in the future - it's notorious that even Nintendo had to rely on "backup sites" to be able to publish themselves some of the ROMs they sold in cartridges in the past!
The Risk 3 is something we don't have to worry about, as Forum doesn't generate direct revenue - and the indirect ones we had covered by mitigating Risks 1 e 2.
About the Risk 4, the only defence we have is P/R. They had a huge backslash on the KSP2 drama, and that hurts - right now I'm pretty sure there's someone there overviewing everything to prevent another one. Bad P/R costs them money, huge amounts of money. And they are on the game (pun not intended) for the money.
So, as long we manage to help them to help us (willingly or not), we have a reasonable chance to score this stunt.
(Ab)using a bit the Game Theory, these are the possible outcomes (as long we stick to the rules I'm trying to delineate):
Since our main (and only) goal is the survival of the Content (as nobody here is going to make any money, directly or indirectly, with it), where are the better chances of saving the Content? Well, doing the Archive ourselves. So the logical decision is doing the Archive.
But, by then, we risk being taken down on a DMCA, right? What are the possible outcomes?
Again, since our goal is the preservation of the Content, it's our best move to do the Archiving the same. What matters if TTI takes them down in the future, as long Forum is alive? And if Forum ever dies, it's still their best interest to preserve the content as any future reboot of the franchise would benefit from it. Heck, I would not be surprised if someone on TTI ends up making a copy of our Archives for them.
We are not cheap work force. We are not doing it for "them".
We are doing it for ourselves in a way that "they" would also be benefited, we are working to achieve a win-win situation.
Yes, they royally screwed the pooch and there's a chance we would be helping to save their sorry arses. But we are doing it to save our own - saving theirs is a compromise to enhance our chances. ;)
pywb Core Python Web Archiving Toolkit for replay and recording of web archives
wombat Wombat.js client-side rewriting library outbackcdx Web archive index server based on RocksDB cdxj-indexer CDXJ Indexing of WARC/ARCs waybackpack Download the entire Wayback Machine archive for a given URL. waybackpy Wayback Machine API interface & a command-line toolscrapy An open source and collaborative