Well... December 2020 has arrived, and sadly, there has been no meaningful progress on this front over the past two years. Adobe is still planning to kill off Flash at the end of the month, and all major browsers are set to drop support for it on 31st December 2020 (meaning the arcade will immediately stop working on Chrome, Firefox, etc.). Perhaps those games will still work on some obscure and/or outdated browsers... but, frankly, it's not worth the security risk that that would entail.
The most popular 'replacement' for Flash is, of course, HTML5 - and, quite a lot of popular Flash games now have HTML5 equivalents. Sadly, the MyBB arcade hasn't yet been modified to support HTML5: the matter was raised on the MyBB forums in March, and the developer said
he was planning it, but nothing has happened in the nine months since then. Perhaps the developer was too busy; perhaps the demand wasn't there; or perhaps it was just too difficult, and he decided it wasn't worth the development time... I don't know. Maybe there will be a surprise announcement late in the month that "We upgraded the MyBB arcade for HTML5!", but I'm really not holding my breath.
What all of this means is:
unless something major and unexpected happens within the next three weeks, the arcade will very sadly be going at the end of December . Perhaps it will be modified one day to run HTML5 games (in which case I'd be very happy to reinstate it) - but, the impending end of Flash was announced all the way back in mid-2017, so if the arcade
was going to be upgraded for HTML5, then I expect it would've happened already, at some point over the past three and a half years.
However, if we
do end up having to remove it (as currently looks very likely), then it might be worth thinking about what we could replace it with. Perhaps there's some other plugin that we could install to take its place. Perhaps there's some other game-themed stuff that we could do elsewhere. Or, at the very least, perhaps we could write some kind of 'Arcade Memorial' page, listing everybody's high scores in each game. It's not much, but it's
something (and it'd at least ensure that the "https://tch-forum.com/arcade.php" link will give us something more than just a "404 Not Found" error).
So... does anybody have any thoughts or suggestions regarding potential 'replacements' for the arcade, or for the content of an 'Arcade Memorial' page?