Thanks for the update fearless. Although you’ve been absent, your popping in now and then, usually to fix stuff, is greatly appreciated. And of course, @Troll keeps us out of the gutter and from backsliding into becoming a rowdy mob. Much thanks to you too Sir.
While we all feel at home with the current forum format, at one point there was chatter about migrating to Discord. Would this allow the Spike to operate less expensively? Just thinking out loud.
We are a forum, discord is a chat app. Sure some of our threads devolve into slowchat at times, but discord is something quite unlike what we have here.
I have to admit I seriously don’t like Discord…great for VOIP I guess, but it always strikes me as being a complete jumbled mess. I have a difficult time understanding why it is so popular.
Of course schurem. It would probably become an incohesive mess, no mater how well we organized channels. Something like the Christmas flight would be impossible to give due service.
As far as articles for the web site, it seems like those presented here go beyond the usual flight sim news and review format. For instance, a celestial navigation tutorial or an argument for using virtual controls in VR over conventional physical HOTAS. Is there a lack of article contribution or an understanding that information consumption has trended toward video? Or is the subject matter better presented and discussed via a forum among like-minded enthusiasts?
Really great questions there. I have my opinions on this (reading vs video - and writing especially) but the masses have spoken it seems. Loudly.
This place is one of positive interaction. The last bastion of thoughtful and attentive discourse? Hope not. Perhaps those are [just some of] the qualities that have allowed this lil hole in the wall to survive - not be overrun?
I’m just regurgitating out loud here but, where else would you go to find some of these lil gems? - celestial nav and such as you mention - and I have a plan to do a piece on lua scripting when I finish up, FWIW. But it will require those inclined to read.
Anyway, one of the BEST things I like is, for lack of a better phrase, is the absence of elitism displayed here (thus the thoughtful attribute).
Discord to me is a PITA to use and feels, like so many things, like one big “why?” to me.
Sincerely,
Your Closet Luddite
PS: And thanks @Troll - when I referred above to being ‘rudderless’ but _ not unsupervised_ I was thinking of you (among others). In the best of ways.
Yes please. As a fellow luddite I much prefer to read… I find it is much easier to pause and rewind than a video 
But I am ex-Army so lots of pictures would be handy 
God, I hope not as well. I only just found this forum.
Thank you all for those incredibly kind words and hugs 
The way I see it is that I am one of those everyday users anyway, and we’re pretty much self moderating here, so it’s not the hardest of chores on my list. Besides, I do my best to tear the site down by sheer incompetence, sometimes. @fridge swoops in to do the maintenance when @fearlessfrog needs to go to japan and other corners of the world. Frog built this place and now he’s patching the holes in the roof, remodels the kitchen and cleans the place up, so it will shelter us for years to come. If he gave up, there would not be a Mudspike.
It warms my heart to see so many regulars wanting to contribute to the site and its upkeep.
This forum is home for many. I’d be sad to see it go and it breaks my heart a little, everytime someone among us decides to leave. Thankfully, new friends still happen to find the door and steps in to join us.
So, the well being of the Mudspike forums is very much still a cooperative effort. I guess the best communities are…
@BeachAV8R hasn’t given up on us either. He will be back.
Thank you @Troll, for your efforts and your kindness. You all know I need some moderation at times and I am grateful to all of you who keep us on course.
It is great to hear that Beach will be back, I really miss him as well.
Thanks a lot to the engineers that keep Mudspike afloat! @fearlessfrog @Fridge I am but a simple user here and as a user it is easy to forget the effort that went into building the product and keeping it running. We only really notice the work needed when something goes wrong.
Thank you very much!
thx all, good job ! cheers 
I’ll join the others in expressing my infinite grattitude towards the work you guys are putting in to keep the site and forums running. Although I not the most active member I really value this unique community.
Long live Mudspike 
Thank You very much.To You and @fearlessfrog @BeachAV8R and all the others who keep the lights on around here.
I take this place for granted far to easy,I appreciate all my friends here who tolerate me, 
I really enjoy it here with the mature and interesting opinions and posts.
I would very much like to make a Paypal donation if possible?
*and very sorry I’m late here responding…Big Thanks to @schurem for pointing me to the news/thread.
Step 1 is complete, in that the forum images were resized, taking us down from ~120 GB of storage to about 49 GB or so. This will make moving them easier (see step 3).
Step 2 is sort of not really doing anything, but I will update the forum layout a bit on this side, just to be tidy. Do not panic if the forum header changes a bit.
Step 3 of moving the image storage to somewhere cheaper means I just temporarily want to do a quick test and try out the new provider. It might go horribly wrong. This will mean you won’t be able to upload images for a bit (maybe an hour?).
TL:DR - image uploads disabled temporarily.
Ok, all good now. Test didn’t work, which is a result in itself. Onwards.
EDIT: Ok, back online for real this time. Sorry about the downtime but there’s never a good time so this was the least worse.
No probs. However it did go down, literally, as I pressed “Reply” on my post about Casmo in the AH-64 thread so I spent the next hour outside looking for black helicopters 
Thank You for your hard work and persistence.Happy Holiday’s to You and Your Family
Gave me the big sad that the website will be going down 
I loved reading the articles when they were still coming regularly. Articles such as @Fridge’s experience in the tactical combat flying trilogy with @near_blind, @Chuck_Owl describing the airmobile assault event and the IL-2 desert wings as well as many of Chris’s and other contributor efforts were some of the most incredible reads I had about flight simulation. Something simply not found anywhere else. Sad to see it will go down to be part of flight simulation history.
Also a big mega thanks to everyone who helps keeping the forums healthy, alive and tidy!
One thing I should clarify, as I didn’t really show an example before, was the articles aren’t being lost to the void completely but being digitally preserved 
as part of the forum content. Here’ one I just did:
vs
I just did a quick copy/paste into the comments post we had already and it took about 3 minutes. We lose some fancy gallery things, which is a shame, but it’s better than nothing.
The trouble is there are about 150 articles to do that for, so it’ll take a bit of time or we need to ask for some elf volunteer help to do it before the articles site gets it in the neck 
. I think @Troll is going to take a look at organizing it, or if he isn’t then has probably just found out he’s now penciled in to organize it. 
I was also hopeful that after a bout of frenzied copy/pasting then people would be more inspired to write their own Articles, or we’d have a super easy way for people to do that. It was a bit of a barrier ‘preparing to publish 
’ something, so making that easier might lead to more people wanting to dip their toe.
Also, I was planning on doing a fancy new page for the Articles section, that would look like the old ‘blue boxes of content’, so in a way, the old site comes back to still haunt us forever… 
Your post about the Flaming Cliffs F-15C guide is still some of the best material I’ve seen on the subject. I still get messages regularly from people thinking I did it… when in fact it was you!