It's a bit sad to acknowledge the death of a child. This child I'm talking about is the first game I created on this site when I first joined. I started the game in April 2011. It's been a story-driven fantasy game that reached almost 82000 posts (which I understand is a lot for a non-sandbox game).

Because I'm working fulltime now and I felt an urge to ST something smaller, I couldn't give this game the attention it deserved. I didn't want to admit it at first, since it has great sentimental value and has been a huge part of my life for four and a half years. A few of my players have stuck with it since day one, and it feels great to have left a big impact on their lives by STing this game, every day, every week, for all this time.

But all things must come to an end. It feels bittersweet to end the game, since I never got to resolve its final story arc, but I think it's for the best. I've had so many memorable moments with that game that I will remember for the rest of my life. I believe that many of my players share that sentiment.

Soooo, just wanted to share this with those who cares, and I also want to give a big thank you to all the Rpol admins for giving us this great forum for roleplaying.

I don't know your game, but as someone who knows what it is like creating a very long running big cast "deep" game, I know what you are feeling.

Don't throw anything out.  You never know what the future may bring.

Do, however, store everything off-site.  RPoL has semi-regular clean-ups, and inactive games do get deleted.  Once that happens, there is no way of recovering anything unless you have it stored elsewhere.

I was wondering about backing up.  I deleted an old game, it's long gone now, but it seems it would've been nice to put it up somewhere for the people that played it, some record of what whey did.

What's the best way to backup the threads?

Use the All link at the top of any page in the thread to show the whole thing (this will only work if there are less than 1000 posts in the thread).

Then use the D/L link at the top of the thread.  This will let you choose some formatting options (show private lines, etc).  After that, you can use your browser to save the whole thread as a single page - in Firefox go to File -> Save Page As... - to save it to your computer.

If you save it as a html document, you can use it to create a web page that you can upload to your own webspace.

Then just repeat for each thread.

Surely games are not deleted without first contacting the GMs to ask if they still want it for reboot - or at the very least to advise them that it will be deleted in X days?

In reply to icosahedron152 (msg # 6):

          /help/?t=faqs&page=generalfaq

Note that this -- "it is usually moved to the "Deleted" area" -- means that it is marked as "Deleted" on the Main Menu.  So yes, GMs are given sufficient warning, and time to address the matter.  At the end of the day, though, the site is intended for active games, not as a permanent storage for inactive ones.

That's what I thought - whew!

Thanks Ron. I have a few bits and pieces stored on site, since I can search for stuff more easily here, but even in total with my current games it's a far cry from 82,000 posts. If I had something that size, with no intention to reboot, I'd ease the burden on your storage for everyone's sake.

I'm far away from storing all scenes yet but those I've stored so far makes up for about 10.000 pages of Times New Roman, size 12. I'm expecting all 82.000 posts to be about 20.000 pages or so when I'm done storing it all.

So many good memories. :)