What happened?

[darkmud....@gmail.com]

So, does anyone know what happened, and do we know anything about the admin?

[GreetingCard]

I wouldn't expect to hear anything from the admin. He did a good job setting up the Proboards Archive, aside from missing the part about "No Erotic Material Allowed", but was a pretty infrequent visitor to the Archives after that.

[Kiwimayotte]

If Neocities does indeed allow erotic content, how important is it for everyone for the website to remain a forum, (which Neocities can't provide for) if it means that at least it shouldn't be taken down?  The old site (previous incarnation) wasn't a forum and seemed to work okay.

[johnso...@yahoo.com]

Lurker here. First, the admin's UMD account is custardwam, https://umd.net/profile/custardwam , but they haven't logged on since January. You can find the topic where they talked about creating the most recent incarnation of the archive here: https://umd.net/forums/best-way-forward

If I recall correctly, in the last few months custardwam asked for some new admins to take over some of the moderation. At that time, they claimed to have a backup of all of the stories at the time and discussed the possibility of moving to another place, but no one had an idea they were happy with and the conversation died.

I think it's not unreasonable that we might hear from custardwam at some point in the future, and that they'll have this backup that I'm... pretty sure I remember being mentioned. It's just a matter of how long it takes them to notice and take action.

For my part, I had saved some of the stories I liked best... although I also had links to a few times as many that I was going to back up "when I had time"... Damn my procrastination. I have 27 stories... not a lot, but something. Hopefully custardwam or somebody will surface with a real collection.

Also, many of the stories that were on the previous wamstoryarchive.com can still be found through archive.org: https://web.archive.org/web/20150113070332/http://wamstoryarchive.com:80/ . Of course, since the search function doesn't work, navigating it is a nightmare, and it only really has stories from 2014 and earlier...

On behalf of uncountably many lurkers, I say: good luck everyone, we're all counting on you. Godspeed.

[darkmud....@gmail.com]

We could always ask them. They're very likely to respond and tell us yes or no. But not only does Neocities disallow posting comments, it also doesn't have the technical capability to post stories. It would really just be an archive.

[johnso...@yahoo.com]

Okay, I just found something significantly more helpful on an old hard drive. When DustyBeard's wamstoryarchive.com was shutting down, I started saving all the stories. When custardwam announced that he had all of them and was relaunching the site, I stopped, but I never deleted my incomplete backup.

I have 344 stories by 40 authors. Hardly everything, and nothing later than February 2015, but fairly substantial. Fingers crossed something better turns up, but I'll gladly upload what I have as soon as someone tells me where to put them.

I don't have everything that was posted at the time by some of these authors, but I have stuff from: 31malelondon, activ8tor, acustard, Agent 47, Black Opera, BlueStocking, briff1es, clownsandpies, Coolie48, Corhockey12, custardwam, Deeppan, Dusty Beard, emmakunis, factorygurl, feathers_n_tar, Fender_Mike, ferdgerfel, ghilton, Gness7, hamish1024, Hammer01, jenny-stoogette, KakeKid, Mandy, marisai, messyflyboy, messyhose, MessySoMessy, Mongoose, Morepies, MrWetShirt, MudMadMan, newpieguy, ojin_migoto, pondcat, raghav, SlapstickMatt, WAM Anticipation, and wetgalfan. I also left myself some links that could potentially allow many more to be recovered from archive.org. Unfortunately, that trick won't work with the freeforums site, since you had to log in to see most stuff.

From the more recent batch I mentioned earlier, I have one each from Captain Sensible, Eric, Jiminy Thicket, kiwimayotte2 (hi), messytom, and Shann...@hotmail.com. I also have what I think is everything from cmr4life and topcattopone as of late 2017.

So, uh, awaiting instructions from my betters, I guess.

[Slimelover22]

Not the account I used to use for the site, but ce la vie. I had an idea that won't resolve our lack of forum problem, but which would give us a long-term proper archive that won't go away.

My day job involves lots of cloud computing, so I'm relatively familiar with the various providers' acceptable use policies, pricing, and such. Long story short - we could keep up to 5GB in a Google Cloud storage bucket for free, with Cloudflare in front of it to avoid going over the free bandwidth limit. Both of their AUPs on erotic content are "as long as it doesn't break the law we don't care". Even with some images that'd be a great deal of content, and for text-only it's probably all we'd ever need. I'm willing to start putting something together on that count if it's the way people are inclined to go.

GitLab haven't finalised their AUP, but are leaning towards "you shall not harm us and we shall not be held liable" instead of telling people how to behave, so we may also be able to use their Pages system with Cloudflare. That'd allow more ready adding of content by anyone, but involves people learning Git and Markdown which... yeah. Seems like the wrong way to go for encouraging content, imho.

We could also go all-in on Literotica, which has a Fetish section - we're arguably in that territory, even the SFW stuff, but I feel like that might be less desirable.

Whichever way, glad we have this group up so quickly. I suspect we lost a bunch of people and eyeballs last time with not having an alternative approach to keeping contact for a while.

[Kiwimayotte]

So as far as anyone knows, we don't currently have access to a forum that allows explicit content?  In that case is it worth trying one of the options already mentioned, just in the short term, just to see if they are feasible and to gather the stories that we have left somewhere together, thus making the migration to wherever we do go permanently a lot easier?  Is the google drive suggestion a reasonable shout?  I don't know enough about cloudflare to know how it works.  How should we choose which way to go forward.  Is anyone willing to take the lead?

[johnso...@yahoo.com]

Assuming we can get the EC Gunge admin to fix the recaptcha problem that's preventing new registrations, is there any reason we can't go there? They have a forum setup, and the content restrictions seem to be even more lenient than on the archive.

[darkmud....@gmail.com]

I don't want to take responsibility for setting up a forum for this.

One more temporary option that I can think of is Blogger: they permit adult content and anyone can read and comment without registration. You can also categorize by labels and they have a pretty good editor. One downside is that to create a post, you must be manually approved by a blog admin.

[Wamdude90]

MyBB is a free, open source forum site builder that does not restrict erotica. I've been looking into setting something up.

[GreetingCard]

I can help moderate if you want. I don't have a ton of experience, but I do have time and a bit of patience.

[sbriffles]

Is that what Gunge Male Celebrities is using? They've got a pretty feature-rich forum going on over there. Would that require a dedicated server?