In Dynasty Scans’ #scanlation Discord channel it was brought up that this domain/hosting provider may expire and we’d lose all our data. I suggest that at some point, we make an effort to move to the chat platform Zulip instead, as we may be eligible for the free Standard tier as a community.

Zulip is a platform organized like a forum but stylized like a real-time messaging service (each forum thread acts like an IRC channel, and one can also view all messages from all threads interleaved). It has some advantages over the current forum software:

1. Notification support (including mobile ones)
2. Viewing all current threads in a compact title-only view, eliminating the need for my spreadsheet
3. Supports nice-to-have features like editing posts, polls, etc
4. Supports various modern features like DMs, apps, integrations, etc
5. Unless Zulip itself shuts down, the server won’t be deleted

And some disadvatanges:

1. No support for anonymous users posting – one needs an account.
2. Possibly harder to learn?

I have a preference for Zulip over traditional forum software, mostly due to my preference of messaging versus forum posts; Zulip is also one of the most modern options available. I’d like to avoid something like Discord because it’s less public – Zulip doesn’t allow unregistered users to post unfortunately, but they can at least view the messages.

As for the migration, Zulip has a web API so I’d be happy to write a bot that moves all yuri-project history into the Zulip.

Any opinions on this? Obviously I’d like to move, but I’d mostly like to avoid losing contributors.

(oh, I forgot to put my name, I’m valence by the way)

Although I suppose there’s a risk Zulip would be unwilling to host this activity since it’s in a legal grey areä. Hosting it ourselves would be $12/month, which I should be able to contribute some to… we’ll see

Thanks for the suggestion. I'll look into it. I agree that traditional forum structure isn't the best fit.

I'm mixed on the anonymous thing. On the one hand, I respect privacy, on the other, the child porn spam messages that show up occasionally makes me incoherently furious and checking for and nuking them is tedious

Thanks for the updates.

As for Zulip, I'm down for whatever software as long as it continues to be easy to just pick something up and do it.

I can also help contribute financially if need be.