New Year's Resolutions for 2024

[Murfreesboro]

Aww, Andy, what a sweet way to put it.

[TheHeadlessHorseman]

Andy will still be here until the human race has to leave the planet.

To be honest, even if this forum were to shut down tomorrow and be gone for good, it would be possible for one of us to bring it back. As long as the evil little Google bots and web crawlers continue to gather information, then almost every single post on this forum should be retrievable from the internet archive, and depending on how frequently the archive is updated, there might only be about a week or so of posts that you wouldn't be able to retrieve.

So then we would have to get a website to host the forum, this could be from a free website, or someone would just have to pay for webhosting. Then comes the hard part, copying the whole forum from the internet archive, and republishing every single topic and post as they originally appeared here. That would be a labor of love and dedication, and it would certainly take a long time to do, but it's possible if someone was willing to put in the work. Of course, if nobody wants to sit there rebuilding this forum for the next few years, you could just start a new forum and invite the rest of us to join so we can still stay in touch.

This is just IF this forum went away, and well ... I have some interesting information to share about that. I just went to dig up the domain info on Halloween.biz and it appears that it expires on 03-26-2024, so hopefully he will renew it soon. I'm guessing that the same thing will happen like last time, where the domain expired and we couldn't access the website for a few days until it was renewed. It's interesting to note that Halloween.biz was actually registered way back on 03-27-2002, so he had it ready to go when he sold the Halloween.com domain.

[Andybev01]

I love the archive/Wayback.

You sound like a card-carrying geek; my people.

[Murfreesboro]

I'd certainly.miss you folks if this place should disappear, but you can't count on me to save it. I'm techno-Amish. But I'd show up if someone else were to save it.

[Andybev01]

I second that, and third.

[MauEvig]

That's quite the story you shared, Headless. Thanks for sharing! That's definitely one heck of a crazy childhood, putting it mildly of course. But I'm happy you were able to build a better life for yourself, your wife and your kids. Congratulations on your success, it sounds like you've earned it.

As far as saving the forum goes, I can install programs on computers and such and I enjoyed my temporary summer IT gig for the school I used to work for, but the best I could do is offer alternative means of communication should the forum finally go under. But hopefully it won't, since Halloweencom/Biz made such an effort to send those emails out and bring us back. Forums themselves seem to be dying out in favor of social media sites.

Thanks for the sentiments though Murf. It would be nice to see the forum keep going.

And I try to mind my p's and q's. I get pretty good practice because I work at a school. Buuuuuut...I admit in person and at home I'm much more "sailor-like" and less "proper" in my vocabulary. Different vocabulary for different situations as they call for it. I do however, enjoy the family friendly atmosphere and I'm accustomed to the fact that there's a time and a place for certain language. I respect the rules here and I like being here, so I will follow the protocol accordingly.