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.
I have a huge problem with my account. I make sure that I save my progress in games, but everytime I log back on my saved games aren't there. Please help.
Since the goal of ArmorGames is to find and play games, you might want to take a page out of Google+'s book - specifically the circles idea. How this involves the forum is to integrate it into your game API so not only can posts be real time but link groups into games (plural, such as for clan activity or "fourth wall" roleplayers) designed for it. This could extend what forum games are, too.
For developers, this would give them additional tools if a special forum or topic is set aside for their game (perhaps easier set up moderation), special abilities that only forum software can give (special sort searches of users, thread searches to help with game support and design, in game forum).
Obviously, security and monitoring is important but I feel the extensability gained would be worth it. Also, if you integrate the forum side by side with the actual games being played you would be able to offer a new feature that would help "compete" with other sites like Kongregate without copying them.
Most important for me would be the "edit" button over a post available to the submitter. That way double and triple Posts would be reduced. Some forums have this already.
Hmm this is a very interesting forum anywayz i think people should understand its hard to migrate whole armorgames cause it has so many games and forum posts but my idea is now U see this problem you should solve it in AG3 so you wont have this problem when AG4 comes out.
Most important for me would be the "edit" button over a post available to the submitter. That way double and triple Posts would be reduced. Some forums have this already.
It's been in discussion, so hopefully it will be implemented.
Seeing how HTML is currently not blocked in these forums, is it safe to assume it will be allowed in the AG3 forums?
I'd think so. I don't see why they would implement something, only to take it away again. Granted, this assumes people don't go crazy with HTML and all that jazz.
