Something New from the Typophile Forum?

[Fournier]

¶ The Typophile forum is still on stand by. It reads: "Typophile is migrating to a new system. We'll be back soon."

¶ It's been a long time now. Seems like ages.

¶ Any news? Any date of re-opening?

 

••• Thanks.

[Ralf Herrmann]

According to the feeds they are in private beta:

 

[Fournier]

¶ Have you applied to the job of Typophile·colonist?

[Ralf Herrmann]

No. After my mentions of Typography.Guru got deleted on Typophile.com, I'm not sure I am very welcome there. 

Maybe @Riccardo Sartori joined?

[Riccardo Sartori]

Maybe @Riccardo Sartori joined?

I didn’t applied either. Part because I lost hope some time ago in the ability of Typophile’s owners to keep things together, and part because lately I had little time to dabble in typography (hence my sparse presence here too).

It’s a pity, though, for some of the content, and some of the people.

[Ralf Herrmann]

An archive of Typophile posts: http://typophile-archive.simon-cozens.org

Unfortunately not built from the original data, but from the web scraping system of the Wayback Machine. So there might be all sorts of glitches and holes in it. But better than nothing of course. 

[Ralf Herrmann]

More information here: https://github.com/typophile/typophile.github.io

[Fournier]

The Typophile Forum re-opened. They now show your full name as opposed to the username of the past.

The general graphic design of the forum is very bare.

http://www.typophile.com/forum/1

[Riccardo Sartori]

5 hours ago, Fournier said:

The general graphic design of the forum is very bare.

So is its functionality. Also, a good chunk of the old content hasn’t (yet?) been ported.

[Fournier]

Oddly enough, it was closed to update it. Where is the update?

The old forum was okay.

[Ralf Herrmann]

13 minutes ago, Fournier said:

Oddly enough, it was closed to update it. Where is the update?.

The owner said in a post somewhere that they attempted to move to other forum systems, but then returned to Drupal, which I guess is now up to date with a new layout and some other modules. So it basically IS the old forum. 

[Riccardo Sartori]

32 minutes ago, Fournier said:

The old forum was okay.

It was far from okay, both from a technical and from a management point of view.

I don’t see much improvement on either side, but I’m glad it still exist.

[Vince42]

I tried to register with typophile a while ago and did not even get a registration / confirmation. 

[Ralf Herrmann]

Again something new from Typophile. It has been hacked in is now used for crypto mining. 

 

[Riccardo Sartori]

🤦‍♂️

[George Thomas]

Jared Benson, who runs Typophile, notified users about an hour ago that the offending code has been identified and removed. Typophile has returned to normal.

 

 

[Riccardo Sartori]

7 minutes ago, George Thomas said:

Typophile has returned to normal.

Unfortunately it doesn’t mean much…

[Vince42]

I do not have much experience with Typophile. Is it a good or a bad thing when it is back up and resuming normal operation? Is it worth registering? Should it be avoided?

[Kevin Thompson]

George, you must be special, because I’m a registered user at Typophile and received no such notification.

Vince42, I used to enjoy the old Typophile site very much, but in its latest incarnation its font identification forum has been overrun by a poster who goes by LiLianJie. While said poster occasionally IDs a sample correctly, he or she mostly repeats others’ IDs days later, all the while posting links for en.likefont.com / en.fontke.com (sites that offer up dubious download links for licensed typefaces). Complaints by myself and other Typophile users asking that LiLianJie be banned from the board have gone unanswered.

In general, no one appears to be moderating the site (Ralf is a rare breed).

The other forums on the site don’t get anywhere near the traffic they used to; it was offline so long during the retooling that people found other outlets. I mostly use it as a resource for older posts (pre-retooling).

[George Thomas]

@Kevin Thompson -- Special? Why yes, and thanks for noticing. Just kidding; wish I was.  🙂

That being said, I was too inclusive when I wrote "users" when in fact all Jared did was reply in the TypeDrawers thread about the issue. That's pretty typical of him, I think, because I'm not sure he cares much about Typophile anymore. Try getting a moderator's attention when there is a spam problem, for instance.

You're right about being off-line causing the problem. I had given up hope it would ever start up again and when it did, it was a big disappointment. The archives are really the only thing useful about the site. I rarely go there anymore.

[Ralf Herrmann]

So Typophile ist down again and my guess is, for good this time. The third-party archive started in 2016 was also abandoned as far as I can see. 

I think I will take matters in my own hands now and finally solve this. I currently have a crawler running in the background to retrieve the Typophile files the Waybackmachine has stored. It found over 13,000 images already and probably will continue to run a few more days. I also coded a custom crawl script as a proof of concept to see if it would be possible to open a Typophile page on the Waybackmachine and clearly identify, extract and process all necessary information (like user IDs, timestamps) for an import into our forum here. And it looks like that is indeed possible. 

I wonder what Typophile users think about this. Would you be happy to have the old discussions you took part in to be resurrected or would you rather have them die with the Typophile plattform? And if we bring them here, would you like your old posts to be associated with your existing Typography.Guru account?

And then there is the question of what to import. I doubt that letting a crawler ran automatically over the site will give good results. It will struggle with missing/unindexed content, import spam, outdated announcements and empty posts (where users deleted everything or attachments necessary to make sense of the post) and so on. It’s probably better to do a “curated import” where topics are manually inspected before the import. But that would require a lot of work. Maybe a Kickstarter campaign could be started to kick this off and pay for the necessary coding and content moderation?
Looking at the old page, the Type ID board for example has probably very little value. But what about the Critique forums for example?

[Kevin Thompson]

I haven’t been able to log in or access the Type ID forum of Typophile.com since the spring of last year.

I would like to be able to access my old posts and discussions in which I participated, though my focus was the Type ID forum (my first foray into broadening my knowledge and skills).

When you have a better idea of how much time and money it might take, let us know.

[Riccardo Sartori]

3 hours ago, Ralf Herrmann said:

Would you be happy to have the old discussions you took part in to be resurrected

Yes.

3 hours ago, Ralf Herrmann said:

would you like your old posts to be associated with your existing Typography.Guru account?

Yes.

3 hours ago, Ralf Herrmann said:

It’s probably better to do a “curated import” where topics are manually inspected before the import.

Yes.

3 hours ago, Ralf Herrmann said:

Maybe a Kickstarter campaign could be started to kick this off and pay for the necessary coding and content moderation?

It could be, but I wonder if there still is enough people interested (and willing to pay for it).

Also, there could be issues concerning the ownership of the content.

[Riccardo Sartori]

5 hours ago, Ralf Herrmann said:

the Type ID board for example has probably very little value.

Probably most of it, but there were interesting discussions about historical typefaces or subtle differences between digitisations, or list of alternatives (possibly dated, at this point). And sometimes it can be useful going back to already identified samples.

5 hours ago, Ralf Herrmann said:

what about the Critique forums for example?

Another one I liked to partecipate in. Plenty of interesting discussions, some perhaps of historical value even (I recall giving my very inexperienced opinion on one of Toshi Omagari’s first typefaces!).

[Ralf Herrmann]

Update: 

So I brought over around 25,000 Typophile posts from around 2000 users. The import script worked quite good: Example. You can go to the end of our Talk forum to see many of the imported topics. 
https://typography.guru/forums/forum/2-talk/page/60/
However, there was actually much less content indexed on the Wayback Machine than I originally thought. The forum pagination suggested lots of content, but since the Wayback Machine is built around snapshots, different pages would just return the same content over and over again and much of the content was completely unavailable. So without access to the original database, bringing most of the content over here isn’t really possible. In addition, while trying to go through each topic, I noticed how little permanent value there was in most of the old Typophile topics. So in the end I focused on actual discussions and questions which might come up again in the future and so I only selected specific topics for the import. Most of the topics are from the general discussion board on Typophile. Plus some from the Design board. Nothing from Build or Font ID at this time. I also brought over three special interest groups as clubs with almost all content intact. https://typography.guru/clubs/

All imported Typophile posts are regular forum posts now and so the imported content isn’t just an archive, but the discussions can actually be continued! 🙂

I will make a separate post about the option to assign your old Typophile content to your Typography.Guru account.