pouët.net

🎺🎺Analogue, the last of the Bernadottes de Pau🎺🎺

In 50 years from now i want pouet.net be like a place to look back at by historians and grand childeren or anyone else.. A place showing the digial culture originated from the 80's till around 2065 when hardly any scene productions are being released anymore..
So sad to have like what took 75 years to create will it be demos added, bbs posts and comments and comments on productions.. and also the amazing one liner.. this place is cultural heritage! Who will be paying for keeping this website in the air for like 200 years more to visit by interested people? Hows the long term online future of pouet guaranteed? And also the short term (supposed analogue gets hit by a car coming weekend whoever is paying for it now?) all i am saying is.. i love pouet , make love not war and hopefully pouet will be around for a long time!!

deffo needs more than one admin, if anything, so that people can go on holiday or just have some time away, without issues building up.

What @magic said. Precisely.
(except the part where analogue gets hit by a car)

Some thoughts:

If I understand correctly, the main priority right now is finding at least one person for the admin role.

Building a team of moderators and gloperators will be up to the new admin. Analogue might suggest a list of interested people (that he is currently compiling). I guess the current active moderators and gloperators will stay unless they choose to step down.

Though it seems like some mods haven’t been active for ages.

IMHO, admin should have experience managing websites, basic PHP/MySQL knowledge, know how to handle SSL certificates, and, of course, be an experienced and passionate demoscener. Ideally, someone with a good reputation who’s well-known in the community.

Hopefully, someone like that steps forward.

P.S.: Don’t worry, I’m not throwing my hat in the ring, lol. I know my limits.

The bills are split between multiple people, there is redundancy at multiple levels to pay the bills, maintain the hardware, and to move Pouët elsewhere if needed, e.g. if the servers are shutdown. Before the new team is created, I'm doing a pass on everything, including making sure the important stuff (e.g. database dump) is regularly backed up on top of the existing backups.

And even if this all fails, the code is on github, and data dumps are public. so anyone without elevated access could potentially relaunch it, with some gaps.



Not exactly. I am not finding a new admin. I am trying to build a new team, which includes admins, then the team will be independent as stated above.

Replacing Gargaj with a single person with the duty of building a whole team would not be fair to the person, and increase the chances of repeating the same mistakes (burnout).

Those gaps would be immense, though. You don't get any users, comments (except vote totals), screenshots, oneliners, or the bbs, so everything would really be an empty shell. So I hope we don't get to that :-)

gaps are unavoidable unless backup/restore strategy is maintained. I personally don't believe anything on the web can be retained longer than original authors/maintainers are up to the task, so all one can wish pouet team assembles.

From the other hand, historians have quite a number of daily snapshots from 2009 up to now on web.archive.org

Assuming though all the trials AO needs to take in US won't put it down offline for its own reasons..

There's also the weekly data dumps. They don't include users, oneliners, the bbs, etc though.

Yeah, I get it. What I mean is that the admin(s) you choose will still have the freedom to decide who to bring on as moderators and gloperators. They’re not obligated to take everyone you suggest, they’ll have the freedom to choose. Or is that not the case? After all, an admin should have the right to hire or fire moderators and gloperators as they see fit.



I get the feeling Gargaj’s burnout isn’t just about that. From the Bulletin thread, we know that tasks like deleting release comments, BBS posts, banning users, or even removing releases are admin-only. Moderators exist but don’t have those powers.

Maybe Gargaj was wary of delegating critical stuff, like deleting releases—what if a moderator goes rogue and systematically removes prods from the database, and it’s discovered too late? (By the way, in such a case, it would be good to have a complete action log in the engine, which any team member can access. I hope such a log exists.)

But doing all that alone for years would wear anyone out.

What I’m wondering now is: does the Pouet engine even allow flexible delegation of rights to mods? Like, can you just toggle settings to let moderators ban users or clean up BBS/comments, or would the engine need tweaking? Have you looked into this?



If public backups were supplemented with an archive of screenshots and prods comments, it would already be pretty good.