17 lines
2.3 KiB
Markdown
17 lines
2.3 KiB
Markdown
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title = "Bringing New Life to the Squat the Planet Community"
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date = "2023-10-21"
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author = "eyes"
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description = "We're working with Matt from Squat the Planet to ensure this wonderful online community of travelling anarchists lives on"
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TOC = false
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Hi everyone!
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A few weeks ago of exploring around travel forums I stumbled across [Squat the Planet](https://squattheplanet.com) (abbreviated StP), an old anarchist travel forum created over 20 years ago. I was absolutely delighted to see that this was an old-school, web 1.0 style message board that still has a relatively active community. The content of the forum is right up our alley too; the site boasts categories of all sorts of anarchist/punk travelling methods and topics ranging from train hopping to vandwelling to squatting and so much more. Since Brooke and I are currently in the middle of getting ready to be vandwellers full-time, StP seemed like a complete gold mine of resources, information, and cool, knowledgeable people.
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To my dismay, I read the banner at the top of the site stating that the forum is to be shut down by the end of the year. Apparently the ownder and founder of the site, Matt Derick, was moving on from the site [for extremely valid reasons](https://squattheplanet.com/threads/squat-the-planet-will-be-shutting-down-at-the-end-of-2023.44627/), namely that he did not have the time nor energy to maintain the site any further.
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It was at this point that I decided to reach out to Matt to offer our services to maintain the infrastructure and management of the community. A few email exchanges and Signal calls later, we collaberate on a plan to move forward, and he agrees to let us take over the backend of the site! From there we proceeded to start the migration process onto our infrastructure.
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The website as it currently stands runs on a proprietary platform called [Xenforo](https://xenforo.com/solutions/). This is a php-based application that is, tbh, quite dated, and its development has stagnated significantly over recent years. Our first goal is to migrate the forum to a fully open-source platform. [Discourse](https://www.discourse.org/) seems to be the likely candidate for this, however [Flarum](https://flarum.org/) is another possible option. We plan on rolling out this change gradually and with close feedback with the StP community.
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