I have a ton of experience with this. I've been running a "Dark Forces II: Jedi Knight" fan site since early 1998. We've been in it so long that probably over 90% of our outbound links are at best broken or at worst lead to malware or pornography (of course I clean it up when I find it -- by removing the links and adding a note). And yet, stuff that people have been directly contributing to our site since 1998 is still available, still open, and freely available without creating an account. The only thing that saves content like this is people who care. Reddit doesn't care, they're in it for the dollars. Facebook doesn't care, google doesn't care (look how many services have been removed over the years).
I miss the days of every site having their own community. I remember when most game companies would put a landing page for each new game that came out and that was about it. Hundreds or thousands of fan sites popped up and provided a community that far outlasted the direct revenue of most games. Then gaming companies decided to create their own "communities," but they're stale, without personality, and as soon as the game isn't making money anymore, the sites languish and are eventually deleted, along with all the helpful content that has been posted by users.
I'm completely torn because you can't count on idiots like me (and all the people who have helped with my site over the decades!!) to keep things going forever.
My take on this was to make all the content "open" -- it started with all our static assets being converted from 25 years of spaghetti HTML to clean markdown and a static site generator. Anyone can clone the repo, recreate the site (including all the static content) and upload it wherever they want. The next step was to open-source the dynamic back-end. The remaining two steps are somehow regularly distributing a database dump (with personal information stripped out, of course) and then finally figuring out how to make available regular dumps of the content that doesn't fit in git or the database (like the ~10G of maps, mods, and screenshots that users have submitted). These two are still being planned.
I wish every site with anything to say had a plan for what to do when the owner is done maintaining it. Figure out a way to make the important content open and up. Internet Archive is great but they miss so much stuff, especially zip files, image files, etc.
I don't think any of this works with a profit motive, however.
I miss the days of every site having their own community. I remember when most game companies would put a landing page for each new game that came out and that was about it. Hundreds or thousands of fan sites popped up and provided a community that far outlasted the direct revenue of most games. Then gaming companies decided to create their own "communities," but they're stale, without personality, and as soon as the game isn't making money anymore, the sites languish and are eventually deleted, along with all the helpful content that has been posted by users.
I'm completely torn because you can't count on idiots like me (and all the people who have helped with my site over the decades!!) to keep things going forever.
My take on this was to make all the content "open" -- it started with all our static assets being converted from 25 years of spaghetti HTML to clean markdown and a static site generator. Anyone can clone the repo, recreate the site (including all the static content) and upload it wherever they want. The next step was to open-source the dynamic back-end. The remaining two steps are somehow regularly distributing a database dump (with personal information stripped out, of course) and then finally figuring out how to make available regular dumps of the content that doesn't fit in git or the database (like the ~10G of maps, mods, and screenshots that users have submitted). These two are still being planned.
I wish every site with anything to say had a plan for what to do when the owner is done maintaining it. Figure out a way to make the important content open and up. Internet Archive is great but they miss so much stuff, especially zip files, image files, etc.
I don't think any of this works with a profit motive, however.