jamesdeluxe":1r23196l said:I joined there in 2002 and was an active member for a couple years before discovering FTO, at which time I bailed.
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:jamesdeluxe":3ffbofzc said:
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:
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.The Mountain News Team":wnaewv40 said:
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.Current EpicSki Admin":wnaewv40 said:
Patrick":173up1pm said:
Marc_C":173up1pm said:
Yesterday, I was skimming through a number of Epicski threads and trip reports that were archived on the Internet Archive Wayback Machine. All of the links that I tried via the forum homepage worked. Good to know that the extensive content didn't go poof as feared at the time.
Yes and no. Wayback only has the first few pages for threads. Meaning if a thread was long, most likely most of the content was lost.
I only went through maybe a dozen threads so it's a small sample size; however, none were abbreviated, including long discussions across numerous pages. For example, RIP Epicski. All 31 pages are there/see screen grab below.
I always wondered if a tech geek could've carried out a quasi hostile takeover of the Epicski content and renamed the forum so the brand conflict with VR was gone. NY Ski Forum and FTO were both moved from obsolete hosting software to Xen Foro (Harv's was especially obsolete!). It was 2017 so probably not but who knows.
That is useful info.
I will resist going far down that rabbit hole for now. I suspect you need to navigate through forums to look for something though. Search engines for topics or keywords will not work.Former admin deserves some credit forcing me to take over FTO when I did. The conversion process from phpBB including archives was shockingly easy (photos captions were the only content lost) when I hired Xenforo Marc to do it in a couple of days. I got the impression in 2017 that the Huddler software hosting EpicSki would have taken a dedicated programmer a couple of months to save/convert.
Another company paid a consulting company to convert from Huddler. Took a long time. Afterwards the consultant never wanted to deal with Huddler stuff again, for any amount of money. Huddler was the wrong type of software and database for what EpicSki was at the time the partnership was created. It was NOT meant to be primarily for threaded forum discussions.
I forget -- was he planning to shut down the site if you didn't take over?
No, but I think some kind of software support was ending, and he thought it was inevitable that a spam/hacker attack would eventually damage/corrupt the site beyond his ability to repair it. There was some kind of site crash that was an easy fix but became so frequent he showed me how to do it.
