IMPORTANT - staff change and move to a Fanrestore.com domain

[Stamper]

What a mess. Rows do happen. I'm in bed with (minor) COVID. Blend those sites back together again or you will incur my wrath!

[dvdmike]

What a mess. Rows do happen. I'm in bed with (minor) COVID. Blend those sites back together again or you will incur my wrath!

Hope you feel better

[alleycat]

I'm going to echo what a lot of people have said, that I'm really sorry it's come to this. It's not my place to comment on the specifics of what has lead up to this decision. I've been around for about two and half years now and really appreciate the work that all of the mods/admin have done to give us this platform. I think it's easy to forget how much work it takes behind the scenes to design and run a site like this, and of course the ongoing costs.

Clearly this has been a difficult decision and has not been taken lightly. @spoRv I hope in the future you can find a way to continue to be a part of the site, you and @PDB, along with many others have been very welcoming and invaluable with your time, guidance and technical knowledge. Ultimately we all have the same goal, the preservation and restoration of movies.

[HippieDalek]

What a mess. Rows do happen. I'm in bed with (minor) COVID. Blend those sites back together again or you will incur my wrath!

Yikes, I hope you're feeling better soon. Glad to hear it's just minor.

[Lio]

This forum is a great alternative to a site like OT, which can seem like a dumping ground. spoRv's own projects helped set a standard for quality here that attracts really remarkable projects from other users. I've seen this situation on another forum where a very passionate project person got mod power and began to insist his arbitrary ideas over the entire userbase. The difference is that, on that other website, the rest of the leadership was awful whereas here on Fanres(tore) the integrity of the site's leaders is evident.

As ac3 mentioned, one thing sporv was planning as recently as today -- I don't know if he's going to pursue it any more -- was a private FTP. The way he presented the idea was vague and confusing, but it would have saved the trouble you sometimes have to go through to get audio tracks people have acquired and synced. It would be great to just pay a fee and have this sort of stuff available. It also helps as a matter of archival, since it doesn't depend on whether one particular guy is checking his PMs. It was so appealing that I myself was prepared to upload hundreds of movie trailer pre-dub tracks to that server. But maybe that project was one of the things which frustrated the other mods here; because like I said, the way it was presented was very difficult to understand. Even his post today on the broken fanres.com has nebulous and unclear ideas about "evolution".

[Feallan]

FYI I'm in the process of reverting most changes recently made by spoRv, and improving some things while I'm at it. Hopefully it's all done in the next couple of days. All suggestions are welcome either here or by PM.

One annoying thing will be replacing forum.fanres.com links with fanrestore.com ones in all posts. I will have to take the forum offline for that, hopefully for no longer than 30 minutes. If you see a 403 error sometime this week, don't be alarmed.

[ac3]

A cheaper method would be to just have mega links posted publicly in one section and make it an invite only site.i doubt it would get shut down over a bunch of audio tracks.

http://www.audio-track.com/en
This site has been online for a few years now

[Valeyard]

Yeah, I can't log in either... Also guys, can't you agree to disagree? I mean, are things really that bad that we really need this war?

From the perspective of being a participating member here since 2015 - this forum is seven years old now, and it takes time to re-adjust and make necessary changes including in administration/staffing. It seems this point was inevitable really, that is a change in administration was going to happen/needed to happen at some time or another.

it's also funny that only today I discovered that there was another admin that I was never aware of.

I don't know that he ever was an actual admin. It's possible he was promoted in 2015 to that role and then everyone forgot about it and he never actually did anything as an admin? That was a contributing member (outside of Fanres/before 2015) and I asked him if he wanted to come back to Fanres sometime as he hadn't logged in to Fanres in over 2 years. I think he's too busy now with life and his family for the hobby projects here so what he did was log in and demote himself to the Power User class. Obviously I've no idea which of you made him an admin or why etc, that's got nothing to do with me, and he has nothing to do with any of this.

[Valeyard]

FYI I'm in the process of reverting most changes recently made by spoRv, and improving some things while I'm at it. Hopefully it's all done in the next couple of days. All suggestions are welcome either here or by PM.

One annoying thing will be replacing forum.fanres.com links with fanrestore.com ones in all posts. I will have to take the forum offline for that, hopefully for no longer than 30 minutes. If you see a 403 error sometime this week, don't be alarmed.

The dates are not working in replies:

[deleted user]

Well, from how this reads, this was inevitable. I almost wanna take spoRv's side because it was his baby from what it sounds like. But then, if you let someone else pay for hosting for years (did I get that correctly?), you kinda stop being entitled to that kind of authorship imo. If this was all spoRv's server, paid for by him etc, I'd be 100% on his side, but as it stands, I kinda hesitate to take any side at all. I guess it boils down to, collaborations are a recipe for drama.

I do think since it was his baby, at least spoRv should get a backup of the database. So should any moderator/admin for that matter imo. I understand Feallan is reliable but if he falls off a cliff tomorrow (let's pray he doesn't), someone has to be able to take over. There likewise appear to be countless examples of websites/trackers where years of hard work by thousands of members was lost because the one person with full access disappeared from the face of the earth. Considering that this site is all about preservation, maybe it should even go a step further and allow every user to download all content he has access to (excluding potential admin forums and such ofc). It's already possible to download private messages, which is great. If there was a way to do the same with general forum posts, it would be perfect.

Moral arguments aside ... my personal preference as a user is to keep things as they are, not change something that works. I honestly admire that stance. I've lost count of amazing websites or software that were utterly ruined by completely needless changes and "redesigns". Always breaks my heart. Microsoft's Ribbon tabs are one of many many examples.

I don't think that breaking the site once is reason enough for such a conflict but I can see how if this is what happened after one day of changes, a permanent rush of "upgrades" would seem rather dangerous long term.

And it does seem like spoRv starts a lot of ideas but eventually doesn't always follow up on them. I'm pretty similar in that haha.

Overall, sad how this went. Having contributed to my share of forum drama over the years, I suppose I can't be the one to point fingers at anyone though. Let's hope for the best for the future and @spoRv if you have it in ya to stay on this new site and make peace with the others (I know I myself would probably be too stubborn to do that), I for one would be happy to know you're still around. Always enjoyed your presence on here.