Pixelation's Future

[Amorphous]

Thanks to everyone who worked to keep Pixelation up and running for so long. A great space that will be missed by many, but pixels and the internet live on.

[Mathias]

Thanks, Dan. You're the best.

And also a thanks to Sven, Telemachus, and the other mods over the years. It meant a lot.

[JACKjcs]

I've been waiting for a long time for this site to come back to actively join this community and this happens, I've been following this platform for a few years and having it at the top of my list of places to go for help, work or something related to Pixel art and now it will be no more. Although I respect the decision taken, Twitter is one of the worst places to put a community like this.

It's unbelievable that this is my first post.

This is all very depressing for me, really, how unlucky and disgusting the reality we live in.

I guess it's true what they say about "it's now or never" I shouldn't have waited so long to join you guys.

[JinnDEvil]

[F]                                                   

[SeinRuhe]

My heart almost bursted out of joy when seeing Pixelation was online again, only to read this really devastating news, although it makes perfect sense. 

This forum will always have a special place on my heart, without it I would've never become a pixel artist. I will miss reading threads, interacting with others and trying my best to understand topics to be able to help others. Somehow the interactions I had here felt way more meaningful than interactions over social media.

Still, I think there's a function that Pixelation covers amazingly that other sites, forums, social media, instant messaging softwares, etc. don't do really well and it's the Portfolio section, I hope any of those step up now that Pixelation is retiring, otherwise finding Indie jobs will be a lot harder.

Anyway, Thanks for all of your efforts Dan! As well as Atnas, Kiana and all the mods over the years too!  You guys really made a place that felt as good as home.

[SeDiceBisonte]

Like JACKjcs, I also regret not joining sooner. I used to lurk around 2006-2008 and I really missed out by not building up the courage to join in.

I'm thankful that the wisdom here will at least be archived. There's so much to learn from these old threads and, even if it's only remembered by a small group of people, this will always be an important corner of the internet.

[Crow]

On top of all this, forums in general are dying.

Hey, I remember having a solution to that problem

Are there any plans to locally back up the various images from the crit threads? I've been keeping mine up, but image hosting sites inevitably crumble... Perhaps submitting this site to the Internet Wayback Machine might be the easiest approach?

The Internet Archive has luckily already archived a lot of stuff on the forums. Submitting it manually may actually be worth a shot, but I'm not sure if they accept "just a website" to crawl through and archive stuff from.

Back in the day™, I had created a (very simply) Python script to automatically retrieve images from the Internet Archive for Pixelation threads based on their thread ID. Here it is: https://gist.github.com/Ennea/92fa14fde3f466837467a5a99382cf52

Let me point out a few important details, though. It's a bit old, so it may not (perfectly) work anymore. It's also still Python 2, but updating it shouldn't be much of an issue. The domain that's used in the script is still wayofthepixel.net, so if you'd like to use this for newer threads, using pixelation.org instead might be a better idea. Finally, scraping the Internet Archive is technically against their ToS...

Edit: Well, looks like the Wayback Machine website is now a lot more reliant on JavaScript than it used to be, so that script needs a lot of adjustments to work again

Edit²: Oh yea, can I market our stuff here? Check out the cool stuff we've been doing on Pixonomicon:
https://pixonomicon.net/panorama/
https://pixonomicon.net/haunted-mansion/

[Eggy]

I've been here mostly for the Secret Santas that would occur every year, but other than that I sadly haven't paid much attention to this forum. Depressing to hear that it's not able to really stay up anymore, but an archive is still a nice idea since I'll be able to revisit the forums anytime I like.
Take care!

[fskn]

Thank you admins, mods and everybody that has been posting all this years. I have learned a lot visiting these forums, got to know (not personally, but still) many amazingly talented artists with a variety of different styles and ideas of how to tackle pixel art. I wouldn't know half of what I know today if it weren't for Pixelation and its users.

I do prefer forums as a medium to post art-related stuff in general, pixel art in particular. For me, not even Discord comes close in terms of usability no matter what they do there. Conversations just get lost.
Twitter is just bad. Sure more people will potentially see your stuff, but that's really not important to me, personally.

In regards to spammers, I have been helping some friends for I believe more than a decade now in checking for new registrations and that has kept them away. Of course it's a much smaller forum than Pixelation (or at least I think it is), but it has worked for us.
I also wonder if changing the forum engine from SMF to some other wouldn't also help solve this particular problem...

But anyways, I'll keep coming here while the forums are still up and new posts can be made, and I'll keep an eye on Discord because I have to use it in a daily basis.

Thanks again.

[pixelblink]

I rise from the deep dark abyss of the past to pay my respects to the greatest of all pixel art communities. You will be missed.