Kopasite|

Recently I've been considering plans for sunsetting Kopasite. Such as what would need to be done to no longer need it. There's a number of reason of why I'd want to do this. Click to read more.

Why sunset Kopasite

- The current version of Kopasite was made in the era of PHP 5.x, which as of January this year has been end of lifed. Which means just finding a place to host it in the future is going to be difficult without major changes, not to mention unsecure.

- Elma Online and it's website has in more than one way usurped Kopasite. EOL is in most ways an easier experience for the player, as also can be seen in the recent activity on Kopasite.

- While I still have interest in elma and in creating and maintaining websites, I have little interest in working on PHP and I'm also a significant contributer to the EOL site which I'd prefer to spend my time on.

How to sunset Kopasite gracefully

There's a few things on Kopasite that would suck to lose if I just let it die. Primarily a significant amount of records from the pre EOL era, almost just as many replays, and the upload feature.

- Upload feature: This might be the only thing that's actually widely used still. Honestly it's not that great technically but has somehow stood the test of time. My plan would be to create an upload feature on the new EOL site. That should be a pretty minimal task. Furthermore it would be nice to convert the permanent uploads and let the urls redirect.

- Records: Kopasite currently contains 33.110 PRs, about 20.000 of which are from the pre EOL era. Just moving to the current EOL levelpacks, we would lose all these. Currently there's plans to make a legacy time import, so EOL site can have complete stats for things like internals and other level packs such as the ones on Kopasite. Exact implementation is unsure, but would be mainly for times from the pre EOL era and which can be confirmed in some way. Of course Kopasite times can easily be confirmed, having been uploaded here with replay before EOL.

- Replays: Kopasite also has a huge database of replays, as these has been required to upload times. It would be nice to make these available somehow, as many of the players may not be around anymore to upload them themselves. I'm a bit unsure here what to do. Those shared publically with the share feature here could be uploaded with no ethic issues, but there's a lot more that's not, which includes a bunch of awesome replays people may want to see. What do you think?

- Other things: Other than what's mentioned above it's minimal what's on the site. There's a few things that could be uploaded to the wiki or something like that just to ensure they live on.

As for the site itself, I'll of course let it live on for as long as it can, it's always fun to have around. Once it's been sunset uploading will be disabled. But I cannot guarantee it's going to continue to work forever. So if there's anything on it you depend on, it would be wise to take a backup somehow.

So there's a few things that needs to be done before I could do a graceful sunsetting, but they are very much things that are part of plans and likely to happen in the not too distant future. Hopefully Kopasite will live long enough to see those things happen. But if not, fret not, all data is safely secured in the database and will not go anywhere even if the site itself does.

Lastly thanks to everyone who's been along for the ride. It feels a bit sad it has to come to an end, this site has been around pretty much since I started playing elma. But it's also the only thing that makes sense, in order to improve the player experience moving forward. For anyone who may find this and be out of the loop of what's going on in the scene currently I'd like to share a few links.

Discord where a lot of the chatting and announcing of things happens these days.
elmaonline-site github new version of the eol site, where many of the things I mentioned is going to happen, please join in either as contributer or just to discuss how things should be done.Also elmaonline.net if you're wondering where and how to play elma nowadays.')