UMSF will close, Jan 1st 2025 Options

[djellison]

Dear UMSF Members,

It is with a heavy heart that I share the news that UnmannedSpaceflight will go dark at the beginning of January 2025.

Some of you may have seen this note from Nick just over a year ago alluding to long term challenges The Planetary Society had shared regarding the maintenance and hosting of the forum in its current form. Since then we have taken a close look at the technical state of the server and forum hosting software and have not been able to find either a technical or financial path forward to keep the forum operating.

For context, the Invision software itself is over a decade out of date and no upgrade path exists to either upgrade to current Invision board software, or migrate to other hosting platforms. Plans of migrating to a more inclusive URL have been on the backburner for over 10 years. Even if a path were obvious - finding new affordable hosting and migrating to run the forum independently of The Planetary Society would take a talented web developer a significant amount of time ( and thus money ) and admin team time to manage it ( which none have )

After talking with other veteran members of the admin team, we have therefore decided the better path forward is to give members 3 months notice to take copies of their attachments, discuss places they might like to hang out together in the future, and reminisce about some of the highlights of 20 years of stitching, mapping, discussion and adventure before bringing things in for a graceful landing on Jan 1, 2025.

I had no idea when spinning up a forum back in 2004 that it would last so long or that the breadth, depth and quality of creations and discourse would be anything like as incredible as it has been. For some, this place has literally been life changing. We’ve seen spacecraft, and people, come and go. Entire careers have sprouted from some of the out-of-this-world-ideation right here on these pages.

I want to once again give a huge thank you to Nick for being the de facto admin for more than a decade - without his care and attention the forum would have collapsed many years ago. Emily too deserve special mention for chaperoning this place when it became part of TPS. Jason, Ted, Dan, Glen, Stu, Bjorn, Mike and others have also been a major part of the UMSF story.

Further - I want to credit folks like Steve Squyres, Jim Bell, Alan Stern, John Spencer, Ralph Lorenz, Paolo Belluta, Mark Lemmon and others for sharing their time as part of this community or being pivotal in its origins and in doing so, inspiring others to keep the level of discourse as high as it has been for 20 amazing years.

So what’s next?

• New registrations are no longer being processed
• We will attempt to archive the forum as best we can around the beginning of December and upload it to archive.org (and will update this message with a link when it’s done )
• New attachments will be disabled at that time.
• For those that want to continue hanging out together - we’ve spun up a UMSF discord server ( https://discord.gg/hp3g3TKVRW ) - still an empty work in progress, but maybe folks might congregate there. Use the Ideas & Feedback channel there to discuss.
• A thread "Greatest Hits" has been spun up for people to share their favorite creations or discussions from the last 20 years.
• Another thread "Find me at...." has been spun up for people to share where they can be found moving forwards.

In closing - thank you all for being a part of this adventure....we’ll see you around the solar system somewhere.

Doug Ellison
Founder, UnmannedSpaceflight.com

[dtolman]

Well that's a damn shame - this site is a unique treasure, and discord really can't replace it.
If it was a financial question, I wish they had started soliciting donations for keeping the site operating a long time ago (I've seen it done with other sites).

[djellison]

If it was a financial question

It's far more than that. UMSF has asked for, and raised, donations in the past. Several key donors ( and I was one ) have each put four-figure sums of money into keeping the place alive in the past. I'm sure something could be raised if the cap was handed around. However, there is no financial structure in place to collect, manage and spend that money outside of TPS which has said it's not in a position to support the forum anymore. I can't blame them...in terms of traffic and frankly, ROI, UMSF is long past making sense. Back in the peak of '05-'09, USMF was getting 2-4,000 posts a month. Now, it's 200-300.

The real problem now is the state of the forum backend. I've only recently taken a look at it ( I've been away from UMSF moderation for over a decade ) The Invision board is about 15 years out of date, the server is so full it doesn't have the space to take a backup of itself without crashing the forum. I tried a few months back and it broke the place. How much would it cost to fix that, convert the database to something newer, find new hosting, move to that, set it up and maintain it. That could cost thousand and thousands of dollars if it's even possible at all. There's nobody here with the time to manage that entire effort either. It would be irresponsible to ask for money without knowing how much is needed and there's nobody with the time to manage it and nothing in place to properly maintain the place moving forward.

It's been a good run - 20 years is far far longer than most communities like this ever last. There's nobody to blame - it's just outlasted its own ability to be maintained. To ask for money would be dishonest...because nobody can promise how much it will take to do the work to fix the place, and there's nobody to maintain/moderate it thereafter either.

It's far better to give people a heads up and have an orderly close out than to ask for money pretending there's a clear path forward to keeping the place alive.

I'm certainly not proposing discord replace it - I just offer it up as a place where people can hang out afterwards if they have nothing else.

[Phil Stooke]

It is a shame, very much so, but understandable. As the sign in the Shuttle Processing Facility said before the last STS flight: Don't cry because it's ending, be happy you were part of it (or words to that effect).

I'm not sure what new version of UMSF might be possible in future, I am not really up to date on things like that, being a bit fossilized. But I would sign on. Meanwhile I will be posting other space-related things on Mastodon:

https://mastodon.social/@PhilStooke

I have found that quite useful. I am doing a long series on Apollo at the moment but will add other things.

I see a few discussion threads opening up on Discord already and I will put some things in there too.

Phil

[john_s]

Sigh. I'll miss this place very much (though I, too, understand). It will be great if an archive is possible- there's so much history here. Thanks to all, especially Doug, for making it happen.

John

[mcaplinger]

We will attempt to archive the forum as best we can around the beginning of December and upload it to archive.org...

Let me know if there's anything I can help with in that regard. AFAIK archive.org can't/doesn't crawl into any forum topic so everything currently there is pretty useless (top-level topic links you can't navigate into.)

[Phil Stooke]

I hope people saved files they found interesting. I have been saving files forever which is why I now have about a gazillion gigabytes of stuff on assorted external devices.

Phil

[RoverDriver]

Doug and others, it has been an honor to be part of this adventure. I apologize for not being an active poster for several years. Health issued forced me to leave driving rovers and leaving Mars. That was a *very* painful decision and since then I cannot even look at images from Mars, either past or from current missions. I have very fond memories of our discussions, collaborations and the people I met, either in person or virtually. I will leave a note of my wereabouts at the Find Me At thread.

20 Years. Wow.

Thank you Doug for all the memories.

Paolo

[djellison]

Let me know if there's anything I can help with in that regard. AFAIK archive.org can't/doesn't crawl into any forum topic so everything currently there is pretty useless (top-level topic links you can't navigate into.)

At the very least, a dump of all the attachments and the fairly modest sized SQL DB that drives the place are easy 'gets' which I would zip up and throw on archive.org - you're right that their waybackmachine snapshots are marginal at best.

I'm trying a few web-crawling-download tools to see how well they do....if anyone has recommendations in that area, that would be great.

[vjkane]

I have so enjoyed this forum. Thanks to all of you for making it happen.

[deedan06]

I really liked this forum. I think I found it when I looked for info on space probes as when I was still a kid. This server was full of info. I checked up on it, and then I left again. But when Perseverance landed, I remembered this forum and began looking it up daily for updates. I mostly kept that up until now. I never joined, never really had anything of value to say, but mid 2023 I had a change of hearth. I joined. The place was already pretty broken when that happened. It accepted no gmail address, I had to use my high school one which I no longer have access to. And even then, no mod would see my request to join, so I had to DM Paul on Lemmy to get in.

That was over a year ago. Technically others have joined after, but none of them ever posted anything. So basically I'm the newest member, despite having joined over a year ago. That also kinda makes me the last member. There were many signs. Only one guy left moderating everything. The site looking its age. And all the broken stuff, with the lack of an https certification and all. Plus the lack of new members. I can't say I didn't see this coming.

Sigh This site did a lot for me. It informed me about space for many years, and without it I would have probably never be as interested in it as I am. When I had to pick a topic for my Pre-scientific-paper for my high school final exams, I picked Curiosity, inspired by this very forum. And while I could not use it as a source, it is after all just a forum, it gave me the base knowledge to build on. I got an A. I owe you all that. So I'd like to say thank you. Thank you all for this wonderful forum, with all the wonderful images and information about the wast world of robotic spaceflight, and let's make the most out of the discord server.

[Antdoghalo]

This is Wikimapia and Google Earth Community all over again for me! It is a shame especially with Europa Clipper and Hera about to launch in the next couple weeks. I joined back in 2009 when I went by "antdoghalo" on the internet. I have always been interested in space. I used to have a huge collection of space books as a kid but overtime they got torn and I really got into space back in 2002 when watching BBC The Planets and seeing news on Space.com. I joined here, followed Spirits misfortunes and watched as images came in from Dawn and New Horizons years later just months apart.

Thanks Dj for creating a discord! I hope y'all join it even if many of you are older "boomers" who may not be into that stuff. Its super easy to post into once you get the hang of it even when compared to forums. (Discord itself works a lot like a forum) Just avoid any random accounts offering "free nitro".

Thanks for all the great memories in space exploration!!!

"To the Moon, Mars, and Beyond"

[Explorer1]

I almost couldn't believe the email, when it came, but then I saw the post and it was true. I have been reading this place since 2004, and registered 6 years later after finally getting the courage to post. Apart from some (very gentle!) moderation reminders, it has been smooth sailing every since, on this journey through our local cosmos.

A shame that so many exciting events won't be covered here, but it was too much to hope it would last forever. Another casualty of the social media era which swamped the old forum system of the 2000s, though caused just as much by the general decline in activity as in the wealth of other places with which it competes. I have certainly stopped myself before posting many times, since I felt it couldn't possibly compete with the contributions of the experts. The emphasis here has always been on quality, not quantity of posts, and the ways in which drama was avoided has always struck me as another success of this place. Other places used upvote/downvote systems to do this, but UMSF has always done it manually to great success.

I don't know if I can replace it; I have never touched Discord up to now; still a few months to decide.

One final question; what will happen to the domain name now? I hope it isn't given over to a squatter like mer.rlproject! A fate worse than death....

[nprev]

Thank you very much for the kind words, Doug. When I first found UMSF while looking for thesis information & ideas back in (egad) 2005, I was dazzled by the sheer scope, and depth of discourse. After decades as a solitary space nerd it was literally a Finding My People experience. I would never have dared to dream that someday I would be an admin here!

And that was literally true. I have made IRL friends here--you among them, proud to say. I have learned and beheld with wonder SO much more than I ever had before in the dark days of desperately searching for images and information beyond just 'gee whiz' pop media articles about planetary exploration...and shared that indescribably great feeling with others who understood that too. There was nothing better than landing days on Mars on UMSF!

Of course, one of the best things the Forum did was transform the lives of some in a dramatically positive way. As a direct result of UMSF becoming a true pro-am community, JPL picked up some high-powered talent from our membership (including our founder! ) UMSF also transformed how the interested and engaged public interacted with the professional space community. The Juno mission approached the Forum to process JunoCam imagery, and the efforts of our imagewizards (shout out to Kevin Gill!) have become internationally iconic.

I could go on and on and on, but so could a great many other people...and that's what counts the most by far. UMSF was an exceedingly rare example of the Law of Unintended Consequences breaking good in all ways, and I will forever be proud of being a small part of it all. Thank you for creating it, Doug, and my deepest thanks to all of you for the knowledge, the dazzling imagery, and the pervasive sense of wonder over the years.

[Glevesque]

I really want to thank you all. The follow-up of several missions was fascinating and very informative.

Thanks!