RSC Comments Enabled, Forums Renewed And Users Imported Because Archiving Matters

After being ‘no comments’ and ‘no forum’ for years I’ve recently decided that an RSC forum is really needed to help foster the older sim racing community and give a place where people can still talk about those older simulations. While there are places to discuss current simulations, older content has been disappearing off the internet at an alarming rate for many years; Blackhole Motorsports, NoGrip and RSC itself were lost, VirtualR is in what seems to be a state of limbo, rec.autos.simulators is relegated to a spam-ridden Google Group and the archivist in me really doesn’t want to see this kind of loss continue. That’s the reason why you see old simulations featured here the way they are, where you can even play many of the DOS-based racing simulations from your browser, find instructions on how to get many early Windows titles running on current versions of the Microsoft operating system, and why there’s a rec.autos.simulators archive here that’s far easier to browse than the Google group.

Why a forum while Discord exists?

The frustrating part of seeing people use Discord is that even though there is the capacity for searching and threads, nobody uses them. Worse than that, information no longer exists to the community the moment it disappears out of view. I don’t want us to keep losing this information. For a modern sim it’s not unusual to see the same question asked multiple times per day with the regulars churning out the same reply time after time. This is such a waste. For the older sims? Discord will barely ever carry a discussion.

Also, who knows whether Discord will be sold and ultimately destroyed and shut down? It happens.

What’s happened so far?

I bought the $160 self hosted license for Xenforo and set it up on my existing hosting (which I will upgrade as required).

For each simulation you’ll start to see a forum link as I get time to add them to the sub-menus (see below), but in the meantime you can visit the forum yourself to find something you want to talk about.

I’ve been through every news post and assigned a thread in the forum to them so that all posts in the news category of the Web site now have comments. I’ll be doing the same for articles and am deciding in what way to do it for vehicles, tracks, software, etc, as I’d like people to be able to reply and just give ‘their story’ about a particular simulation.

Users from a broken RSC backup dated during the period where it was owned by Ignite GT have been imported to the forum. The backup is heavily corrupted, so in many cases the user data didn’t carry over (and I’m not sure you’d want it to anyway). No passwords were imported and many of the username were not either.

What’s planned?

I’m hoping to be able to grow the forum based on user needs. If you want something, whether it’s a sub-forum for an existing area or some missing feature, ask in the forum or email me.

I am going to keep trying to rebuild the posts and get a working import of them that can be assigned to the correct users via the emails that were successfully re-imported.

I’m also open to importing other forums that are shutting down if your community is onboard with it. I don’t want to see sim racing lose any more information that it doesn’t have to, especially older forums that might have a nugget of historic information.

Things like a dark mode are planned, but feel free to suggest this and anything else in the forum.

How can I start using the forum or delete my data?

– You can visit the forum at community.racesimcentral.net.
– You can register a new account here.
– You can request a password by entering your email.
– You can change your username here.
– You can delete your account here (and it will not be re-imported when/if posts are).