Hi everyone,
I’m starting this thread to announce our plan to close the forum at the end of the year. Although this is sad news for Win-Raid as a community, the truth is that the current administration team is not able to continue supporting and maintaining it.
This is mainly due to changing life and/or work responsibilities, which means that we don’t have the time or energy to deal with the forum like in the years past. Besides that, it appears that the amazing community Dieter started in 2013 is not the same today. The goal of this forum was always to target more advanced users, with a passion for technology, who want to understand, optimize & improve their systems, as explained at the Welcome page. That means doing research into new things and writing guides for people to follow and learn. Both of these things require a lot of time and knowledgeable people who are able and willing to devote that time and energy. Unfortunately, most of these people have now moved on to other great things, and it seems that most active and/or new threads nowadays are usually centered around “requests”.
Moreover, as a general internet trend, it appears that the style of the “classic” forum is dying. More and more communities transition to social media style interactions or threads through those mediums. On top of that, our particular proprietary forum platform is controlled by a web host which is neither pushing updates regularly nor fixing long-standing issues or moderation deficiencies. In general, we have no real control over it, and we neither collect any revenue from the (annoying) ads that you see across the board nor are we able to control their content, placement and frequency.
All of these do not align with the spirit of the forum, as originally set, and is thus our decision to close the forum instead of letting it become something it was never supposed to be: content-poor, ad-filled and unmaintained.
Thank you very much for having joined and supported this forum for the last 8 wonderful years! If you have any comments, thoughts or suggestions, please feel free to share them publicly in this thread for everyone to see.
Plato (a.k.a. plutomaniac)
Update 14/04/2022 :
I’m happy to announce that we’re very close to migrating to a new home for Win-Raid! Huge thanks to @wendell and his team over at Level1Techs for making all this possible! Please take a look at the new announcement (Win-Raid – New Home ! Upgrading forum software and evolving ) and share your thoughts if you like!
Update 30/01/2022 :
We are still working on a transition/migration of the Win-Raid forum to a new home. As explained back in November, this process will take some time, but I’d like everyone to know that the forum will not go down in between and its content/members will be preserved as much as possible. We’ll keep you updated for any important next steps. So feel free to keep using the forum normally in between, and don’t worry, it should have a new home & administration soon and thus not only preserve, but also expand, all the amazing knowledge/work.
Update 21/11/2021 :
There is a plan in discussion to transition this forum elsewhere. I’ll keep this thread updated when more concrete news are ready. While there is still hope for such a great solution, the forum will not go down, even if it takes longer than the end of the year to complete. Hopefully that early statement provides some reassurance to everyone while the details are ironed out in the coming weeks.
sad news indeed but thanks for the help / support /comminity we had all that time.
is any chance to save at least the forum to its current form somewhere else ? at least dont loose all this huge info this site has.
Hello Plutomaniac and all the Win-Raid team,
this is sad news, but the reasons are relevant.
I hope you will find solutions, if not, I wish you a good continuation. And I would like to thank the whole team for bringing this superb site to life.
Div
I agree that this is sad news although I fully understand the reasons.
I am wondering whether it would be possible to join this community with any other similar communities (so that the admin work etc can be shared)?
This community has been a valuable resource for me for a very long time and I was sad to hear it is coming to an end. The reasons make sense and the problems that are becoming more trouble than they are worth resonate with me. Everyone that has been a contributor here is an outstanding individual whose contributions have been a blessing. I don’t know what I am going to do when Win-Raid community is gone. Maybe this forum shutting down is added confirmation that the good days are gone and it is time to move on to other things… become an enthusiast for something other than computer technology. As wonderful and amazing as it has been for a long, long time, the technology landscape has become a real dumpster fire over the past couple of years.
To @plutomaniac , @Fernando and all of the others that made Win-Raid community so great (it would be impossible to compile a complete list)…
The Lord bless you and keep you; the Lord make his face to shine upon you and be gracious to you; the Lord lift up his countenance upon you and give you peace.
This is sad news, indeed, but I understand your arguments. And I concur- the forum has changed it’s character a lot the last two years. And I understand that it’s not very tempting to continue this way.
But there’s a lot of very specific knowledge:
- Intel ME: This forum is a unique and massive collection of knowledge and ressources. It really would be a pity/ shame to just let this disappear.
Then:
- The collections of Oroms and Efi- drivers for storage and graphics and the knowledge of updating settings for the latter
- The collections of Intel µcodes
- UBU (does it have a future with more complex and more protected bios regions?)
- The Insertion of the NVMe driver in EFI bioses.
All this might get less and less relevant for the mainstream, but on the other hand there are many people still happy with working on these old (and even a lot older) machines. So this is part of PC history and I assume even in 20 years there will be people reviving old stuff, that would happyly read at least the main threads how those things were built and learn (again) how those mods were done.
How or in which form could at least the basic parts survive?
Hello to entire Win-Raid community. It’s really a heartbreaking news. I discovered this absolute invaluable knowledge sharing passionate website very recently and barely even started learning things. And I cannot explain how much I gained knowledge and tried to give it back everywhere possible including helping myself and also post again here, and still there’s so much left to discover. I cannot even comprehend the Internet without this website and the people, my mind cannot process this gut wrenching news, not even sure what I’m going to do.
Also the Discord really knocked the old school forum aspects, it serves as a mere bloated place and the information is drowned without possibility to recover it. Add the Telgram, these things even killed XDA forum for the Android modifications, that place used to be so good. Now they changed their priorities and became a social media tech blog post site and debilitated the core passionate foundation. I wish people are more passionate like us. Unfortunate that you have to deal with the technology problems associated with the extra baggage.
Please kindly let us know if there is anything we can do, even if there are very few folks who are active can try to pool our resources if we can and try to keep the spirit alive. Knowledge is power and losing this much amount of highly invaluable information and people is really feeling like Abyss taking over, it’s just too much for me personally to even take in this shock. There’s simply no way to preserve it, There’s a lot of computer history here this is a holy place, please kindly give us a chance to make it better for you.
Thank you for everything Fernando and Plutomaniac, all the Admin team of Win-Raid . I hope there’s a light at the end of the tunnel.
Sad news [crazy] [weinen]
@plutomaniac Hello!
Sad news has arrived, you’ve Forum with useful content and strong skillful Community.
I’ve read this forum for a couple of years in the past.
It’s tough to lose such valuable resource.
That’s very disappointing information, but lets hope for best
Totally agree with you @lfb6 !
With the help of the Intel Management Engine section, I learned how to fix the Intel CSME update when the ASUS motherboard sent for RMA was replaced with one with the same old version of CSME. Now I manage to solve the problem for which I sent the motherboard by courier to another country.
Also using the information contained in the BIOS section Modding Guides and Problems I learned to use an SPI programmer, UEFITool and I even wrote the first BIOS on the chip.
I spent tens of hours reading the information in this forum and I think this is the worst news of this year!
Bad really bad!
Does this mean that there will be no future versions for ME Analyzer, MCExtractor and CPUMicrocodes? I ask because I use them currently and I even donated for this purpose.
Edit by Fernando: Formatting of the fully quoted post corrected and blank lines removed (to save space)
Saddened to hear this news, plutomaniac. This forum has been an incredible source of knowledge over the last few years. Completely understand the reasons for closing it down.
I hope only that some of the larger guides find a way to survive even if only as a static wiki or similar.
All the best to the moderation team for future endeavours
>> How or in which form could at least the basic parts survive?
I started mirroring pinned topics and all files to https://bitbucket.org/dartraiden/win-raid.com_1/
(just html + all linked archives)
The main goal is to preserve knowledge
later it will be possible to deploy it in a more human readable form
Regarding the shift towards “requests”, maybe make a no-request-rule? Guides and tools are all here on the forum, people should be able to get it done by themselves after reading and understanding what they are doing.
In any case, I agree that all the guides and files provided NEED to be preserved. This place is an archive of computer technology and software history. Many are still running old hardware that isn’t properly supported by manufacturers anymore and I know no other place on the internet where you can find old drivers/oroms/µ-codes etc conveniently in one place like this. Did you consider to let the forum online in read only mode or something? This could also leave the possibility open to get back to normal forum business when (or if) you find new admins/mods that are willing to step up.
Hello,
To take a website that offers so much knowledge off the map (in such a short time) is hard to hear.
I guess the decision is irrevocable.
There is still the possibility of backing up the website locally via web site copier.
Does anyone know a good software for that ? (all are not equal because sometimes it works well on certain site and not on others…)
HTTrack ( https://www.httrack.com/page/1/en/index.html ) seems a good reference @plutomaniac are there any special parameters about Win-Raid Forum ?
Is there any way we can support the survival of the content of the forum?
Thank you all for the replies, wishes and suggestions. Something that both Dieter and I feel strongly about is the trust imposed to any potential new administrator/owner. Meaning, we will not simply give the forum to someone who we don’t already know and trust to keep it at the same or better level that what it currently is. If we cannot maintain what it stands for, it should no longer be operational. I’d like to thank anyone who offers to migrate it and run it themselves, but please remember that if we don’t already know you, it will not proceed. Hopefully this is understood. 
The entire forum, no. But it will be easy to copy-paste the first post(s) of the sticky guides elsewhere. These are the most interesting/important things either way. Feel free to suggest other related communities which might want these first posts migrated there and we’ll see if something works and makes sense.
It would be possible to migrate (by copy-pasting mind you) the first post(s) from the sticky guides, meaning the critical parts, to another forum of similar orientation. But Dieter’s and my decision to not be involved in administrative level tasks in the future is set in stone.
lfb6 I’d like to thank you personally for all the help you have provided around the forum this past year(s?), especially at the ME section that you mentioned. People like you have definitely helped in keeping the forum active and maintained. As I mentioned above, there is no reason to vanish all the helpful guides/sticky threads. They can be copied to another place and if Dieter or I want to continue maintaining them there, no problem. The same applies to all other authors of guide/sticky threads. As for the tools you mentioned, I’ll talk about my own below because there is a direct question about that (tl;dr - they have nothing to do with Win-Raid). As for UBU, Sonix/LS_29 has an official thread at overclockers forum which is very active and maintained by DeathBringer and other people over there. So Win-Raid will not affect its development. The other stuff (oroms, microcodes etc) are kept outside of WR either way so a "simple" guide OP transfer will suffice. To sum up and answer your concern, the basic parts will survive. 
Yes, the general internet trend I mentioned. That is correct, this style of forum is dying and neither Dieter nor me are fans of this transition. As for preservation, please read the other answers.
Nope, never said that. My personal projects are not related to Win-Raid. If they receive less frequent updates from now on, it is for reasons outside this community. So don’t worry about these.
Thank you for the wishes IntelModder. Yes, various guides and/or sticky threads can be preserved that way. Please read the other replies for more info on that.
This is a nice idea, but I wouldn’t do that if I were you. We can preserve most important stuff by manually copy-pasting some stick threads/guides. Also, this forum software tends to temporarily ban IPs when weird behavior is encountered, so this solution won’t work. I cannot disable this, even temporarily, and in fact it has happened that the stupid thing even bans me (yes, the "admin") when I move too many posts or open too many threads at the same time due to "suspicious behavior". Go figure… 
We had tried that in the past, didn’t work. Unfortunately, various people break the rules, which means even more work from the maintainers to try and fish out these things, delete, merge, warn, ban etc. Also, some people find it "offensive" to tell them that they need to follow a guide and not expect things on a silver platter.
Sure but decided against that. Someone needs to pay for (an effectively) dead platform, and it will probably be even more filled by ads (which again, we do not collect, we do not control). Aside from that, neither Dieter nor me want to see this community in that state. It’s better if we accept it had its time and place, but now it’s time to move on.
The decision for both Dieter and I, to not be its administrators, yes, is irrevocable. Its shutting down completely, not yet. But as I explained above, we could only conceive such a scenario if someone we already know and trust wants to do so.
Please read a previous reply as to why this might not be a good idea.
Thank you for the reply FM, I think the previous replies covered this question.
@plutomaniac @Fernando
As closing this forum is really sad, I asked NIM on WinCert what he think about Win-Raid content. And I got very positive answer
https://i.ibb.co/19cqV3Y/WinCert.png
If anybody want to keep Win-Raid forum content alive, please see https://www.wincert.net/forum WinCert forum as is open for our content 
https://www.win-raid.com/t9792f45-Lets-continue-on-WinCert.html#msg153956
I just want to add my thoughts to this.
Firstly, I want to thank Dieter, plutomaniac, westlake, Marvin and all the contributors to this forum (too many to mention all by name).
Your work and leadership has been excellent. It is hugely valued and respected! Thank you!
Secondly, this forum and it’s content cannot be allowed to die. it must be allowed to continue and evolve as before perhaps with new members/contributors on another similar platform etc.
A few comments on forums and social media. Social media is not a replacement for a board like win-raid it is too unstructured and opinionated.
There is and will continue to still be a huge need for competent fact and knowledge based forum style platform covering what Win-raid does. Right now there is no alternative that can take over what win-raid does.
For me personally, win-raid is where I go to get latest UBU, uCodes, bios modules and read up on the latest about hot topics (used to be raid…), ME etc. I do not see any other forum/board who can cover this competently. Most other places are shallow and superficial = useless.
I sincerely hope a way forward can be found continuing the great work of win-raid.
Once again, huge thank you!
[quote="plutomaniac"|p153952]Also, some people find it "offensive" to tell them that they need to follow a guide and not expect things on a silver platter.[/quote]This! Its unfortunately happening everywhere, even on my old trusted local sites here in Serbia, let alone Global ones like this one… [weinen]
Sometimes i get irritated (even mad if they insist on it), but I also came to understand that the technology I love came to an crushing Consumers majority; and that only a small number of passionate tech-savvy dinosaurs like us remained around.
So like you guys, I am slowly starting to get less and less involved, and discouraged, even tho I hate it being so. Have seen to many good sites I loved pass into history and legend, but such is life! I recon there will be not much true experts in the close future (cca max 5-10 years), and no one will care; but when they finally do it will be too late.
Same thing happened to almost all fo the technologies that came.
Take a car for example; today most people brag only by repeating marketing induced stuff (horsepower, displacement, lights type, accessories, consumption etc), but they can not change oil for the life of them. Heck I know a few that do not even know how to check and add some, and more so a friend of mine managed to add oil in to the cooler and water in the engine!! [rolling_eyes]
So as sad as it makes me, I fully understand and support your decision! Good luck, and Godspeed!! [engel]
feeling so sad. i truly understand the situation of forums now.
will there be a whole backup of this forum so that we can search something when it shutdown?
where will you post things future? very appreciate for your sharing about intel things. and for Fernando hosting this forum too.