[256_]

I feel like there should a law about this, but I'm not sure how it would work. Maybe companies should have to at least give a warning before they do it, so Archive Team (or the likes of them) can go into panic mode and archive everything before it gets deleted.

[samtho]

I don’t think the reaction to everything we dislike should be “let’s make it illegal” because you’re going to end up with unintended harms. If companies are forced to retain public information against their will, many will simply opt not to have a public forum.

If anything, governments should be proactively funding organizations that archive content and governments can archive content of significant cultural or historical value like the library of congress does for physical media.

[precommunicator]

Great! If they don't have a public forum there is no opportunity to do harm, I see no issue here. The community will still ask questions and answers somewhere e.g. in one of Stack Exchange sites which is less likely to be removed and/or forgotten

[HeatrayEnjoyer]

I do think there should be some kind of law, but it would also have to comply with gdpr Right to be Forgotten.

[bee_rider]

I don’t think there should be a law requiring companies to keep a forum up. But perhaps it would be nice if we could have a customer protection based requirement to have some sort of customer support, along with acknowledgement that a customer support forum that could go away at any moment doesn’t satisfy that requirement (so either include better customer service or take steps to preserve the community).

I mean we wouldn’t want companies to fall afoul of some law because they had to take their forums down due to some privacy ruining bug in the software. Or because the old forum server sitting in the basement died. Or because the third party software they used for the server went out of business.

[vineyardmike]

> I mean we wouldn’t want companies to fall afoul of some law because they had to take their forums down due to some privacy ruining bug in the software. Or because the old forum server sitting in the basement died. Or because the third party software they used for the server went out of business.

With the exception of maybe a transient bug, isn’t this exactly the point?

“We wouldn’t want a company to run afoul of [data preservation law] because they [neglected maintenance]” seems like the directly incorrect intent. We would want to compel the business to migrate or modernize any hosting to keep it active and viable. If their vendor goes out of business, they should’ve paid more or migrated the data.

If we’re discussing a local club then sure, they’re a victim to hardware failure or business changes, but this thread is full of billion-dollar-businesses. They can spend a few thousand dollars on a forum every few years. When I worked at $FAANG, my service had millions of users and cost like $10K/mo in hosting. Surely the Autodesk forum in read-only mode would cost a much less, and almost nothing if migrated to static HTML.

[knome]

It's a bad point. Forcing companies to maintain internet forums just because third parties may want the data in them isn't a reasonable thing to legislate.

[bee_rider]

They (or some other hypothetical company) might have some personally identifiable information (maybe in messages between users) or at least they might not know for sure that they don’t. We could at least imagine a company where the due diligence required to hang on to and continue serving up the info ethically isn’t free.

There are companies that have a forum, but it just seems to be a best-effort mostly community driven thing, or at least it isn’t tied to any paid product. It would be a shame, IMO, if they couldn’t offer that without signing up for some perpetual obligation. Even if it is small, somebody has to have an eye on it.

[hombre_fatal]

That's insane overreach.

The web archive already works from the mode that anything can disappear at any time. Anyone who would rush to archive it if it were going offline could have archived it any time over the last N years.

Websites getting shut down no matter the reason is just a part of life that we need to accept. Laws can't address the underlying churn of time. Forums should be easy come easy go, not open you up to litigation if you shut down your own site too quickly. Cmon.