Vail Pulls Plug on Epicski Forum

[jamesdeluxe]

LOL, with three days' notice! As was noted at the time, VR wanted the Epicski name and had always planned on killing it.

I joined there in 2002 and was an active member for a couple years before discovering FTO, at which time I bailed.

[BobMc]

I joined there in 2002 and was an active member for a couple years before discovering FTO, at which time I bailed.

http://www.epicski.com/forums/posts/by_ ... 1414/page/

[jamesdeluxe]

Correction: active through 2007! BobMc: the first person I ever skied with via an internet connection/EpicSki: April 2002. As you can see, I regret it to this day.

[BobMc]

BobMc: the first person I ever skied with via an internet connection/EpicSki: April 2002. As you can see, I regret it to this day.

Jamesdeluxe= A Paula's ski lover

I was just trying to get rid of some free tickets, :shrug:

[jamesdeluxe]

LOL, that's right; I've rewritten history twice in this thread/Paula's Ski Lovers, LOL. I was suckered into skiing The Canyons in early April because some carpetbagger from Michigan had free tickets!

[Tony Crocker]

The thread is up to 524 posts in the 30 hours since the announcement.

As was noted at the time, VR wanted the Epicski name and had always planned on killing it.

I believe Vail was indifferent not hostile to the forum, or else they would have killed it soon after they bought it in December 2012. EpicSki Forum is on a platform called Huddler that is being discontinued by its owner Wikia. Huddler is a convoluted platform that would take a high level programmer 2 months to migrate. Vail Resorts/Mountain News Corp obviously doesn't want to spend the money to do this. Here is the announcement posted about 4PM yesterday:

The EpicSki forum will no longer be available after April 28, 2017, due to our current hosting provider discontinuing its forum services. We appreciate and thank all of the forum members, moderators and site managers for your years of dedication and contribution to the conversation and community. Those EpicSki members who would like to retain their photo albums, unofficial guides, and all other content should download that to their personal storage device by no later than noon MDT on Thursday, April 27, 2017.

Some of you may recall that FTO is also faced with problems when the hosting platform changes. I am reminded of this every time I edit a post and have to get rid of this crap:

" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;

To no surprise there is a lot outrage about the archives. Time is short for them to be saved but there is a recent cryptic post from the administrator to stay tuned.

I worry some about my TR's here, but at least I didn't post them there.

[Patrick]

You know what I think about this. So much information risks disappearing. Fortunately I don't have a lot of posts on Epic, however I won't be able to check if there some things I'd like to save as I'm out West until May 2.

[Tony Crocker]

A stay of execution:

We have worked out an agreement with our forum hosting provider to extend the closing of the EpicSki forum for an additional two weeks, until May 12, 2017.

We listened and heard you loud and clear that many would like to move the content to another provider. Unfortunately, there are a number of operational, legal and other considerations that make selling or giving the archive to someone else very difficult. The two-week extension is intended to give you more time to download your content before the forum closes.

Those EpicSki members who would like to retain their photo albums, unofficial guides, and all other user content should download those items to their personal storage device by no later than 11:00 am MDT on Friday, May 12, 2017. We sincerely apologize for the inconvenience.

We know this news came as a surprise and we empathize with those who feel we didn’t provide ample warning to users to download their content. We appreciate our forum hosting provider for working with us to extend the site closing date for an additional two weeks to give users more time to make arrangements.

Your passionate, thoughtful posts, guides and photos have been inspirational to the community. We will miss the conversation and appreciate your participation and input on EpicSki.com over the years.

Vail bought the URL in December of 2012. They did not meddle with the site in any way other than not want to spend any money on it. The contract with Huddler expires 4/30 and Huddler as a platform is being shut down by its owner Wixia. We know the pitfalls of platform migration because of what happened to FTO in 2004. It's tedious, potentially expensive and the end result of migration may not be clean. And Huddler was considered by many a dangerous platform, but Epic started out like FTO as a mom-and-pop. Huddler provided expedient support at that time (when, probably a decade ago at least) to scale it up with shared revenue.

Evidently there are legal complications to a formal transfer of EpicSki content.

The downside to the stay of execution is it seems execution is indeed inevitable. They've told me that they've explored several options and received offers and really tried to find something, but there are legal hurdles that are insurmountable, so May 12th will be the last day for EpicSki as it is. However hopefully the efforts to make an archive are able to benefit from this reprieve. I think it would be best for whoever considers it to consult a lawyer. Each user theoretically owns their content, so I'm not really sure the implications.

I believe VR's attitude toward EpicSki Forum is one of neglect not hostility. PhilPug (Former Epic admin, now running Pugski, which will inherit much of Epic's forward going activity) knows they bought it exclusively for the URL and at the time knew zero about the forum, its large scale or potential value. The combination of VR neglect and the demise of Huddler is a perfect train wreck. Due to VR's indifferent attitude, I really don't think they will care if the Forum content survives as long as none of it has an "epic" URL attached.

[Marc_C]

This set of search results might be of some use, but I suspect that a discussion forum would exceed the capabilities of most if not all of the free solutions (or make the effort intractable):
https://www.google.com/search?q=website+scraping+software&ie=utf-8&oe=utf-8

[Tony Crocker]

You know what I think about this. So much information risks disappearing.

This set of search results might be of some use, but I suspect that a discussion forum would exceed the capabilities of most if not all of the free solutions (or make the effort intractable):
https://www.google.com/search?q=website+scraping+software&ie=utf-8&oe=utf-8

Someone posted about this software: https://www.httrack.com/ You can save enumerated URL's on an automated basis, including all attachments like pictures. This will be a fast solution to my FTO TR's, for which I have a list of URL's in my skilog spreadsheet. Reformatting the results to reload online would be tedious as the program creates a maze of directories to save all the graphics and make the page look exactly like the original. But at least it's a fast way to save.

Patrick is 100% right. I recommend people on FTO make a list of the URL's they might want to save so they can execute the program fast if it ever comes to that.

I've saved maybe 20-30 Epic threads. I have over 4,000 posts there but have initiated only a few threads. Most of my postings are responding to questions. I've saved threads I can remember as important but I'm sure there are lots I don't remember specifically.

[Tony Crocker]

I have succeeded in downloading my posts via the https://www.httrack.com/ software. It was a brute force exercise going through the posts, copying ~1,500 URL's to a document, then running the program a couple times a day to save ~200 threads at a time. Each of those downloads has an index page listing the ~200 threads. Clicking on a title gives you a view of that page on your computer exactly as it appeared online, complete with attachments. That doesn't mean it would be easy to reload somewhere else. The file structure is messy. Nonetheless I believe https://www.httrack.com/ will be very effective in backing up TR's including pics here on FTO. I will be testing that in a month or two.

With total stonewalling by Vail/Mountain News Corp. I have no idea whether a systematic attempt to download/save the whole site will be successful. I presume the lights will go out tomorrow as scheduled.