Remembering what happened to the official Poser forums at RDNA when RDNA disappeared, I hope the same thing isn't going to happen to the official Poser at Smith Micro.

I noticed that anomalaus asked the question on the main announcement thread within an hour of the announcement, but I can't face wading through 27 pages to see if there are any responses.

I assume that Renderosity have this all well in hand...

I waded through that thread, and I don't think there was any official answer. There's different forum software there than here, and converting it would be difficult if not impossible. Maybe they're mulling the options.

If you have any favorite threads over there, it might be a good idea to make sure the Wayback Machine has them.

There are a few Wayback Machine captures of the main Poser Forum page(s) in both infinite-scrolling () and paged (e.g. ) modes, but the linked threads don't appear to have been captured.

I've tried getting the Wayback Machine to manually capture individual threads (using the "Save this url in the Wayback Machine" link from the "Hrm. Wayback Machine doesn't have that page archived." page), and it appears to work. Except that, of course, it only sees what a non-signed-in viewer would see - i.e. no pictures. So that's a problem.

My only success has been manually downloading complete threads to my system. A couple of conditions:

• You have to be signed in to the SM forum of course.
• You must have "Delay Image Loading" UNticked
• The viewing account must be set up to view threads in paginated mode, i.e. "Paginate topics and posts instead of using infinite scroll" ticked.

Where the other topics in the forum (Motion Artist, etc.) are still open for comments, it's possible it might stay up for a while. But that's just a guess.

SM didn't actually own the "Official Poser Forum" at RDNA and DAZ had no real incentive to keep that forum up and running. In fact, in my opinion only, the opposite was apparent. SM did own the Poser forum at the Smith Micro Forums, so we can assume that Renderosity also has access to that information as well. And it is still up and running, so even though it's read-only, the information is still there. Also, it's not costing SM anything to leave it there for the moment.

I think this will be one of the many things the Rendo people will shed some light on when they open up about their plans.

RedPhantom posted at 1:51PM Mon, 08 July 2019 - #4356428

Where the other topics in the forum (Motion Artist, etc.) are still open for comments, it's possible it might stay up for a while. But that's just a guess.

I believe they're still open because SM didn't sell those software apps, so who knows how long they'll keep the Poser forum open. Hopefully for a long time, but the better decision, in my opinion, would be to move the Poser forum somewhere here on the Bondware servers, and let Renderosity take care of it from now on.

For Rendo it would be 'low fruit' in the process of building confidence.

If that were the case, it would be a huge error on Renderosity's part.

I had to double-check "low fruit" because I can think of both good and bad interpretations. I assume it's being used in the "a commonly used metaphor for doing the simplest or easiest work first" sense.

But I sincerely doubt whether it would be 'easy' for Renderosity, although I'd be delighted to be proved wrong.

Yes, I think it might be more difficult than it seems. They bought Poser, not the forum software SM uses.

And since Bondware sells forum software, using someone else's is probably not something they want to do.

I should have said 'low hanging fruit' indeed. So much for trying to be colloquial in a foreign language. LOL! Anyway, it would create a lot of goodwill even if they provided just a read only version. These forum systems have a lot in common and being able to import existing databases is a sales argument.

When the SM forums first started I wanted to do a TOS for the site and was told that corporate would do so. They never really did much on the front. There is a general privacy policy associated with your account, but it doesn't include any areas that state they can re-post what others have posted elsewhere.

Since they didn't do much with that, every post a user made that didn't work for SM, wasn't on the clock, etc... Is the copyrighted intellectual property of the poster.

They are not going to transfer it anywhere, it will simply disappear at some point.

Yeah, I don't think the SM Poser forum will still be around in the long run. We may want to repost anything of importance here or start a wiki with any important information from there to preserve it.

If anyone really wants their own personal copy of the entire forum, there is software out there that lets you back up websites on your computer like SiteSucker.

Hoping for a comment from somebody on the Renderosity staff...

Technically, it would require a bit of work to transfer over, unless Rendo bought the contentparadise.com domain along with the codebase for Poser and etc. (which, to be honest, they kind of should have, since it would make nearly everything easier to transition and slowly migrate. But anyrate...)

Typically, there's an agreement somewhere to keep old stuff alive for one or two years, with a widely announced transition date (after which the old stuff all dies off.)

No idea at all what Rendo has going in that direction, though. Their priority was most likely centered on code escrow, merch migration from CP to Rendo's internal store, making sure developer resources (and tribal knowledge thereof!) were/are kept as intact as possible... you know, critical stuff. Pretty sure that CP forum posts, no matter how useful they might have been (or might still be) are, on the priority scale, kinda low.

But then, that's kind of up to them, to see if they'll bother translating from whatever software CP used over to Bondware, then stashing it all somewhere. It's not technically hard to do, but it would be tedious as all heck.