Is K:M dead?

[SodiumtheGlitcher]

I have an account on Keen:Modding, but it looks like it's dead there. Am I to assume that that forum is dead? Or do people still use it?

[szemi]

To be honest, since I know the source modding (of Keen Dreams, but Keen 4-6 must wait), I don't need patches (unless I wanna make a Keen 1-3 mod, which has no source yet), so I don't use that at the moment, but I always look at it.

[Dave216]

I wasn't expecting my patch requests to get a reply. But, yeah. For the most part, it is inactive. Maybe a topic titled 'patch requests' could be made here, but then again, keen modding has better categorized and organized patches. I agree that source modding is the future of the keen modding scene; however, patching is more accessible to newcomers. Especially if you're looking to tweak a few small things in your project.

[SodiumtheGlitcher]

Maybe a topic titled 'patch requests' could be made here, but then again, keen modding has better categorized and organized patches.

A patch requests topic here sounds fine, so I might as well start one. Keen:Modding does have better organization, but it's much more active over here. So I'll start a topic in Misc (unless I should put it somewhere else).

[namida]

Just its career.

I doubt anyone here knows this meme, but oh well.

[SodiumtheGlitcher]

From the looks of it, KeenWiki is dying out too...

[szemi]

Bigger question: What about the admins here? Flaose, tulip, Ceilick? Where are they here?

And Levellass? She is a global moderator.

[SodiumtheGlitcher]

tulip hasn't been active since 2016, and Ceilick, Flaose, Levellass, and Nisaba were last active early this year (XhyRauh too, but he's only an admin on K:M). So it looks like Fleexy is doing all the admin work himself (no offense, Fleexy!). Apparently Keening_Product was active recently (November), but I haven't seen him do anything in my time being here (two months). All the other admins haven't been active for a few years (xtraverse, Yorpy, adurdin. Not sure about KeenRush though. Probably not recently).

[Quillax]

I've been meaning to write a response to this, but then promptly forgot about it for a while...

Keen: Modding was originally created to round up all the modding topics that were flooding PCKF. This is back when modding was very new (I believe K:M opened in 2003, so a year after Yorphius II came out), so I'm sure a lot of the old-timers weren't used to seeing so many modding topics, although such topics might've also been more prominent than today (I wasn't a member of PCKF at the time so I can't exactly tell). Mod releases were still permitted on PCKF, but aside from that, you were better off posting on Keen: Modding.

Over the years, Keen modding has become so interwoven with the Keen fan culture in such a prominent way that it doesn't make as much sense to have that segregated in a separate forum. I'm sure most of the people who joined PCKF in the last 10 years came here for the modding aspect. Also, I think people prefer not to make multiple accounts, especially if they need to go through an approval process, which hurts Keen: Modding's chance of becoming active ever again.

I remember back in 2014 some people were calling Keen: Modding a nearly dead forum, but even at that time it had much more activity than today and there were a few members who would post on Keen: Modding but not on PCKF. Nowadays, you mostly get the occasional patch request and once in a blue moon some new person asks a question. People have posted topics about their latest mods on there, but all they get are cricket responses, which would be considered unthinkable 10 years ago. Frankly, I'm a bit surprised Keen: Modding hasn't become a read-only archive by now. No one has posted anything there in 2025 yet!

With all that said, I think it's a bit of a shame that Keen: Modding has become such a ghost town. The forum was such a great place to chat with people who are super passionate about modding and quality game design. There are many excellent discussions there that are very informative and I consider many of them to be essential not just for Keen modders but also to game designers in general! The Theory subforum is such a goldmine for learning! We get some excellent game design and modding discussions on PCKF, but they get buried by so many unrelated topics and thus they're harder to find. The solution I've had in mind for a long time is to create a topic on Keen: Modding that lists all the topics on PCKF that would be right at home on Keen: Modding, that way they would be more easily discoverable. Aside from that, though, it's probably smarter to post on PCKF than on Keen: Modding, for better or worse. Sometimes things are just the way they are...

P.S. About your KeenWiki comment, Sodium, I've had an account there for nearly 10 years, and it's always went through highs and lows in activity. People get the urge to do a lot of editing, and then they take a break, only to run again later on. I guess I'm currently in that break period, but I still check the wiki every day, and there are some things I'd like to do. With that said, though, I kind of miss having Nisaba and Grandy02 around. They've done a lot of great work in the wiki, but maybe they're just having that break period at the moment.

[Benvolio]

I agree that K:M is no longer active. I think archiving it would be a good idea.

I think having a new, simplified Keen Modding forum nestled within PCKF would be a good thing. Maybe simply divided into "General", "Vorticons", "Dreams" and "Galaxy/AAMB". And let relevant conversations trickle in at their own pace.

In an ideal world there would be a way to import archived discussions into the PCKF too but I guess that won't be possible. Many of the conversations were of huge value and of course recorded the huge amount of fun brought to us by countless old users who don't seem to get involved any more.

As for Keenwiki, I wouldn't be too pessimistic. It is, after all, a wiki, meaning that it does not have to fall to one or two users to continue its existence, much and all as those you mentioned contributed hugely. At this stage, the wiki was so well tended to that it should retain usefulness for a long time even without any further edits.

Our community is characterised by an unending stream of enthusiastic new participants and hopefully this continues. Chances are someone will get energetic about large scale wiki updates soon. Meanwhile the rest of us can do little bits when we feel up to it.

If hosting the Keenwiki ever becomes an issue (due to money or otherwise) then that should be something brought into open discourse rather than risking it vanishing without anyone doing anything about it.

[Ceilick]

Just echoing sentiment that archiving Keen Modding seems like a good idea, and having a single subforum in Unofficial Keen Games dedicated to developing mods/patches/technical aspects of modding seems a good solution. Given enough activity, it could be divided further by series. I think the unofficial forum can potentially cover topics that would appear in a "general modding" subforum.

I'd add that most keen discussion seems to take place on the discord now, including modding discussion.

Re my activity: I'm not here as much as I'd like, unfortunately life forces us to prioritize even the things we enjoy and only so much fits on our plates. I am around if a moderator is needed, my input is wanted on something, you want to ask me something, or you just want to say hi; please don't hesitate to contact me.

[DoomJedi]

I don't use the other forum myself (and for many years now), I only visit this one.

Once I had a user there, then I remember him not logging me in...maybe it was solved...donnow. But I think there is no need for 2 forums.

[Vortlike]

Does this mean we can post patch requests and things like that regularly on pckf? I am somewhat hesitant to ask about patches anyway because I'm not sure if I need anything. On the other hand some things might be known already but not be (clearly) documented yet. For example I learned that you can change the frequency with which the tankbot in keen 2 shoots. so now I'm curious does this exist for vorticon elites too?

[SodiumtheGlitcher]

Patch requests can go in the Patch Requests topic, which I created because of this topic.

[NY00123]

Thanks for the reminder, considered responding beforehand.

I think people have already added enough on their own, say about Discord usage. Discord might be commonly used for gaming-related discussions, as an alternative to online forums (and to varying extents, to other services, centralized or not). But it's actually just one example of a more general pattern: Using a few centralized services/websites with access to various features and much more people, mainly due to convenience. The latter approach obviously requires significantly less accounts / logins.

Even if people still visit the forums known as the PCKF, chances are they won't visit K:M without having enough of a reason. It's also another example of visiting more separate community websites being much more commonplace beforehand.

Non-modding-development activity between K:M and the PCKF seemed to differ even in 2009, which might be expected. For instance, consider my old AAMBA threads (preceding AAMBA15Y) created in 2009. Both forums had their posts in page 1 of each thread up until the October 2009 update to AAMBA. However, after posting about that 3rd and last 2009 revision, there was no new post in the K:M thread, while the PCKF one eventually had about 10.5 more pages of posts up to (and including) October 2018.

Speaking of the Keen and Modding Wikis on shikadi.net, I've thought of the notion of creating a separate thread covering them (if there isn't already a relevant one). Originally, my reasoning was bringing up the topic of Bio Menace related contents in the Wikis, something which had actually already been done by me within a K:M thread back in 2011; Albeit the latter had been more specific to Bio Menace patches, at least initially.

On a side-note, interestingly, the PCKF had its incarnations, including the Ezboard-based one and this or that earlier incarnation not yet using the PCKF name. On the other hand, it looks like Keen:Modding as currently hosted is still essentially the original forums, including posts older than the earliest ones found in the currently hosted PCKF.