Lets please backup a little here.
With all respect, I would keep such conversations and opinions to a minimum. This forum wasn't some form of rebellion as much as a life raft, so let's enjoy and savor it as much.
This wasn't any national or public library turned off. It's company dealings, so let's not pretend it's anything else. If Presonus saw fit to close their forum, stop Studio One altogether (like we know who did), or turn their Studio Live mixers into movie-theater popcorn machines, we have no say. That's up to the corporate side of things, their shareholders, and their investors. So let's avoid the Constitutional rights end of this (in all fairness). Trust me, I can get into the Constitution, Bill of Rights, and justice for all, as much as the next person, only it has no place here. Period.
Look around, this forum has no disgruntled users, or trolls bad rapping the product. It's really a refreshing entity, so I'll simply end my points here and be thankful.
I wasn't going to join this "guess" why the Presonus forum ended, and I still won't. To anyone wishing to do so, write a song about it. Anything, but making points about what rights are who's.
It's over folks. Time to move on.
I hope I didn't raise the bar of anyones feeling concerned about what happened with the old forum, or get in anyones face. Truly. I won't add anymore to this topic.
We are amongst good folks here.
Enjoy the production, art, and music Ya'll.
...and even talk shop.
With all due respect Lokey, I'm not talking about the administrators of THIS forum, but rather the (likely single marketing entity) that deleted the old one, and you're
kind of putting words into my mouth on that particular chestnut; you seem to be inferring that I am conflating the admins/mods of the old forum that relocated to this board with the folks who put the 'kibosh' on the old stomping grounds, and nothing could be further from the truth.
I'm very grateful to all the associated acts that made this happen, and honored to have been able to play a (small) part in it.
This wasn't any national or public library turned off. It's company dealings, so let's not pretend it's anything else.
Now hold on a second though, you say that, but how was that knowledgebase any less invaluable to many of
us than a library is to the general public? RobWJ above would certainly seem to concur (don't mean to speak for ya, Rob!). We are many of us working and/or aspiring professionals, in need of highly specific advice and information. Functionally I see no difference between a nuked forum and a closed/burned library in that example; the information is
literally irretrievable unless rehosted and formatted. I've said it before and I'll say it again,
I would have been lost without that place on my S1 journey, many times over, and that realization spurred me to act on all this (
has it been over a month already?? Geez).
I do feel like you're downplaying just how toxic 'corporate culture' is/can be vis a vis our fundamental access to free speech, but hey, I respect you enough to not preach to you about your take, so I'd appreciate if you'd take a bit less of a patronizing and dismissive tone towards mine. We can just leave all that right where it is, and I'm totally fine with that. Agree to disagree, wholeheartedly.
But moving past the whole rights aspect, my entire conclusion was about
the critical nature of backing up our online experiences, and taking their custody and preservation into our own hands — which we successfully
did do by the creation of this board — and yes, which is in a certain sense, an act of resistance against corporate overreach... I'm kinda curious why you had no thoughts whatever on that aspect of my post, alongside all your grievances with it?
Anyway, to shed some more light on that whole 'data custody/preservation' point (and maybe help you understand why I'm so wound up about it), so all that stuff was not based on some abstract theological position, but rather my firsthand-experience with this whole fiasco, which cost me no trivial amount of time and stress: I spent a good 4-5 days eating into virtually all my freetime struggling like hell — hunting down and talking with archivists, sending out DMs like crazy, making posts on VIC to raise awareness, etc. — to find a way to preserve the decade-old knowledgebase from the old board... but ultimately, to no end;
The
'robots.txt' file of the old site apparently did allow crawling, but no matter who I contacted, and regardless of which software we used, every one of us ended up getting rate-limited and only able to make archives of very small portions of the repository, and with each passing day it became more clear that the old knowledgebase would eventually just be gone and irretrievable.
The only apparent solution would have been to instantiate different 'instances' of archiving efforts each masked with different VPNs (to trick the ISP into tolerating the server load), but this was something that would have been both an incredibly tedious technical task (even for an expert I was informed), and virtually impossible to pull off in the 3-4 days we had left before the closure deadline.
So that said, yeah, I've had a lot of skin in this game recently and I'll reiterate my MAIN point once again:
Back up your data! Conversations included. ESPECIALLY conversations of a technical/work-critical nature. Literally can't overstate this, and I want to emphasize this being the main point/conclusion to this whole shitshow, which I hope we all never have to endure again. The more custody we have over this kind of stuff as a community, the better.
The less dependent we are upon corporate and/or tech-giant run platforms, the better. We are safer, more robust, and I believe ultimately better off because of it, and for that stance I make no apology.
So there you have it. I can appreciate that you feel rather detached from some of the points I made, but I've simply been very close to this whole affair and came to a lot of these conclusions 'in the heat of combat' so to speak, so I felt the need to unburden myself and hopefully share an informed take with the good people here at the same time.
Also despite the fact that this is the lounge area and not the support section, I do wholeheartedly agree that the main point
is indeed shop-talking, of which I am as active a proponent as anyone.
So you and I do find some common ground, as usual
Thanks,
JB