It’s become semi-clear that it’s very unlikely that the decision to shut down RPGMW forums will be changed. As such, I was wondering if anyone had an idea of where to find projects based on preservation and archival of the old forums.
I currently know that there are some community-hosted efforts here and there, alongside someone running a scraper to hoist all the plugins posted on the old forums, but I couldn’t really find any specifics as to where these projects are hosted and/or how to access said archives. Would anyone happen to know where I can access these archives and/or archival projects? While I am currently busy with my finals (yes i am pretty young lol), I would like to maybe contribute a thing or two myself to said projects. Also, having access to said archives would just be nice overall. Thank you for your time!
1 Like
I wrote up this python script if you’d like to scrape the old forums for plugins. Got all the MZ and MV plugins downloaded yesterday. The more copies out there, the better though!
Scrape-RPG-Maker-Forums.zip (7.3 KB)
5 Likes
this is really fucking good. thank you man 
1 Like
Redundancy is good for preservation. The hydra must have multiple heads! But I also wonder about the future of these efforts. Will all these dumps end up as publicly available resources? And if they do, what can the community do to help them. How many can we help keep afloat. 
Some are proven to be good on their own. I know I can trust Rmarchiv’s resilience for example. They actually helped RMN though the dark times and host not only English and German games, but also Spanish games in conjunction with AlianzaRTP.
3 Likes
from what i know, theres currently an effort to preserve the entire old rpgmaker forums called “rpgmakerchat” that is thought to be done in 26 or so days. additionally, the rmw refugees server (you can find an invite by just searching “discord” in the welcome to rpgmaker guild thread in the old forums) has a channel for preservation efforts, with multiple people making their own archival projects. theres currently none noteworthy aside from the previously mentioned rpgmakerchat since this change was JUST announced, but id say give it like, a week or two, and the “big” ones will probably shine on and become available in most places aside from discord when they become noteworthy
i should also mention that psychronics scraper seems to work quite well. by tampering a bit with the code i managed to change it to archive MV plugins instead of MZ, and so far its been working great. im almost done with the MV forum plugins entirely. you could probably play with it to change it to archive other versions as well, though those wont be high priority since i primarily use MV
1 Like
Yeah, I’ve seen RPGMakerChat. That one I assume will have a public access archive, since it has a website already, even if it’s only for displaying the current progress for now.
I know of Dosmaen, Ryg and Psychronic’s archives. Tho as far as I know Psychronic’s is only plugins, right? Dosmaen has archived all posts I think, and Ryg’s goes as far as archiving attachments, images and downloads. Some will even archive avatars and other things that are pertain only to the site . I’d also think that best of cases at least one archives the entire site, as a static site, similar to what Archive.org does. Which also brings a personal question, I don’t know if anything in RMWeb stops Archive’s web crawler from archiving the whole site.
Anyway, yeah, we’ll see in a couple days, maybe weeks, it doesn’t matter how long as long as it’s before the deadline of December 11 hahah. 
1 Like