http://www.intfiction.org/forum/viewtopic.php?f=4&t=18932
So if anyone has any ideas to make it work, please share them over there.
I’m not really surprised… I never said as much, but I thought that side was spreading things far too thin. If there are too many places to answer questions, some of them will dwindle away, and the other existing places already have a much bigger existing database of questions and answers, even if it involves some digging and searching.
bg has done good work on ifanswers. It’s a shame to see it gone. But every other day I try to visit, the server is down. Alex reboots it if you ping him but his heart isn’t in it. Could somebody else admin it?
Does ifanswers have a new questions feed? If you could put that as a sidebar on other websites it would drive traffic.
I think both of your suggestions have merit, if people are interested. I think they’d be more visible if you posted them over there, though.
Oh,
I, er, didn’t know.
If I did I’d have phrased my post differently. Sorry, bg.
I think I’ve only had to reboot it twice to fix database errors, so maybe you’ve just been unlucky.
If anybody wants to take it over then I’m happy to discuss. It’s running on an Ubuntu VPS at Digital Ocean on their $5/month package so you’d have to be OK with administering that.
Are there any Quest people who’d be interested in taking over?
Or, is it a possibility to make it part of one of the existing forums (like the Quest forum?)
I’d like to see it continue in some form, if only because if it doesn’t, it may be harder to try something similar in the future (“It’s no use, we already tried that and it didn’t work.”) I’ve no idea who is in a position to admin, or who’d be interested. (But if it were made part of an existing forum, hopefully that wouldn’t be an issue?)
I don’t think there is any good way to make it part of an existing forum - both intfiction and the texadventures forums are powered by phpBB which doesn’t have functionality for upvoting, accepting answers etc.
Also, even if “we tried that and it didn’t work” could be a reason that something similar isn’t tried in the future, “we’ve already got one of those and it doesn’t work” would be equally valid. So I don’t think a closed site is any worse than a failing one in that regard.
The idea is that if it were made part of an existing site, it wouldn’t be failing…it’d be frequented by forum regulars, just as any new subforum would be. New questions would show up on the main page just like new posts, and people would probably click on them, unless they had some sort of aversion to that particular part of the website. But if there’s no way to make it part of an existing site, I guess it doesn’t make a difference one way or the other.
This is too bad. I think there could be many ways to keep it interesting and lively, whether that’s asking old or new questions, or specific or general. Maybe a question of the week? Maybe, how would we implement (simple thing X) in any of Quest, Inform 7, TADS and Twine?
I’d hate to see it go. I think there’d be a lot useful even though I hadn’t visited for a while. I know I started out really looking a lot but a bunch of things like misplacing my password had me cooling on it.
I like the idea of integrating it with another website.
Well, maybe it’s something to keep in mind for the future for the forums. If people ever get tired of phpBB, perhaps options that are more searchable, taggable, etc. could be looked into instead. It doesn’t seem like there’s enough interest to keep IFAnswers going as its own site right now though. At the very least you’d need an admin.