Hello! It's been a while. I'm making this thread here because I don't think any official support board is in use/active and this is probably the closest thing to an NDim hub for announcements there is.

If I'm wrong about this, I can pass on elsewhere but the fact I don't actually know the answer is partly what leads us into this topic today.

To get straight to the point, I'm no longer in a position where I can fund and run NDim. This has come up a number of times in the past, and I've reluctantly carried on in the background anyway. On this particular occasion, it's unfortunately legitimate.

I created NDim back in 2011-2012 with a view to living off my means at the time and eventually making some kind of profit from ad revenue out of the forum service. I was a young and naive software developer, probably at the wrong end of the Dunning Kruger curve.

It's now 2023. NDim never became profitable and never gained a source of ad revenue income out of the initial experiment with Adsense back in the day. There is some Amazon Affiliates program which I occasionally get an email about saying I have a paltry amount, but the sum total of everything gained wouldn't even fund a month of server costs for the site.

For the past 11 years since I launched the site, I've essentially run this thing as a charity. I've done very little active development outside of launch, only stepping in when required to maintain and keep the site going. I've fixed a few technical issues, dabbled in cheaper server hosting, paid for a HTTPS certificate that I could never fully install (the site needs a hardware revamp behind the scenes). But ultimately done very little.

However for 11 straight years I've forked out roughly $100 a month to keep the lights on. I've done this with absolutely nothing in return, without even using the site much myself, if it all ever. That's just over $13,000 I've spent on something I basically never use. I don't use my Netflix account either, but it's considerably cheaper to keep throwing money at.

It's reasonable to assume that this state of affairs couldn't carry on forever, and life is moving on for me. Financially I could use the money on things for my own life, but there's another facet here too. The internet is very different in 2023 to 2011. It's a much more highly scrutinised ecosystem and the laws that govern internet usage, data protection and all manner of other technical issues are changing all the time. It's no longer viable for me to fund something I have absolutely no oversight nor active involvement in.

The staff and mods of FE have always done a great job of keeping things going NDim wise which I have the upmost respect for (also completely charitably, they get nothing in return). In spite of this, content creation in 2023 needs a lot more governance than I can provide or allow for.

So for these reasons, my time running this site has come to an end. I've put this off so, so many times. Because in spite of this never becoming a financial success, a lot of people got a lot of satisfaction and enjoyment out of using the service for these past 11 years. I created something that people enjoyed, and as corny as it may sound, this made me very happy.

I feel a debt of gratitude to the actual users of the site. They've made the most out of something that was coded at an early point in my career (that I was never essentially proud of) and turned it into something special. It's very humbling for me that my efforts to launch this thing were never in vain, in spite of having no financial return. That always gave me a sense of happiness and contentment overall. And I always felt a debt to the users, so much so that I couldn't pull the plug and turn off the lights on all the fantastic content they've created and put together over the past decade.

Sadly nothing lasts for ever, and the time has come to say goodbye.

Next Steps
I've briefly discussed this with Curtis, but here's what will happen next, as a rough but official guideline.

Board registration has been broken for a while. This was never actually intended, I think it's a side effect of me pulling the plug on one of the experimental side hosting projects I was running (it was costing me money I couldn't spend, so I turned it off). When this went off I checked that FE was still running to sanity check I hadn't destroyed anything functional, but forgot about board creation.

Unfortunately due to the nature of this announcement, despite this being an accident I'm not intending to restore this functionality. I don't want to give people the means to host new games and forums, only to cut them off again in the not too distant future. There's very little to gain by restoring it for now so I' m not planning to.

The hosting of the website is currently handled and funded via myself only. Over the next 3 months, ending on December 31st 2023, I will have ongoing discussions with the NDim/FE staff about the best way to proceed with a handover, if at all possible. This will mean transferring ownership of the server, domain name and all content to somebody else. It will also require that person (or persons collectively) foot the current hosting costs.

If a decision is reached before December 31st, I will hand everything over and go about my way. The site will presumably continue, and users will be unaffected. The new staff may even opt to restore board registration. I have already signalled that despite the fact I won't own or fund the site, that I will happy to assist for the long term as much as I can to handle technical support issues and anything else needed to keep the site going. I will honour this for as long as I'm able and for as long as the staff want me to.

If a decision is not reached and the site is still being hosted and paid for by me on January 1st 2024, the site will enter into an archive mode where new registrations, threads and posts cannot be made. All boards will essentially become read-only. This is to give the site a cooldown period before turning off the lights completely.

The site will stay in an archive mode for 6 months before it goes offline completely. I will make available a tool for all site admins to be able to export the content of their forum in its entirety and download the contents. This will include any site layout elements, stylesheets, a copy of some page snapshots (so people can view the styles as was) and all site data in an exportable format. This will be everything from the database that is stored on the forum itself.

The only things I won't export to site admins, are personal messages, user emails and encrypted passwords since these are intended to be private and secure. This data will be scrubbed from the final export and inaccessible.

I will also provide a means for individual users (e.g. members of forums) to export a copy of their own Personal Message threads to their registered email account. I will still allow users to change their email if necessary in archive mode. Essentially my goal for the 6 months will be to release absolutely as much of the site's created content to the users as possible, provided they want it. You created it, you get to keep it. I don't want to turn everything off and to delete years of your content.

When the 6 months is off, the site will go offline for good.

My hope and preference is for the first option (successful handover) but I want to be clear and transparent as to what will happen if that fails. I don't want to do as I've done in the past and set a very fuzzy deadline, let that pass and then continue to silently keep the site going. By setting dates and expectations, it reinforces them.

Final(ish) Words
Ultimately, in spite of me getting nothing back personally from running this, I still feel kind of bad about having to do this. I do feel a debt of gratitude to the many users of this service over the past decade and every board they've hosted, game they've run and post they've made. The overall success of it amazes me to this day. I don't think I ever felt that it would be used by many.

So apologies, but I hope that you understand and that ultimately I'm being (and have been) very reasonable with this.

Thanks to everybody once again who has used and enjoyed NDim over the years. Sorry I didn't do anything more with it.

I'll keep tabs on this thread to answer any questions you have. Opening an informal Q&A/AMA in the thread beyond. Happy to answer any questions you have (even if they're not NDim related!)

My biggest regret is that I'm having to announce this on GrompelBup's birthday.



Sorry to ruin your special day, old pal :(

Grumpy Old Man @ 10/9/2023 18:04

Porl forgive my ignorance. Can ndim be dockerized? I have a server I can host it on with ample space if so. Would just have to configure my ngix and pay for ddns which is like $1 a month

It's not ignorant, it's a reasonable question and suggestion in 2023.

But the website was built in 2012, using tech from the early 2000s.

That's a definite and clear no, unfortunately. I'd effectively have to re-write it all (a project that I attempted about 2/3 times and never got off the ground)

The site relies on a database and website both which have to be physically hosted on either a server or a VM. You can probably remote host the DB but it would involve a long running job to port everything across. This has been done before, it took about a week back then. It may not take much longer now, and may be an option if it helps transition to a cheaper host.

For what it provides, the current host for NDim is pretty over-priced. An Azure VM could run the whole thing with a great deal more resiliency baked in and hardware upgrade capabilities for little more. But as with a lot else, the project to investigate, invest and actually do the work of porting it over never fully got off the ground.

PORL @ 10/9/2023 18:07

Grumpy Old Man @ 10/9/2023 18:04 Porl forgive my ignorance. Can ndim be dockerized? I have a server I can host it on with ample space if so. Would just have to configure my ngix and pay for ddns which is like $1 a month It's not ignorant, it's a reasonable question and suggestion in 2023. But the website was built in 2012, using tech from the early 2000s. That's a definite and clear no, unfortunately. I'd effectively have to re-write it all (a project that I attempted about 2/3 times and never got off the ground)

As an addendum to this, because I was curious I looked into it. People have actually achieved this with Windows containers. So it may not be as impossible as originally stated.

I'm still confident enough to state it couldn't run on a Linux container.

(and the DB would need to be its own thing still, of course. So some re-coding still necessary and solution not optimal, but theoretically not impossible)

Zersch @ 11/9/2023 2:29

This impacts more than just FE, I'm technically inept but is there anything I can do to help a transfer here.

I'll update if there is. The most likely thing will be funding, but there's a few different ways this can go and we just need to hammer out the specifics.

im317 @ 11/9/2023 12:38

many thanks for all you did. i cant imagine what would have happened to ProM if we had still been on Zetaboards when it sold to taptalk.

I've never heard of that until now. I don't really do forums much these days, although I've had this conversation before with people and I still think forums are a superior format to the likes of reddit et al (although I more browse reddit for stuff these days than anything).

I had a quick Google out of interest and the first thing I find is this:

https://www.tapatalk.com/groups/jefffsbeardboard/?sid=6ccf10eeecf9c4ebf3775c08132088c9

Truly we live in interesting times.