Damn… based on the statement that came out recently, it doesn’t look like Yaktribe is long for the world.
The founder and maintainer of the site posted the following, which I’m just going to post in whole because who knows if the site might go down in any given moment:
Hello all, been a long time. I needed to provide a some imminent issues affecting the very near future of Yaktribe’s ability to stay up.
- Obviously I have not been able to attend to anything Yaktribe for a long time, especially any updates on the systems here. I’ll be plain and state that this won’t change unfortunately.
- I’m not able to continue funding the site. Yaktribe has been mostly funded by the community, but understandably unless things are kept updated and the site remains applicable to modern Necromunda and such, there’s no reason for anyone to help fund the place. For other reasons as well related to impending changes there, I’ll be shutting down the Patreon as well.
- Running a website requires keeping the backend systems updated, and at minimum code reviews and changes for exploits and such. I haven’t been in a webhosting and coding world for several years now. Yaktribe is far behind on updates to underlying forum code, PHP and many other components of the site.
- Laws are being updated over the years around the world, especially in EU and UK. I’m no longer able to continue providing the necessary changes and compliance for those laws, I simply don’t have the amount of time, money, nor the legal shielding to navigate those.
- Yesterday, a couple of major exploits were released that Yaktribe is susceptible to. This would require some significant updates to PHP, which in turn requires changes to a lot of the underlying code to be compatible with the required PHP versions, of which I’m definitely not capable anymore and would rely heavily on AI to try and navigate.
Due to the latest major exploit, I may have to take down Yaktribe imminently, to preserve the site as it is, and especially, preserve the private account information of the member accounts.
So I’m reaching out to see if anyone would actually want to take over YakTribe as a whole. It would need a lot of work and requires some significant knowledge in both coding and webhosting to maintain. Several AI tools like Claude can also provide a lot of insights into the code, updating it, and even completely re-writing it to other modern languages. AI can also help maintain the server side along with some initial guidance I can provide, at least limited to what I actually am able to remember.
I know there are other more modern tools around as well, so I’m not sure if this is desired by the community as a whole either. I’m just not up to date on everything and haven’t been for a long time sorry. I appreciate you all, especially the folks that have basically run this place for many years.
Please reach out to me at malo@yaktribe.games. Do not use the PM feature on the forums in case I suddenly take the site down.
Yaktribe was a passion project but one that the community needed more than the creator was able give, eventually. And his comments about donations reads correct to me. I paid for a subscription for two years, not because I thought I needed the board image posting limits to be raised but just because I wanted to support another developer who was providing a tool for the community. And because I could.
I stopped supporting Yaktribe when it became painfully clear that the creator wasn’t going to update it or the tools any time soon.
Look, we all get busy, I get that. Money can be an issue. I get that, too. But the one thing I don’t get is disappearing for years.
Had Malo open sourced his gang list software, it’s likely Munda Manager, et al, would have been forks or spin-offs. Malo had the original recipe and people bitched but used it for years after it stopped being current.
Which is not to criticize him too harshly. The original Yaktribe Gang manager was a substantial piece of work. Especially in the days before AI could write a fair amount of code for you. That it became the ganger manager software shows how complete and functional it was. And that deserves mad respect.
As he said in his statement, hopefully Malo can find someone to take over the site and give it a little love.
I will say, personally, that Yaktribe was there for me as I was getting into the game. I’d gone through the boards looking for people in Hamburg and found a long abandoned post from someone looking for other players here. I replied to it to bump it back up and then I was responded to by a guy who went and started the HH Necromunda Discord. Initially it was just him and me but, eventually, even after he left for personal reasons, people found their way to the server and we have a pretty good community going her in Hamburg now.
And that would have been unlikely to happen without Yaktribe as a central resource for people interested in the game to connect to one another.
RIP Yaktribe. You will be missed.
