Important Announcement About This Website

[Keiji]

This is a sticky in "Higher Spatial Dimensions" because apparently Global Announcements are not publicly visible (to non-logged-in users).

Hi all,

I want to announce today that for a variety of reasons, I may decide to close down this website (and others) permanently at some point in the future.

I have not yet decided if and when to do this. However, my intention is to give as much notice as possible if I do, and I would expect to be able to give at least a few weeks' notice. I also don't want to leave you hanging, so I'll try and make up my mind soonish and give an update with something more specific, rather than posting this and then leaving it here for years.

This applies to all web content I host - the forum, wiki, the classic pages, as well as other web content not on this domain, unrelated to Higher Space.

I have been pondering this move for years now - anyone who has been around for a reasonable time probably realises I've not been very active here for over half a decade.

I would imagine most visitors to this website probably know about the Polytope Wiki. This has far more content than our wiki, so I would definitely recommend it to visitors, and if our wiki somehow has some content that would be useful to them they don't already have, do feel free to share the knowledge. I have added an "Attribution" section on my user page with relevant info if you wish to use my wiki contributions anywhere, and to other editors of our wiki (there aren't that many of you!) I do recommend considering if you want to provide a similar section on your user page.

The Polytope Wiki also has a Discord server. Many visitors here are already on there, but if you're not, there's a link to it on the main menu there. Now, to address a point some might raise, this here Higher Space forum is a phpbb forum, and while Discord is a great piece of technology for many uses, I don't believe it is anywhere near as good as phpbb for what phpbb is designed to do and for what we use it for here - but I'm not aware of any other phpbb (or similar) forums around that focus on higher spatial dimensions. If you know of one, feel free to let me know, and I'll post it up here if I like the look of it.

I'm not planning on starting any new web sites. If I do decide to make a new place to host my own work (which I imagine would really mean "random miscellaneous blog posts on various topics"), my intention is to run a Gemini server for it, not a web server. If you've not used Gemini before and you're interested, I recommend the Lagrange browser.

There's probably a lot more I could say, but time is escaping me. I'm sure there will be plenty of questions, so please post them here (or PM or email them to me if you wish to ask anonymously) and I'll do my best to answer in a follow up.

[mr_e_man]

Thanks for letting us know!



Maybe someone else could take over the site?

[username5243]

The Polytope Wiki is - as the name implies - far more focused on polytopes rather than the more general fields on the wiki here. In particular things like the toratopes, tapertopes, and bracketopes that this site used to focus on aren't discussed much there, and the relevant notation pages don't exist yet. I suppose we could copy that text from the wiki, along with related developments (I remember we had quite a few renders of higher toratopes on here, for instance), but this hasn't been a high priority for the PD/Polytope Wiki regulas.

It might be a good idea also for someone to archive at least some parts of this forum, especially things like the CRF section. Although I suspect between the Polytope Wiki (eventually) and Klitzing's incmats pages most of those discoveries have been documented, having them recoverable might not be a bad idea.

[Keiji]

Maybe someone else could take over the site?

I considered this briefly, but there are a lot of technical hurdles in the way.

If someone does want to make a serious offer for taking over either the forum, the wiki, or both, I'd be open to a conversation about whether migrating content is practical. It would require effort from both sides, mainly for the task of separating the public content on here from anything else.

What I certainly can't do, for instance, is just hand over a disk image, or a raw database dump and file archive, and say "here you go! - you deal with setting it up".

Any custom coded stuff on the wiki would be really difficult to hand over too. For example, the automatically generated "incidence matrix" and "usage as facets" sections, and the tool that invokes Polyview.

The Polytope Wiki is - as the name implies - far more focused on polytopes rather than the more general fields on the wiki here. In particular things like the toratopes, tapertopes, and bracketopes that this site used to focus on aren't discussed much there, and the relevant notation pages don't exist yet. I suppose we could copy that text from the wiki, along with related developments (I remember we had quite a few renders of higher toratopes on here, for instance), but this hasn't been a high priority for the PD/Polytope Wiki regulas.

Indeed. The toratope, tapertope and bracketope stuff is much more inspired by Alkaline's classic work on rotatopes, and can easily be considered a separate "field" to the CRF, polytope, and incidence matrix stuff, which is more the Polytope Wiki's focus.

[quickfur]

I'm sad to hear this. Is there any way of archiving the forum somehow, even if it's decided to discontinue it? Over the course of its existence it has garnered a lot of extremely useful information, and it would be a great pity to just let all of that vanish into the ether. The CRF crown jewel discovery threads, for instance, are unique to this forum AFAIK, and arguably have historical value. The toratopes threads too, as well as some of the interesting things that have come up in the 4D speculation discussions (though the latter is more debatable whether it has historical value).

Incidentally, I have recently moved to a different domain name for various reasons, and was just about to post something here to update links to my old website's addresses. The underlying server is still the same, though, it hasn't really changed. And given how little spare time I myself have, I'm unsure whether I'm up for hosting an entire phpBB forum (and yes, I truly prefer this over Discord). But hosting a read-only archive of past discussions is something I'm more likely to be able to offer. I would really hate to see this forum go, but if that's inevitable, then at the very least I'd hope it would at least still continue to exist as a publicly-available (and accessible) archive.

[Klitzing]

Sad to here about that.
I for one surely have "copied" over most of the stuff I found interesting, i.e. made according pages thereon within my https://bendwavy.org/klitzing/ webpage. However I never aimed to do that as a complete mirroring of content. In fact I always am refering the source content here within my own pages. (And these links then would run into nirwana as well.) But much more deplorable would be that all that content of HGS not already being hosted elsewhere as well, would be lost!
--- rk

[quickfur]

[...] But much more deplorable would be that all that content of HGS not already being hosted elsewhere as well, would be lost!
--- rk

Yeah, that would be a great pity. At the very least it should be made available as a read-only archive, if nothing else.

[ICN5D]

Oh no ..... just reading this now. Well, I was wondering about that. At some point, Keiji may want to let it go. Lol, this is why I should have had a website, or blog of my own all these years. I guess that's what my little subreddit hypershape sort of did.


I believe the Wayback Machine may have backups of most of the site!!

Here's the latest one, from 7-13-2022 : https://web.archive.org/web/20220713184847/http://hi.gher.space/forum/

Bookmark it, I guess. You might not be able to log on, but you can still access most of the posts. So, not to worry about losing all the information here. Only drawback is that it doesn't capture every page, especially the wiki. But, someone can manually use the wayback machine to capture all pages here, while the site is still up and running.

[bo198214]

I was a long time inactive (and knew the forum under the name alkaline tetraspace), but recently I stumbled over it again, and very nostalgic feelings came up.

I remembered quickfur - and was astonished he is still active on this forum! Hey quickfur old friend!

Such a pity to hear that it is about to be shut down.
I would be willing to take over the forum & Wiki (I have some experience with phpbb boards) and maintain it - and maybe find a way for it survive even longer than me.
However it depends a bit on how much effort a migration really is. So Keiji, let's talk about it.
It would just not be right to let so much accumulated knowledge just drop without urgent reason.

[quickfur]

I was a long time inactive (and knew the forum under the name alkaline tetraspace), but recently I stumbled over it again, and very nostalgic feelings came up.

I remembered quickfur - and was astonished he is still active on this forum! Hey quickfur old friend!

Whoa! It's been a long time since we've talked! What are you up to these days? I notice the tetration forum has also been quiet for years (or maybe I just haven't looked). I'm only marginally active these days... occupied with other things and haven't really pursued 4D stuff very much lately, except to response to interesting discussions here once in a while.

Such a pity to hear that it is about to be shut down.
I would be willing to take over the forum & Wiki (I have some experience with phpbb boards) and maintain it - and maybe find a way for it survive even longer than me.
However it depends a bit on how much effort a migration really is. So Keiji, let's talk about it.
It would just not be right to let so much accumulated knowledge just drop without urgent reason.

+1, I second this! A lot has happened on this forum, a good chunk of which deserves to be preserved for posterity. At the very least, it should be archived. But if bo198214 can keep it running, even the better!

[bo198214]

Whoa! It's been a long time since we've talked!

Yep!!!

What are you up to these days? I notice the tetration forum has also been quiet for years (or maybe I just haven't looked).

No, Tetration forum has still lots of interesting discussions and findings. However I am rather withdrawing, basically because of health issues.

+1, I second this! A lot has happened on this forum, a good chunk of which deserves to be preserved for posterity. At the very least, it should be archived. But if bo198214 can keep it running, even the better!

So lets see what Kei says about it - no reply yet after a week.

[quickfur]

[...]
So lets see what Kei says about it - no reply yet after a week.

You might want to consider PM or some other more direct ways of contacting him, I think he doesn't really check this forum all that often, if at all, these days.

[thigle]

Please Please Please save this forum foro future generations. i spent a great deal of time here 15 years ago when studying my masters at uni and been coming and rereading these gems here ever since. it would be a pity to lose this treasury of knowledge. whoever saves this gains infinite merits

[polychoronlover]

I've also been trying to save as many important pages in the wayback machine as I can, including "Uniform Polyteron Sections and Verfs", "Quickfur's Renders", "List of Uniform Honeycombs", and "Tetration with non-integers" (the last of these is especially important in the googology community because it was where Jonathan Bowers gave a description of how he wants his fast-growing function BEAF to be evaluated on pentational arrays, which differed from people's interpretations at the time). Unfortunately, some of the content on the forums is only accessible when logged in, so the wayback machine can't archive it.

I definitely hope someone else is able to take over the forums and wiki. On the other hand, the Polytope Discord really is where most of the discussion happens. I agree that a chatroom is worse for archiving mathematical discoveries than a forum, and the Discord sometimes has inside jokes and ... strange ... discussion on the off-topic channels, but if you don't join you really are missing out on the majority of polytope discussion. Sometimes it takes months before discoveries are added to Bowers's site, Klitzing's site, or the Polytope Wiki (https://polytope.miraheze.org/wiki/Main_Page). For example, in February 2022 a new infinite family of uniform polytera was discovered by Discord members, yet there was no public announcement about it until Bowers's website got updated just a few days ago. The discord also contains many up-to-date spreadsheets of uniform polytopes, scaliform polytopes, Euclidean and hyperbolic tilings, and skew polytopes, accessible through the pins in the channels. There's also a "Polytope Discord 2" made by people who didn't like the strange off-topic inside jokes/memes on the main Discord, although it isn't very active: https://discord.gg/rXCv5Jjw6s

[ICN5D]

I Sent Keiji a PM about taking over the site in mid september. Got a reply on the 12th of october that says it's not a financial issue, and more complicated than simply 'handing it over', which is understandable. I hope bo198214 gets a chance to work things out, since he seems far more inclined to admin a site like this.

PLEASE SAVE THIS SITE!!!!!

I'm glad I came back to this forum to interact with all of you guys (gender neutral). I learned so much about toratopes, equations, geometry, and even creating pretty visuals. I don't know what I'd be doing with myself right now, if I didn't have this stuff in my head. It is 100% beneficial to my life, and probably my future (not a far stretch at all). So, my opinion is a little biased here. This site encouraged me to make posts elsewhere on the internet, which jumpstarted an improvement to my internet etiquette as a whole. Because, it wasn't up to par when I first came on here. Anyways...... I guess we'll see what happens .....

[Keiji]

I also don't want to leave you hanging, so I'll try and make up my mind soonish and give an update with something more specific, rather than posting this and then leaving it here for years.

I knew I wouldn't fare well on a promise like this!

I'm still around, stuff's not going anywhere for now. Thanks for the offer of help, Bo. At the moment I'm thinking less about handing things over, and more about setting things up so that they could be handed over if the need arose.

It's still going to be quite some time til I'll be able to get around to that, but things should keep ticking along until then. Given that there does seem to be some amount of interest keeping it going, I think the ideal for the site would be for it to be run as a community effort, properly documented and not reliant on any one person.

[quickfur]

[...]
I'm still around, stuff's not going anywhere for now. Thanks for the offer of help, Bo. At the moment I'm thinking less about handing things over, and more about setting things up so that they could be handed over if the need arose.

Thanks, Keiji!!

[...] Given that there does seem to be some amount of interest keeping it going, I think the ideal for the site would be for it to be run as a community effort, properly documented and not reliant on any one person.

Definitely! An important site like this should have a bus factor greater than 1. Ideally, significantly more than 1.

[Klitzing]

[...] Thanks, Keiji!!

[...] Definitely! [...]

I'd support this gratitude of quickfur fully too. Thanks, Keiji!
--- rk