Pruning, and what you guys think.

[zebru]

I was hoping New Features and Miscellaneous would stay intact - I love going back through stuff in those when looking for game tips, NQ tips and walking down the memory lane in general (but I may be alone there). I do admit that among the good stuff there is a lot of "weeds" - such as old freebies topics, petpet sales advertisements, one time short question and answer topics, glitch alert etc... so yes, there's a lot of things that do take up neccesary space.

I don't mind aesthetics, petpets, subeta, offsite games and chit-chat receiving a vigorous pruning if necessary.

[Silverevilchao]

I hope "Subeta" doesn't include posts from the New Colors subforum. Deleting color threads would be kinda going against one of the purposes of the site...

[bonecrivain]

Subeta Colours has double asterisks, so it won't be pruned.

I'm the type of person who has trouble throwing anything away that might possibly have sentimental value one day in the future, so I'm not necessarily a good judge of what should or shouldn't be pruned. The current plan of action sounds good to me, though. While I'm sure there are interesting threads in New Features and Miscellaneous, it's likely that if we don't remember now that they exist, we won't miss them once they're gone. Entirely disposing of the Petpet forum also seems reasonable to me; even if removing it doesn't free up a substantial amount of space, having the forum doesn't strike me as a necessity.

[Kantark]

I'm happy with the suggestions so far - I also agree with Bon, I'd have difficulty losing anything if I knew what it was, but we won't miss what we don't know about.

One question - is there any way to export parts of the database (e.g. threads that are to be pruned) to a user's computer for archive purposes? I'm not sure what kind of filesizes we're talking about here, can't imagine we're talking GB though. That way nothing would be gone forever, just archived off-site.

[Illuen]

I agree with everything that seems to be agreed on, with perhaps one little caveat; I think we should, if possible, take plot threads and unlock them and keep them bumped; those are some of the topics I find myself rereading very often in New Features, and I think they're a good piece of history to keep.

On that topic, and this may be controversial, but I don't think many people would miss the thread in which customization was unrolled. It is disproportionately long for most threads on NC, and to be honest, it is exceedingly nasty to read, at least from my perspective. We as a group have moved on from that argument, and I think it would be in the site's best interest to get rid of that unhappy little thread.

As for archiving pruned topics, I wholeheartedly agree with this, and if there is a way, I can volunteer to keep a copy of such things. I have about 500GB free space on my computer, and I wouldn't mind giving up any of that to keep Neocolour's history alive.

[Jazzy]

I have backups of the forum and will be hanging on to them even once the topics have been pruned; however, there's two problems with making them publicly available:
- I am very reluctant to hand over a copy of the forums in which private messages are in a format which can be read by anyone. The backup is plain text and can be opened in something like Wordpad or Vim. There's no way to get around the fact that I can see them - I deliberately don't read them, but beyond that honour code, there's nothing stopping me. Similarly, if I pass them on, the recipient can read them. I can't create a backup which doesn't include PMs.
- All of you here can open the text file, but very few of you would be able to turn that text file into a working copy of the forums. That's not because it's technically difficult - it isn't - it's because you're almost all running operating systems which don't support MySQL locally. If you can't run it locally, you'll need web hosting with database functionality available, so you'll be paying to keep it up. The text file doesn't arrange posts by thread, so while all the posts are there, you'd have difficulty following a thread in it.

[Madge]

I think Offsite Games would be great to prune as already stated. Petpets and New Features are both highly prunable, too. A year and a half does seem about the right amount of time. Misc was always my favourite forum but considering no-one plays neopets anymore it's largely deserted, and I'm not really one for going down memory lane anyhow.

I also think a large-scale culling of Chit-Chat is in order, though I'm probably alone in this. Mods can delete threads can't they, so perhaps the current mods could do it, or, if they don't have time for something so tedious, appointing, say, half a dozen temporary pruning mods could make a weekend of it. Though 20,000 topics does seem like a large amount, and "My computer broke ;-;" could easily have turned into a discussion about everyone's favourite chocolate bar that is too valuable to lose, so it might not be feasible. But, hey, if you really need the space...

And having a manual pruning isn't exactly a renewable source of space, but still.

Also, as always, the forum is lucky I'm not the admin (something I am sure everyone thinks regularly, when circumstances cause them to remember my existence) - if I had such a source on my computer it would be hard for me to resist the temptation to search for my name to see if people were talking about me behind my back . Or maybe not. In the days of the temp forum I never did such a thing, so perhaps I'm not giving myself enough credit?

Anyway, pruning is fine with me, especially because this forum is so damn big. I'm guessing if we spill into the next hosting bracket it would require us paying for, say, 20% more than the space we're using now, and thus be expensive for an extra couple of whatever the forum holds.

However, the idea of pruning being a one-off thing, I think is short-sighted; presumably we're just going to get more and more members and more and more posts, so size will matter more and more. I think whichever pruning options are taken should be instituted permanently. Except possibly a large-scale manual pruning of something like chit-chat.

[Jazzy]

The next size up is 300mb, compared to the 150mb bracket we're currently in (and we're using ~120mb of that). We definitely don't need that much extra space, not if we have to pay for it.

Pruning Offsite Games is interesting. How far back?

I'm going to prune Petpets now.

[Monkeyguy]

I'd just like to mention that I didn't notice that the Petpet board was missing until I had made my way to this post, after about 20-30 mins of browsing the site. So At least for me, it was no big loss.

[Jazzy]

Hee. I notice it's gone, but that's because the Neopets section looks so short without it. I'll get used to it in time, though

[Bif]

Pruning petpets the way you did was a very good idea.

I know that this isn't exactly on topic, but just something interesting: I believe that the petpet forums (requests for suggestions etc) faded when the pound went down, as all of a sudden people weren't having the turn over of pets and different colours as before. I know, I'm a social trends geek - that's just me.

I would go so far as to say that perhaps you could prune Miscellaneous to even the start of 2007. (this is coming from someone who rarely uses Miscellaneous and does not know if there are any memories in said forum to preserve). Another suggestion: It seems rare to me for people to post in AaToW unless in the Post minor achievements/woes here! topic. Perhaps we could move that topic into Miscellaneous and achievements and woes be posted there? I know that getting rid of AaToW altogether (as is my suggestion) is not a HUGE prune - but every little bit counts, right?

[Jazzy]

Yeah, I was wondering about AaToW...after all, it works for Subeta having just a single AaToW thread, and Subeta currently has more active posters, as far as I can tell.

I think you're right about the pound - combined with the fact that people have been painting fewer pets since Customisation, we just don't need matches as often.

[oogabooga]

Yeah, I think it would be fine to reduce AaToW to a single thread. If people think their achievement/woe deserves more attention, they can make a separate thread in Misc. And then you can just split off that thread whenever you need to.

It looks like New Features is definitely worth pruning, as the second-biggest, but - well, I'm a packrat by nature and I worry that we'll lose something that would have been useful. Not that I ever go read old posts, so it would probably be fine...

[Monkeyguy]

On all of the cleaning house type shows they always force the person to get rid of clothes, trophies, etc if they haven't worn them or displayed them in 6 months or so. I think we need to take this type of approach. I know there are a lot of sentimental people here who occasionally go back and visit old posts, but if it isn't important enough to bump, it's worth deleting.

[Wingsrising]

Dunno. I've always liked having AaToW -- I dislike the sticky-thread approach, in fact, since it seems to produce less discussion than having a separate thread. (This is more obvious, I think, on Chit-chat, where I feel the RL-AaToW thread has really reduced the amount of discussion of people's lives on the forum).

I realize I'm in the minority in this opinion, though.

If we do merge AaToW with Misc I would prefer it if people were still permitted to post their achievement or tale of woe on a separate thread in Misc if they feel the achievement/woe is big enough to warrant it.

I do beg to differ with the notion that no one plays Neopets anymore -- I think the 14-page Return of Dr. Sloth thread is proof that's not true. For some reason it's just not discussed as often as Subeta. Perhaps that's because no one is messing with Neopets' games every 2 weeks... and since Neopets is usually working, we don't need the 43-page thread complaining that's it's down again.