LogFAQs > #979927063

s0nicfan posted...

Why not reach out to the guy who runs the gamefaqs archive (that we can't direction mention on the boards)? They've already got DB support and like... 10+ years of archived content so they clearly have the storage space.

Roadhogg's account has not been signed into since 2008 and the archive itself seems to have been broken for a few years now.

Trumble posted...

I run the Lemmings Forums. Much smaller, but it runs alongside several insignificant sites on a $12/mo Digital Ocean droplet. SSL is free via LetsEncrypt. A domain is maybe $20 a year. We might need a higher value droplet if it gets really active, but the costs are completely feasible.

I could fund a domain if needed. Had no idea there were free SSL services, but I'll keep that in mind.

Getting someone to make the damn thing is the biggest obstacle. I'd like to say I would, but my track record of finishing projects is kinda poor and PHP is not something I do overly well with. The old clones had bugs (GameFAQ++ had one that literally allowed any registered user to moderate messages lmao) and are written for outdated PHP versions, so wouldn't be the easiest things to bring up to date.

Agreed. The old codebases (especially GFH and WF forks) had a frightening number of security vulnerabilities, with a few quality exceptions that might have enjoyed a bit of security by obscurity (aURL, EGFC). Some developers wrote vulnerabilities into their own software for personal amusement.

I'd be open to building within the constraints of my time, though I need to brush up on the landscape of libraries I might want to use for the concept I proposed.

If we did theoretically opt for a LAMP-based forum, it would be extremely easy and there's a lot of secure boilerplate that didn't exist back then, but I remain queasy about long-term uptime assurances. Even if fully paid for into perpetuity like a number of my AWS-based sites, the Amazon baremetal the instances live on occasionally degrades after a while and then the cloud instance goes down, which means needing to actively monitor things and also potentially have periodic backups. Set and forget preferred.