Indoor Growing Scrog

[GasPlease]

But this all cost money, and we've been running on donations.

How do forums like this usually make money to stay operational? And why dont we do whatever it is?

 

[Son of Hobbes]

How do forums like this usually make money to stay operational? And why dont we do whatever it is?

We've done it both ways. We used to charge for forum space. We used to charge for banner ads. We've had companies offer to pretty much buy out the entire site if we refused everyone but them to advertise here. Then we went to a donation based premise. Where the community would chip in to support the site. No "paid shills", just the people that like what we do here, supporting what we do here. And that's worked pretty well.

The migration costs to move the entire site is pretty hefty.

 

[BII]

Send me a PM if you'd like; I'll answer any/all of your questions.

I don't have any particular questions; just want to know the basics as an end-user: When was, is or will be the switch-over to a new site? What do we need to do? What will be lost? What can (or should) end-users do now to archive material of particular interest for ourselves before it's gone?

I still think a simple prominent notice (not a discussion) is needed.

 

[Son of Hobbes]

I don't have any particular questions; just want to know the basics as an end-user: When was, is or will be the switch-over to a new site? What do we need to do? What will be lost? What can (or should) end-users do now to archive material of particular interest for ourselves before it's gone?

I still think a simple prominent notice (not a discussion) is needed.

The switch-over will be officially by mid-march.
As of March 1st; we've locked the ability to create new threads on the forum, as an effort to start herding traffic to the new site.
On March 15th, we will be removing the ability to reply to threads on here, essentially make the forum read-only.

We are currently working on a plan to archive content where it makes sense and is fitting, but we do not have a solid concrete plan for this yet.

Here is the thread that has been up since January 30th: https://www.autoflower.org/threads/xenforo-to-discourse-the-path-the-plan.92822/

There is a big graphic notice also pointing to this thread.

And again, two messages have been sent out to the entire forum about this.

 

[BII]

Is there a way for us to download threads or sets of entries retrieved by the AFN database? Even just non-formatted text and no graphics?

Just speculation: Google used to fully index AFN (but the content is now mostly gone), with searching it often better than AFN's own database; and AFN surely should be a prime target of AI training systems to steal content from. Might these search engines/content thieves (my view: I've been a publisher) have full copies of AFN or otherwise perhaps be able to help with AFN's database archiving issues? Might there be content collectors having hacked the current/pre-migration server/software and even now are maintaining a full database of AFN entries?

 

[Saint jimmy]

Is there a way for us to download threads or sets of entries retrieved by the AFN database? Even just non-formatted text and no graphics?

Just speculation: Google used to fully index AFN (but the content is now mostly gone), with searching it often better than AFN's own database; and AFN surely should be a prime target of AI training systems to steal content from. Might these search engines/content thieves (my view: I've been a publisher) have full copies of AFN or otherwise perhaps be able to help with AFN's database archiving issues? Might there be content collectors having hacked the current/pre-migration server/software and even now are maintaining a full database of AFN entries?

I was also thinking training an AI model off of this forum or particularly this thread would be a really interesting thing to do, however because it requires a username and password to sign in and access any of it, the basic AI models that I have tried to access it with have always failed

But I’m also nowhere near the guy that knows enough about anything to be able to successfully pull that off, I’m sure someone could.

 

[Entombed]

Is there a way for us to download threads or sets of entries retrieved by the AFN database? Even just non-formatted text and no graphics?

Just speculation: Google used to fully index AFN (but the content is now mostly gone), with searching it often better than AFN's own database; and AFN surely should be a prime target of AI training systems to steal content from. Might these search engines/content thieves (my view: I've been a publisher) have full copies of AFN or otherwise perhaps be able to help with AFN's database archiving issues? Might there be content collectors having hacked the current/pre-migration server/software and even now are maintaining a full database of AFN entries?

There is a program called httrack. It can archive threads for you. I had trouble figuring it out and had to ask someone else but it works pretty well. I saved two threads with it.