[sgbeal]

> My message to all those authors is: don't use web-based forums.

While his message is certainly relevant for _most_ forum software, i feel compelled to point out one which enables anyone to clone the whole forum, in full, and sync it at will for local use (with two-way sync if the remote admin enables that (on a per-account basis)).

https://fossil-scm.org

Though fossil is an SCM/DVCS, one of its features is a built-in forum in active use by both the fossil project and sqlite (https://sqlite.org/forum).

With such a forum, anyone can clone it, host their own copy somewhere (it only requires a low-end HTTP server capable of hosting CGIs), and pull updates from the upstream copy as often as they like. If/when the upstream goes dark, none of the content is lost.

Edit: granted, fossil's forum is intended to be on the scale of one project per form. It is not, and will never be, a multi-project forum like HN, Reddit, or whatever the cool kids are using nowadays.