Quicktopic shutting down

[petapan]

https://www.quicktopic.com/qt-shutdown.shtml

Newer users to the site might not be aware of this, but prior to the implementation of the private topics feature on this site, the standard platform for hosting private chats in games was the quicktopic website. Sadly like so many old message boards the site seems to be going away as the internet relentlessly progresses forward.

This is tragic, not only to see a venerable old website going away, but also because a big chunk of this website's history is kept in the QTs for old games, and that is going to be lost forever when quicktopic shuts down. A quick search of the site says quicktopics started seeing use in 2007 and came into vogue in 2008 and would have remained in use until early 2014 with the introduction of the private topics feature.

Times change and people move on, this site is a distant memory for most of its old users, but one of the values of this site is that the old messages remain and should you choose you can go back and see how people used to play this game over a decade ago. Letting a part of those games be lost to digital rot would be tragic. Without the QTs for old games you're only getting a partial picture, missing all the behind the scenes chatter that influenced those games. For the old users that do remain, those QTs can contain important memories.


We only have about two and a half weeks before the site shuts down for good on December 11. For the sake of preserving site history, would it be possible to get some sort of coordinated effort going to hunt down and archive as many QTs as possible from old games?

[Nero Cain]

I agree. this is something maybe the archiving team should do.

[fferyllt]

I can help.

Peta, how do you envision the result? What format? Where would they be stored? How would they be accessed?

[Cheery Dog]

Someone save the constant vigilance quicktopic.

[fferyllt]

Regardless of the specifics on how to grab the QT data or where/how to store it, step 1 is compiling a list of game-related QTs.

I'll do some work on that today.

If you have QT links and want to PM them to me, I'll add them to my list.

^^ Looks like this won't be necessary.

Bork and Cabd are discussing ways and means.

[Cook]

i propose we have a site theme that commemorates quicktopic in all its glory, maybe a switch in the PT feature.

[Cabd]

We've managed to track down all of the quick topics mentioned in public-facing areas of the site. I'm exporting the contents of each now.

[Cheery Dog]

Do we get all the spam that had accumulated in them over the years as well?

[Cabd]

Yes, although it's simple enough to filter that stuff out since they're going to be in table format.

[Cabd]

Sample data from the first 5 QTs in the list:





The question at this point is what format to store it in. Right now, it's a big table that is shoved into Excel/PowerBI, but we could place it just about anywhere. Hosting is somewhere safe and accessible to all is important though.

[Isis]

Cabd probably needs to be nerfed for next patch to be remotely balanced

[Cabd]

If anyone has a PT that was NOT linked anywhere on site other than in private message, please let us know and we will manually preserve it if you provide the link.

Right now the data set we are preserving is any quick topic that was posted about in a publicly indexed portion of the site ONLY.

You can post it here, or PM myself and Bork.

[petapan]

We've managed to track down all of the quick topics mentioned in public-facing areas of the site. I'm exporting the contents of each now.

nice

[Cabd]

Done..... Over 360k posts exported...



Now just gotta get them into a happy readable format.

User Egosearch is also working:

[Gamma Emerald]

impressive

[Cabd]

The raw data for all publicly posted Quick topic links is now safely backed up in several places.

I've got it in CSV format, as well as in a PowerBI data set, and a copy of it in OneDrive, as well as my personal machine's hard drive and workplace hard drive.

[Cabd]

I intend to do some auto-tagging to allow filtering of potential triggers.... Please PM or reply here if there are specific words/phrases that you'd like added to the list.

Spoiler: Example for Filtering the L Word

[Cabd]

Getting some AMAZING statistical data out of this too by the by.

[skitter30]

wow this is really great, thanks @cabd and @bork for your work on this :)

[Cabd]

Still needs a little bit of work on catching some additional words/phrases but here's just my first stab at trigger-filtering:





And here's the basic filtering option, showing opt-out content filters:

[fferyllt]

Thank you @petapan for noticing Quicktopic is folding and starting this thread. MS came really close to losing all this historical data.

[Ythan]

Y'all are amazing.

[T3]

rip
another mafia site i'm on uses quicktopic so they switched to discord

[lilith2013]

So much appreciation for all of you thanks cabd and bork!

[Cheery Dog]

I don't remember where I got the link for the tiger attack vigil, whether it was somewhere briefly here, or the fallout shelter, or just Skype, but I believe it is useful to still have as a record, even if it's fallen out of use.
https://www.quicktopic.com/47/H/K4NKMxYdYhXeg

I have no idea what other topics I have that may or may not be posted publicly. I think I can see a few others that probably were never posted somewhere publicly.