Did anyone see this message at the official EA forums? The forums are getting shut down and replaced with a different one over the summer. Instead of preserving threads from the past, most will disappear unless you nominate them for migration. So, all those years of technical advice, stories, screenshots from the TS3 community will be more or less gone. Any thoughts?

Yikes! That is a terrible loss to the community. Thank goodness there are other good resources for information, such as here, but UGH that is a shame to lose so much.

Yes, EA's loss will be MTS's and everyone else's gain. But man...what a bonehead move. What they should do is bring over everything except locked or outdated topics. But everything else was definitely worth keeping. Oh, well...

I think it is a bittersweet change- many very old threads are already in disrepair from expired image and file hosting, yet we are also lucky to be an era of the internet where we have the Wayback Machine for what is still legible. Anything that had decent traffic will be archived there, so is not at risk of being lost to time in the way many things related to this game and its older incarnations have been.

The reality is that companies don't hold onto their forums, even the sentimental ones, forever. The devotion of fansites, both community led and by passionate individuals, picking up where official support trails off is about par for the course at this point in TS3's lifetime. I think it would actually be nice to see new blogs and websites come around to archive and support the game in its place, especially after the loss of wikispaces and the corporate mess of the Fandom wikis. I play a lot of much older games, and there is something quite special about finding the information you need from what are essentially shrines to those games- made and maintained by a player themselves.

If time and health allows, I'll definitely attempt a project like that in the future for at least TS1. Silver linings, and all.

Wouldn’t it be possible to save with archive machine though?