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.
We should have specific FORUM MODERATORS so that we can pay attention more to that as the other moderators look at the comments. I'm such a genius
We should also have profile moderators, because we don't trust the forum moderators enough to be global moderators anyway. They do such a great job that we should split them up into sections. Call it tough love!
you know how there is like xbox live and the ps3 thing well i believe there should be a minecraft IGN for that like the Aim since minecraft has really exploded ( creepers lol )
On this matter, I take the opposite viewpoint. Aside from a couple of the forums (Game Walkthroughs and Custom Programming for example,) much of the rest of the forums are absolute drivel, and it's patently obvious from some of the new entries that people don't read them now, so why would they bother in the future.
Sure, keep the FAQ entries, and the other stickies, but consign the rest to the great bitbucket in the sky. After all, who's going to bother reading What's your favorite xxxx? or What's your worst yyyy? of which there are a myriad of such threads in The Tavern?
I think you were looking for Programming Help there.
On this matter, I take the opposite viewpoint. Aside from a couple of the forums (Game Walkthroughs and Custom Programming for example,) much of the rest of the forums are absolute drivel, and it's patently obvious from some of the new entries that people don't read them now, so why would they bother in the future.
Sure, keep the FAQ entries, and the other stickies, but consign the rest to the great bitbucket in the sky. After all, who's going to bother reading What's your favorite xxxx? or What's your worst yyyy? of which there are a myriad of such threads in The Tavern?
I see the logic there. After all, FAQs and stickies are important, but not the "what's your favorite" type threads.
On this matter, I take the opposite viewpoint. Aside from a couple of the forums (Game Walkthroughs and Custom Programming for example,) much of the rest of the forums are absolute drivel, and it's patently obvious from some of the new entries that people don't read them now, so why would they bother in the future.
Sure, keep the FAQ entries, and the other stickies, but consign the rest to the great bitbucket in the sky. After all, who's going to bother reading What's your favorite xxxx? or What's your worst yyyy? of which there are a myriad of such threads in The Tavern?
Better yet, instead of having a preview button (although it would be nice as previously mentioned to make sure pictures worked) you could add an edit button to edit one of your posts. On other forums many times I feel I need to fix, rephrase, or add something to my post but I am unable to. An example is:
It would show the recent treads you posted in.
And in another post:
treads Oops, I mean thread.
The way I see it users are finding themselves in a pickle where they don't want to spam, but they want to help contribute further by editing a post.
This next question is kind of out of this world and probably won't happen, even if it does (which it won't) it will probably happen post-v3 launch. Could you guys kind of have like an Armor Games.....Game? That kind of sticks to the whole theme. What I mean is leaning towards a halosphere-esque thing. Halosphere is basically a game based on a Halo forum called Halocharts: Halosphere: Another idea would be able to have like groups?...I know it's hard for me to explain this but it's to have like a group (a user can join as many as wanted) with a moderator who can have settings like to just let someone join if requested or to make the moderator allow or unallow and the group could have their own little subforum restricted to group members? An example would be a group for people who are programmers, or for people who make music, or maybe for people who like a specific author's work. The possibilites are endless.
The idea I keep forgetting and then remember while typing this is to have signatures. I don't really think I can elaborate on that other than to say there should be set rules and moderators can ban a user for profane or signatures that break regulations
* Laughs because this post proves my point Wow, now I feel the need to use the edit button. Earlier someone mentioned the addition of being able to copy and paste images, instead of storing it, you could find some way to automatically get the link when the image is pasted. That would take some staggering amount of work but its just an idea.
Could there be a way to search specifically through the forums? Because sometimes I want to find a thread but I don't have time to look through 100 pages of forums to find the one thread I'm looking for. Just a suggestion
Could there be a way to search specifically through the forums? Because sometimes I want to find a thread but I don't have time to look through 100 pages of forums to find the one thread I'm looking for. Just a suggestion
The person put that there to indicate that they put their own two cents on the thread.
Could there be a way to search specifically through the forums?
As thaboss showed you, there is a forum-search. But it doesn't work all that well. It'll show threads with those specific words spread out or not, so it'll give you a lot of pages, but it's better than nothing.
I'd like a forum-search on the new site, but it all depends on what forum engine that they decide to use and I don't know much about programming so I don't know how difficult it'll be for them to implement it.
I don't have any ideas at the moment since most things have already been said in here.
edit button: probably the #1 feature that's been requested.
forum search will be a high priority
I like the idea of having an archive you can search through, but only moving sticky threads to the new forum. We might need some way of letting users petition that their threads be copied over from the old system to the new system, though, especially those pertaining to creative writing, etc.
For that matter, we could probably just scan the existing forums and say "anything with more than __ replies to __views gets moved to the new system."
The database we've been using for building part of AG3 has some really nice full text search (FTS) capabilities, which will find English phrases extremely quickly. Unfortunately, it won't find non-English words very well, or things like strings of punctuation symbols if you're trying to find some old thread with ASCII art in it, etc.
Most of the forums I've looked at have their own way of breaking down a forum message (original topic message and every reply) into 'tokens' in order to build efficient search queries. Many forums try to develop their own algorithms of how to best find content. My opinion is that if our forums are English-only anyway, we might as well just let the database handle the workload... that's what it's there for.
One algorithm I wrote using some of the FTS capabilities allows us to use the new search feature on AG3 to pull up a list of about 24,000 usernames (of 1.5 million usernames in the system) to search for the word 'game', plus sort them in a ranked order and alphabetized, in about 90 milliseconds. Part of this algorithm was the database doing its thing, and part of it was me writing some extra algorithms on top of what the database is doing. We'll continue to look for ways to streamline forum searches as we look at other forum engines.
Sorry if this was said already like a dozen times, but lately ive notice Armor Games Forums doesnt have a signature. Most other forum sites do, perhaps you are including this in Armor Games Version. If so I look forward to it
