Interlude

In the shadow of scene portals, SAFIR (Swedish Amiga Associations in the Kingdom) has going on while other communities come and go. I (Brow) will hand over to the nordic guardian of the gate. Welcome to share shelter and cousy atmosphere among Amigans.

Origin

I'm an oldshool retro nerd. Turns 40 this summer and lives on the Swedish countryside with my 4 yo son. Loves to tweek, mod and hack hardware and software. Been working within enterprise IT for about 15 years, currently an IT Architect here in Halmstad.
Svenska AmigaFöreningar I Riket, or SAFIR for short is an online Amiga Community with about 1.400 members (actually 1.399 at time of writing, but new members register every week)

Driving force and first steps

The initial motivation was actually quite personal. I simply got sick and tired of all the shenanigans going on in the Amiga Community. Every forum was so infected and every single time I visited any of the big International Forums or even the local Swedish one at the time (Amigarulez) - I ended up closing my browser in anger. The stress was simply too much.

The inspiration and initial work with what ended up as SAFIR wasn't started by me. To be honest I did kind of a 'hostile takeover' on a discussion that had totally derailed on Amigarulez. The idea behind an united Swedish Amiga Community wasn't mine at all. However the current discussions was an emotional war zone where days if not weeks were spent on bickering on whether the name of the new community should include "Alternative PowerPC-based platforms". At this time the MorphOS compatible boards produced by Genesi. I got so fed up with this so one day I simply registered amigaos.se and asked a good friend who was still studying at university if he wanted to do his thesis in computer engineering by creating a custom, flexible, fast and COMPATIBLE (IBrowse, A-Web, ..) portal for us to use as a base for this new community. He did, and the rest is history. The launch was quite a success and since we invited representatives of Amiga clubs from all over Sweden to consult and help create the base for SAFIR we already had active members from day one. The portal was officially launched in the fall of 2004.

Milestones along the path

It's difficult to say without spending some time digging through the posts and news. But from memory I would say the Gallery function which was published a while after SAFIR's launch was very appreciated. As well as the (private) project section. Forum, PM's and Blogs were there from the beginning, and we had grands plans for an "items database" and file area which unfortunately never got implemented. Another fun thing was when we arranged our 10 year anniversary. A whole bunch of us got together at Syntax Society (one of the member clubs) and had a party. It was great! We also did some (at the time) high profile interviews that got translated and re posted on some International forums. But all-in-all I'd have to say that I am extremely happy with the way SAFIR has evolved over the years. When we "opened up" after having a rather strict focus on "AmigaOS 4 / AmigaNG" for many years the community have really flourished. We now have both AROS and MorphOS news editors we regularly inform us about the exciting news from these platforms.

Anecdotes

In the early days the portal was hosted on a Dell Optiplex (Pentium 3 I think). That's a complete L.A.M.P. installation. Single HDD, no raid, no backup in a closed cabinet. One warm summer day the whole thing melted and we learned the hard way that backups and redundancy was really good to have Today we're professionally hosted at one of Swedens top hosting partners.

A fun note is also the work on www.cafe8bitar.se that actually started off as a dev/test environment for SAFIR. Since we'd rather not implement new features and fixes on the live forum, Café8bitar was sort of a side project with a similar portal (same code base obviously) with about 100 members. Here we could test new features, and at one point we had redundant distrubuted databases (thanks to AWS), a heavy loadbalanser, very functional API - and two of our members even developed an SAFIR iOS Application(!) We've considered releasing the whole portal code, but never really gotten around to it. It's extremely flexible, modular and easy to adopt to new projects. Needs some work to polish the whole thing, translations etc. We'll see what the future brings.

Our blogs are literally filled with anecdotes of fun, personal, embarrassing, heartbreaking stories from our members. Since we've grown to be a pretty tight group of good friends, a lot of us relay heavily on not only technical but emotional support from each other on SAFIR.

Trends today compared with 15 years ago

A lot happens in 10-15 years in peoples lives. Most of us grows and evolve and mature the way we interact with others. This includes things like respect, tolerance and understanding. Chees if I had a nickle every time I wrote some cliche of how we all should love and respect each other - I'd be able to buy an X5000

Future and legacy

Woo, I dunno about Legacy. But I have a good feeling on opening the forum up more for international visitors. Most of this I would say is thank's to the amazing work of one of our members, Mr.A and his Amy-ITX. The day the details of Amy "leaked" on other sites I over 30 ppl wanted to register at SAFIR. Simply to get their hands on the groovy details of this new amazing Classic. We've now decided to make a dedicated part of SAFIR the "officiall" unofficial support forum for all things Amy. Mostly because all of us working with the project already frequent the site and we'd rather not spread the knowledge too thin.

As an end note I'd like to express my deepest gratitude to EVERYONE who's been involved with SAFIR over the years. Members and moderators alike. Also to you guys in Nukleus and Void for keeping an amazing classic diskmag going in 2018! Cheers mates!!!