That should clear up everyone's questions, right? Good ...
As a development team and as a company, we know that the forums are extremely important to some of you, and we know that some of you have put a lot (!!!!) of effort into building up the community here, especially those who have written the more creative poetic stuff. C'mon, how many of you have > 5,000 posts, raise your hands. That amount of effort is *staggering*. Seriously, I think the highest post count I've seen was ~8400? Over 2.5 years, that'd be like 10 posts EVERY DAY since AG2 launched.
The effort of migrating that much data from AG2 to AG3 is almost as staggering, since the guy who wrote the AG2 forum software didn't make it terribly efficient, and the way we're linking accounts, etc., between the two systems might cause problems. Trying to migrate it to AG3 will be a pretty big job, and it will probably fall in my lap since I'm sorta the database guru around here, but that doesn't necessarily mean it's up to me whether I want to do it or not. If Dan says do it, I do it.
Whether we start over, and wipe everything, and build a new forum engine, or implement someone else's forum software, remains to be discussed internally because it's not a critical feature for us yet. That doesn't mean it's not important to us, it just means we have to get core features working like, y'know, logging in.
Will we migrate old posts into the new forum software? It depends whether we can find an easy way to make the old forum data compatible. Nothing's *impossible* but it's also not practical for us to spend development time (read: dollars) for us to spend a big amount of effort trying to sort stuff out so it's all perfect and pristine.
If we start over with forum posts, will we archive the old forums? Again, nothing's impossible, but I can't answer that right now.
What will happen to your armor points for forum posts? Well, since armor points are also up in the air regarding the same sort of "wipe vs migrate" discussions, I can't answer that question right now either.
Please direct people asking about the future of AG2 forums to this thread if they start asking questions in other forums/threads. I'll post updates to this thread as I have more information.
Still no word on what we're doing with the forums. Migrating the forums to AG3 may be easy, but how we manage the forums, etc., needs to change from what we run right now. We're still not sure if we're going to rebuild it from scratch, or use some third-party software. Hopefully we'll have some answers this month.
We probably won't have forums at launch, but it will be one of the highest priorities once we *are* launched. We're trying to find a 3rd party forum engine/system that will be compatible with what we already have in place as far as infrastructure, but something we can easily adapt for things like using our own authentication system, etc. Sometimes, modifying someone else's code to fit your own system can take as long, or longer, than just writing the code yourself... so we'll see.
To clarify, we won't have fully integrated forums in AG3 upon launch, but we *will* have forums of some kind.
Until we can get a new forum engine running for AG3, we're evaluating how to keep these AG2 forums alive.
We're currently leaning towards an off-the-shelf third party solution that we can modify to fit our needs, and then see about importing old messages. When this happens, we'll give everyone lots of notice, because we may need to shut down this forum engine to give us time to move messages to the new system.
Okay, since we seem to have a LOT of repeated threads popping up asking the same questions over and over, please post any new discussion regarding forums, features, wants, likes/dislikes in here.
Keep it on topic. I need to be able to summarize this stuff later for the web development team, and off-topic posts will be deleted without warning to make my life easier later.
I believe that the fact that our forums are set out neatly and structured simply is what sets this community apart from other gameing sites.
However I think a good idea would be to change the way we post pictures and links. If we could get it to be click, copy picture, paste it into a box would be wonderful.
I would also add a forum subsection called the lounge with no ap/karma/whatever because we all saw how well the "currently about" thread did. If that was a place for social fun besides user comments it would be great. Maybe have it as a link to a big thread and not little seperate threads?
As for things like colours and decotr, i'd keep it white. It just gives the forums a more simple look to me and I think new comers would appreciate that.
The reason simplicity is good for these forums is because there is less chance of someone breaking the rules.
No, he was a contractor back in the day before Larry was even hired.
If we could get it to be click, copy picture, paste it into a box would be wonderful.
No, we won't host your images/art/swf/music etc on our systems -- too many potential licensing issues. Your art/audio must always be hosted elsewhere. You'll always have the ability to hotlink to them using an 'img' tag or something similar, but we will not be providing any sort of upload service.
I would also add a forum subsection called the lounge with no ap/karma/whatever
Yes, we'll probably continue that practice since we currently have two forums where no AP is given. The Forum Games has been a big hit.
f that was a place for social fun besides user comments it would be great. Maybe have it as a link to a big thread and not little seperate threads?
Need you to describe this a little more, I don't understand the idea.
As for things like colours and decotr, i'd keep it white.
Aesthetics are something we're certainly open to considering.
I have an idea. I'm not really sure if its quite important to forums, but here it goes. Perhaps there should be a counter that shows how many posts you have in a certain forum sections. I believe that, when viewing someone's profile, it could show what this person is like on AG. there may be other benefits too that I can't think of. The only thing I can think of now that would be negative would be the amount of effort that would go into implementing that.
Well, there is only one forum with the least amount of spam in all of the interwebs.
XGen. Why? Because they have a secret hiding spot for where all the spam goes. Where? Spammerland! Since people can spam all they want in Spammerland, they don't do it in other threads. Therefore, low ban rates, low spam rates, and happy community.
Obviously, this won't be implemented in AG because SL will overtake the Tavern in terms of posts, but it's just an idea. Cormyn or some other will say, well AG is different and nothing that ever works in other forums could ever work in AG because AG is different, or some ****.
Need you to describe this a little more, I don't understand the idea.
I was inspired by the currently about thread and the forum games section. What I mean is that a user accesses the forums and whatever it's going to be pops up (i'm assuming it will still be a row of links) and there is a section called the lounge. The user clicks on this and what appears is a thread. Not a forum, just a place set out kind of like the currently about thread which will be used in a similar theme of conversation except that there is no rewarding system just like the forum games. Which means that spam wont necessarily be all that much of a problem I think because all that user will get is an "education" from the regulars there or a mod. Think of it as an equivalent for live chat in the way that we can all communicate like we did in the good old days of the currently about thread.
I hope you understood that :/
By the way, I think that spam under three words shouldn't apear when posted, autommatically deleted. I understand that there can be stuff that needs to be said in under seven, but having anything under three autodeleted would be great.
Perhaps there should be a counter that shows how many posts you have in a certain forum sections.
Yes, we've already discussed this, and the idea of having the last forum threads you participated in available in a list on your profile page... this could also be public for others to see what you're up to as well. I'm not sure that we'd post any forum activity in the "Activity Stream" because it might get a little spammy.
Another popular feature users as for is to mark which threads they've read (or not) or highlight forum threads in some way that they've participated in that have had responses since they last read the new replies, etc.
Cormyn or some other will say, well AG is different and nothing that ever works in other forums could ever work in AG because AG is different
Watch your tone, please. Site rules say to play nice with others, especially admins...
As far as a "spammerland" forum, we don't currently plan to have any forum free of moderation, and honestly there's no real reason to have one. Arguing that giving the users an area to write spam just means they'll still try to do it elsewhere because "well, you allow spam over THERE..." We will ALWAYS carry our strict rules on spamming, period.
Other "spammerland" posts were (and will be) deleted because they're irrelevant.
Think of it as an equivalent for live chat
Gotcha. Well, we're already planning a live chat system at some point after AG3 launches. We're also planning an "ask a moderator for help" sort of mailbox where you can write a message, and any moderator can answer it. We'll probably use some of these questions to build a new FAQ area on the site, but that's outside of the 'forum' topic we're discussing here.
I think that spam under three words shouldn't apear when posted, autommatically deleted. I understand that there can be stuff that needs to be said in under seven
Honestly, I kind of feel like that's a gray area, because forum games like "count to 100" only require a one-word response. On the flip side, if I'm typing all of this, and you post a reply of "Okay" ... that's where we consider the response as 'spammy' or "unhelpful to the conversation" and delete it.
Perhaps as a compromise, we'd have an settings like we do with saying whether a forum awards Reputation for participating, but now we'd have a setting for a minimum word count to stop the user from posting yet. So unless they wrote, say, 10 words, the 'submit' button wouldn't even show up. But then we face the same problem with game comments here where users write "sucked, but here's extra words so my comment is over 7 words so it's not spam" ... which is why we're always going to need moderators.
Lol, that's really not the right example. The main point of the count to 100 was to don't make < 7 words posts to keep the moddies away. *sends a subliminal message about CT100 NOT being spam*
