Wow! I thought it was common knowledge that I was the one hosting RogueBasin. Yes, I changed my surname to Ritzl due to marriage, but here I am :-)
First of all: I have no intention of shutting down RogueBasin (or the underlying roguelikedevelopment.org). I can say this with 100% certainty because:
a) It costs me next to nothing to host it.
b) I have a couple of other sites at the same hosting provider
c) People are still downloading and e-mailing me about my now abandoned mobile RL Dweller, hosted at roguelikedevelopment.org
d) Sentimental reasons. I still read r.g.r.dev. I occasionally play RLs. I have very fond memories of all my attempts at coding RLs.
Hey Bjorn! This is fantastic to hear, and you've done a great job with Roguebasin so far! I hope we didn't seem out of line by suggesting all these mirrors and things without your input. We're just trying to preserve for as long as possible your amazing site
Anyway, let's move on. What can I do to assist you? Dumping all wiki contents can be done via shell scripts:
http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/MediaWiki#Database_dump
Wikipedia (running on MediaWiki takes this a step further):
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Database_download
It should be possible to get access to a shell using the subdomain credentials. I'll investigate more. In the meantime I'm willing to help out with more or less anything. I'm on prental leave now and have a reasonable amount of time to spend to help you guys out.
First, PaulBlay should definitely also receive admin. Slashie goes without saying
Slashie should of course have admin, but PaulBlay does an enormous amount of editing and work on Roguebasin, and with admin he'd surely help out even more. So I'd definitely nominate him.
I believe Roguebasin should have (if possible) an automatic backup that is created every so often. An up to date link to a backup copy of Roguebasin would have a number of advantages:
- Easy backup, anyone who wanted to could keep a backup copy of the Roguebasin "just in case"
- Easy mirroring, anyone who wanted to could create a mirror of the Roguebasin, which may help with bandwidth costs, though they don't sound too bad as is.
And most importantly, I'd like to start a torrent of the most recent backup of the Roguebasin. I feel a torrent of the backup of Roguebasin would greatly help with the long term preservation of the archive. It might not be needed, since bandwidth costs are low and all involved are very interested in keeping Roguebasin going.
However, a torrent would allow a community effort to keep an up to date backup of Roguebasin permanently. No matter what happens to any website or individual member of the community, the torrent could keep going indefinitely. And it wouldn't be that hard to keep a torrent around. I'd be more than happy to seed it at 50 kb/s indefinitely. The torrent would also remove the cost of hosting a backup copy of the Roguebasin, since the torrent would be the backup. And this torrent backup would provide all the advantages of backups in general listed above. Thoughts?
