Post #774435 by Swanky on Sat, Mar 25, 2017 6:53 AM

As for the future of TC the website, I have been thinking about it along with my own sites for a couple of years. It will all evaporate within a year or less of Hanford passing. Yeah, we are getting old and dying. How many great websites have evaporated already? LOTS. TC requires someone knowledgeable to manage it and someone to keep paying the bills. Either of those stops and the website likely has less than a year to live. poof!

It's also hard to say whether it should be upgraded. This BB is stuck in 2003. Hanford made a lot of custom tweaks to the code and upgrading to the newest phpBB version would wipe out his changes, but make it more accessible to mobile users. It would also take a very long dedicated weekend by someone as smart as Hanford in computer ways. But would be worth it to perhaps stop spam and hacks.

I also think someone could turn the Locating Tiki forum into a killer book. But having spent the time to make a book, I doubt there is anyone out there willing to commit to such an ordeal. It's a rambling mess. If you had been blogging about Locating Tiki for 10 years and taking that rambling mess and editing it into readable interesting posts, you could turn that blog into a book easy enough. But no one did that.

It should be mothballed. I don't mean killed or taken down, I mean it should be placed in a trust with managers and funded to live forever. There should be 6-10 people, probably best to be developers who can maintain the php code, etc., who are in charge of keeping it alive. The domain should be paid for in 10 year increments or more, along with the hosting. Hosting is probably $100 a year, mine is. Domains are $10-15 a year. For $2000 you could insure TC exists for 10 years. You get people like Humu and me and Hanford and others who can manage the code, the backups, the web stuff on a board and as long as 1 or 2 of us give a crap to spend the time on it, it will continue for decades regardless.

I still visit TC daily. Probably at least twice a day. I recently posted something here and on FB and I can tell you I got more traffic from my TC post than my FB post. Why? Because FB manipulates traffic and prevents your posts from being seen by a lot of people to try to get you to pay them to show it to more people. There is still a lot of power in a good old website. There is still room for someone to wipe out FB. I actually have a great idea for it if anyone knows some really rich people to invest...

The web world is aching for content. There are lots of sites that are hustling all day long to find something to share. TC has content in spades. It could be a gold mine if it was correctly mined...