Facepunch Forums

» see forum.facepunch.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the last words ~

The Internet Archive has facepunch.com answering on the first day of 2004. The studio that carried the name was established that June, and the mod that made both famous arrived in December. For fifteen years after that, the forum attached to a one-man game studio in Birmingham was one of the busier English-language rooms on the internet, and by some distance the loudest place where people argued about building things inside other people's game engines.

The numbers it printed at the bottom of its own front page on 6 April 2019 were 433,765 registered users and 32,593,834 posts across 757,000 threads. Those are not social network numbers, but for a forum with a single owner and no marketing department they are enormous, and they were accumulated almost entirely by people who had come for Garry's Mod and stayed for the arguing.

It had the reputation that goes with that kind of concentration. People who were there describe a place with some of the nicest people they met online and a steady background of flaming and gatekeeping, held together by moderators whose own conduct was often the thing nobody was allowed to question. One regular's account of it runs from signing up at eleven in February 2005 to deleting the account at twenty-five in August 2018.

~ the record ~

~ the outage with no backups ~

On 13 October 2018 at 3:26 UTC the forum's database went through a reconfiguration triggered by a storage fault in Microsoft's EastUS region. A replica got stuck recovering, which turned out to be an Azure bug that Azure later fixed, and the forum sat dark until about six in the evening on the 14th while somebody else's engineers worked on somebody else's bug.

The interesting part came out during the repair: there were no backups. Fifteen years and thirty-two million posts had been running on a managed database with replication mistaken for a backup policy, and the only reason the archive survived that week is that the replica eventually came back. Garry wrote the whole thing up four days later, which is more transparency than most operators manage about their own near-miss.

~ the owner's answer ~

That post is also where the forum's death notice is, eight months early. He wrote that he was not sure small forums were still needed, with Reddit and Discord doing the job, and he asked in public why they were paying to run and maintain a forum that brought them nothing but issues. He floated rebuilding the frontend as a single-page app that took community pull requests, and said that whatever he decided would not happen until early the next year.

I was twenty when that forum opened and thirty-five when it closed, and I never once had an account on it. It was a room for people who made things inside Source engine games, and whatever I was building through those years, it was not that. What I recognize is the shape of the decision at the end, because it is the one every maintainer of an old thing eventually faces, and he did not sell it or hand it over, he closed it.

~ knockout ~

On 11 June 2019 the forums went offline briefly and the address redirected to knockout.chat, a replacement that former Facepunch moderators and regulars had already built. The redirect was pulled back off after an hour or two, and then on 12 June at about 19:05 UTC the forums went down for good. There had been a thread asking whether to keep them, and it had collected hundreds of agree ratings in favor, and the answer was no anyway.

Knockout is still running, with a wiki that documents the thing it replaced. The posts themselves were saved on the day: an Archive Team volunteer ran a qwarc retrieval on 12 June 2019 and got a virtually complete copy, on top of ArchiveBot crawls going back to early 2015. Fifteen years of a community survived because one person outside the company ran a crawler on the right afternoon.

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