Fruit

A California slender salamander (Batrachoseps attenuatus) curls in on itself in Big Basin Redwoods State Park, California, USA

If you read the link the company does of course say they’re replacing the existing forums with new ones, and I’m sure no one would say the old ones didn’t perhaps need a lil bit of a glow up, some tech debt fixing… but there’s a few key notes in there:

They are NOT carrying over any history, data messages etc. from the old forums

They are NOT archiving, retaining or in any way saving the existing forums in any way

They have NOT provided any reasoning past ‘as part of continued efforts to support developers’

As an offhand, moderate read, this sounds to me like a desire for some change in the forums but deciding nuking everything is less expensive than rebuilding and carrying over info.

If I’m cynical, and likely realistic? Probably to increase sales of their latest GameMaker software by making it inherently more difficult for someone getting the older software for cheap pushing it to its limits. The amount of institutional knowledge on those forums is absurd.

And even if it is a benign reason, it’s still terrible because what do you mean you’re doing this with no recourse or potential for change? You sell software that runs on community goodwill? In an era where people are pulling away to open source software?? Crazy.

There are yeeeaaars of answers, plugins, suggestion, community built up on those forums - I’ve used the em to learn and grow my own skillet!!! And soon it won’t exist.

At the very least, they gave a ‘heads up’ - the deletion occurs mid December, so archiving by the community is possible from now. It’s just absurd that it needs to happen in the first place.

https://web.archive.org/web/20260000000000*/https://forums.rpgmakerweb.com/

https://rpgmakerchat.com/

https://github.com/imraf/rpgmakerweb-archive/

If YOU use any RPG Maker engines or are considering using one, YOU should let them know that we don't want decades of RPG Maker support and history taken down. Especially when the intention seems to be discouraging people from using older versions. I personally still use RPG Maker MV because privately made MZ plugins are often made with AI, and the more recent RPG Maker versions they've released are Unity plugins and not their own seperate program, and I'm not interested in Unity at all.

Let them know you want an archive here:

And contact the admins on the new forum:

There are still people working on archiving it privately, and someone else has offered their own forum as a new hub (because not many people like the new forum site that GGG has set up, and neither do I). Decent's site if anyone's interested: https://forum.electricairship.com/

Notes:

Spiders classified as evil are any spiders who play an antagonistic role in their respective stories, regardless of nuance

Spiders classified as giant are any spider significantly larger than the average non-fiction spider