The Future of TBGs

(This took me way, way too long to write, so I apologise for being very, very late)

I've contributed to the Discord conversation way back talking about the BBcode situation, and then later the future of the TBGs. While I might not get the conversation fully, I can tell what I was getting in there.

What the TBGs was

For those people that came here by some search engine (if so, congratulations for finding us), or need a refresher of the history of the TBGs, here's a quick history of the TBGs.

The TBGs was a spinoff of the [Scratch Forums](https://scratch.mit.edu/discuss) in late October 2009. It was integrated on the Scratch Forums, before it got split off on 1 March 2013, in the beginning of the Scratch 2 days. As the official replacement, some TBGers decided to open another forum here.

At first, the forum was really lively, probably as lively as the original Scratch TBGs. The post frequency peaked in early 2013, when the Scratch TBGs closed down, and then slowly reduced until late 2014. Activity rose up again in early 2015 and again in early 2020, where the COVID-19 pandemic is in its early stages.

In its life, the TBGers have created things like a [wiki](http://tbgs.wikia.com/), a really long [Pokémon roleplay](https://tbgforums.com/forums/viewtopic.php?id=3235), and some currency systems. TBGers have also created some spinoff forums like the [TBGs Sandbox](https://tbgsandbox.createaforum.com/index.php) and a [spare forum](https://tbgforums.boards.net/) on ProBoards.

What the TBG is now

With the TBGs turning 10, things have changed since then. Most original TBGers have become inactive, most moderators have become inactive, and we age overtime. Skyline — the administrator of the TBGs — had a family now and is famous for being very inactive in the late days of the TBGs, aside from recharging the tbgforums.com domain.

Not only the users who have aged, FluxBB — the forum software which the TBGs runs on — is also ageing. With the website dead, we have considered FluxBB "deprecated", and updating it to the latest version is unlikely since Skyline is functionally non-existent. Added the fact that somebody found a bug on the parsing of posts and eventually an XSS vulnerability, leading to the mods to turn off BBcode entirely (well, aside from the code tags, that's parsed separately), it is clear that the TBGs have some problems to fix.

Decreasing activity is also a problem for some as the pandemic reaches its end. People still make games for the forum, yes, but it's not as active as it was before. With the later Post ID topics being created, the TBGs slowly became just a place to chat, not a place to play.

With these problems in our vicinity, you can hopefully see that the future of the TBGs is dimming. I'm not saying that the TBGs doomsday is near (even though the domain will expire 5 months later), but that if these problems are not resolved, it may result in the community dying out.

So, how can we fix these? 

Regaining control

The easiest solution to this problem is to regain control of the TBGs and do the necessary fixes ourselves. To do that, we must ask Skyline to transfer ownership of the TBGs. This is the first problem with this approach; we had literally no contact with him anywhere. All attempts at trying to contact him failed.

Now, before you try to contact Skyline, I had to reiterate that he has a family now, and being a family member he may have better things to do than transferring ownership of this website to us. However, if he did, then we can do anything to the TBGs server. We can upgrade FluxBB to the newest version, or use another forum engine entirely (more on this is discussed later).

That being said, that doesn't mean there's no hope of contacting Skyline (at least yet). red herring has suggested to make a community email that represents all of us to tell Skyline what the solution in mind is and the way we will resolve it.

Migrating to the New TBGs

Failing that, we still have another option to regain control. Since the time when BBcode is disabled, we have considered to scrape this site and migrate to a new forum hosted elsewhere. We are still putting thought on this plan, as we still need to figure out how and who will host this "new TBGs", and what domain should it be placed on. We have considered Simple Machine Forums as our forum software of choice, and I've suggested making it resemble how FluxBB looks.

Now, before you pack up your luggage, I have to warn you that this is just a plan. It may or may not happen (although signs point to yes), but if it ever happens, we at least have the plan to do it.

On resolving the dying community

With the forum situation sorted out, it would be pointless if the community is slowly dying. Several had suggested advertising the TBGs to gain some more activity. But I don't like this method for two reasons. First, I hate advertisements in general, and I would not like to see some TBGers lifelessly promoting this site just to make it more active. Second, I don't see a point why people would join the TBGs. I mean, what would you get on the TBGs that other places can't provide? No. It doesn't work like that.

How I see it, this is merely just a spinoff of the Scratch Forums. This website exists merely as a novelty for the Scratchers who found this site from the wiki or from the forums. But as time goes on, using Scratchers as the only source of activity has been proven to become less and less effective. Especially since recently the Scratch Team tries to silence out any mentions of this website. And I see why they did that. You might understand them too. Not only did we have our own Discord server (which is already bad), but even with the relation with Scratch (or lack thereof), this site is still considered an external site, and promoting them on Scratch is… let's just say a risky move. From this, people have suggested disassociating ourselves from Scratch entirely (which IMO would create more problems than it solves). 

So, how could we resolve this? Honestly, I don't see any. This is a niche website, with a niche community, which fulfils the need of said community. Asking people to join this community would make you look silly (and again, I hate those people). And while you could ask your friends or relatives to join, this website will not be as active as it was once before. Even if I ask Jefallo at wasteof to redirect everyone using them to this site, I doubt if it will ever have an effect on the activity of this site.

In order to make a site more active, there must be something that drives people back. Unfortunately, that something is… just a chat topic.

What to do now?

Now, all of the things written above are for the future. No matter if or when these will be done, at the moment we still have to resolve these problems somehow. For this, I think it's best to start simple and go back to the reason why we started this conversation in the first place: re-enabling BBcode.

I've suggested two things: using a minimal set of BBcode or adding a regex to the bad word filter. For the latter, we've been told that FluxBB may not have the ability to add regexes to the filter, so that's not a viable option. Even then, it's still one half of the problem, which is not even the XSS vulnerability that led to the disabling of BBcode. While FluxBB also can't disable a specific tag, it can at least disable image tags, which is what the XSS vulnerability uses.

There's still some concerns on some other bugs and vulnerabilities we haven't discovered yet. But I'd say that these changes are worth it. If we want the TBGs to be somewhat usable, then this is our best solution for now.

Conclusion

(man, I spent too much writing the conclusion)

Currently, the TBGs had some major problems pending to be fixed. While help is on the way, when they will arrive is anybody's question. But the TBGs are not ending. Sure, the TBGs now are not (and will not be) as active and as lively as the TBGs back then. But I believe that if anything goes well, our future would be at least better than we had right now.