This forum (along with https://forum.safedev.org) is a huge and historical resource for the SAFENetwork project. At the moment I believe it is owned and run by the MaidSafe company.
It would seem like a sound investment to have a live mirror of the site owned and operated by another organisation. Potentially it could be achieved using IPFS on volunteer’s PCs (a la SAFENet) without the need for a formal organisation. Or if there is another org willing to do so then a classic web host + domain registry (eg safeforummirror.org). A third alternative is to migrate the existing site to a community operated platform but that is unlikely to happen as would require more active involvement of the MaidSafe team who are otherwise engaged.
MaidSafe would have to be willing to open access to the database to allow the mirror site to pull from it.
I think the setup is that it is community owned and operated, but paid for by Maidsafe who provide an administrator. Backups are taken and kept in encrypted form (because they include PMs) by one or more of the community admins.
There was a discussion on the Solid gitter chat and an objection to Discourse was difficulties archiving, so if this method is being considered, it may be worth checking into those, see: solid/chat - Gitter
We don’t have any control here, it is a community driven and managed thing. So we should be all good to work with the admins and mods on this. It makes sense to have backups. Same with all git repos etc.
The @admins can take a backup it seems. But if it is easy to separate the ‘world visible’-topics data from such a backup from the more private data (email addresses of accounts, PM’s etc) in a format that is better than the result of ‘scrape’-methods, I don’t know. Although I assume the PM messages in that backup will have a basic form of encryption anyway.
At least with GitHub there is probably a good chance many people are maintaining mirrors manually - or at least can do so at the click of a button if they want to. Having a SAFENet version of GitHub will I think be one of the first and best apps to run on the network.
But yes, it would be horrible to lose this forum so I just wanted to check out how vulnerable it is. Seems not as bad as I feared which is great.
If there is a way to replicate either live or at least daily, at least the public content, that would be a great thing.