When this fails? (hypothetical)

[zblace]

Hypothetical situation when this forum fails *(happened to WMF with Forum few years ago and they failed at failing)… What can be done? Can we export easily and quickly import elsewhere?
Who can do it aside from @harej?

[harej]

First, your question presupposes that this forum’s failure is inevitable, and I don’t think that’s really fair. Wikibase World in its rebooted form is a new project, and I want us to work together to help it succeed. There is no reason to immediately declare failure just because we don’t immediately have 10,000 members. In my opinion the forum is not truly a failure unless it fails to hold back spam.

If ultimately the forum does not pick up traction, and that’s always a possibility, then I would make the decision to discontinue the forum, and to dump and archive its content, similar to what I did to the Wikibase Registry. This really isn’t a big deal. But can we instead focus on how to help Wikibase World?

[zblace]

@harej

First, your question presupposes that this forum’s failure is inevitable, and I don’t think that’s really fair. Wikibase World in its rebooted form is a new project, and I want us to work together to help it succeed. There is no reason to immediately declare failure just because we don’t immediately have 10,000 members. In my opinion the forum is not truly a failure unless it fails to hold back spam.

I meant hypothetically, but philosophically, all is doomed to fail…
sooner or later, at least someone if not all of us
I agree not managing spam would be fast road to failure.

In terms of numbers I would be happy if at least 10 people are active with different experiences and skillsets to contribute to Forum and whoever wants to lurk.

@harej

If ultimately the forum does not pick up traction, and that’s always a possibility, then I would make the decision to discontinue the forum, and to dump and archive its content, similar to what I did to the Wikibase Registry. This really isn’t a big deal. But can we instead focus on how to help Wikibase World?

Absolutely I was curious if export is an easy option.
Last Forum from WMF was not well and fully save and I think @Tgr worked on that to compensate instead of original team that left quickly just with notice, but no content archiving.
This should not happen by being mindful and also having exit strategy.

[harej]

I appreciate the clarification; unfortunately English does not always express things clearly.

I looked into this since I was curious. This Discourse post recommends wget with a set of parameters:

wget --adjust-extension --mirror --page-requisites --convert-links   --recursive  --user-agent "BackupBot" https://forum.wikibase.world

This satisfactorily produced a static HTML backup of the site, so if I (or we collectively) decide to close the forum, we can dump the site that way and then put the archive on a web server somewhere (+ Internet Archive).