About the future of roughfish.com

Well it's been a good 15 years since we converted this website from Joomla to Drupal 7, and it's run fairly well for that time period. Unfortunately, time has finally caught up with it and moving forward with the website in this format is untenable. There's no upgrade path for most of the content to Drupal 8, and Drupal 7 is both insecure and incredibly draining on server resources (especially with AI's ingesting it hundreds of times a day). It's become both too expensive and too time-consuming for me to continue maintaining this old horse, so it's time to move forward.

One of the problems with the site is it's trying to do too much all in one package - social media forum, private messaging, lifelists of various kinds, all the static content, and the seasonal contests as well.

Here's the plan. I don't want the domain to get bought up by some hostile anti-roughfish org, so I'm planning to convert this website to some lightweight static format. Here, I'll simply host simple modern static pages with all the historical information, articles, species accounts, roundup reports, and a summary of old contest results. I will provide download-only links to old content for at least a year while the site is converted.

Once that's done, I will start work on a seperate contest website and an improved lifelist website if there's interest in that. Both of those will need to pay for themselves (the contest already pretty much does) so there will either be ads or a subscription system obviously.

This will take months if not years to build, so don't expect anything for contests or lifelists on this platform in the near future. There will be no species contest in 2025 hosted on this website. Roundup is obviously not affected and will be held on schedule!

Thanks for reading, and I'll be doing some polling in the near future to gauge what people want most out of future online roughfish endeavors.

Tight lines!

Corey