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.
*sends a subliminal message about CT100 NOT being spam*
i think it's too late for that...
with the whole, "don't let them post if it's not 7 words" i like Efan's idea of it being not accepted if it's under 3 words, not 7 words.
OR secretly just not award points for comments under 3 (or 7) words but let them show up, so all the spammers who never look at the stickies or even the forums for that matter, still think they are getting away with spamming, but the're no getting any points!!!! MWAHAHAHAHA!!
There should be a separate section for contests. I've noticed in the past that contests are scattered around the site forums, and I think it would be easier to moderate them as well as participate in them if they were all in one place.
I'm not sure if this is a repeated topic, but I think the forums could do good with a 'review' button next to 'submit' when you write a message, just so that people don't make as many mistakes, such as with photos(so they can see if the link worked, I've seen examples where the link failed).
After I scanned through the above black and glassy sea of texts... I really want to add a few points that I would like AG3 Forums to have:
1) Preview System: Just like Adrokila said about the "review" system. It would be better if a forum allows a user to check and preview his or her posts. "So as to reduce mistakes, and prevent fail links." said Adrokila.
2) Key-Word Searcher: I would be very happy if the coming AG3 forums have a intra-forumic searcher. A searcher helps user to find particular key-words within a target thread or post. Some other forum has its key-word searcher bonded with google-search engine, in order to reduce usage of internet resources and has high searching tech. <---- If you ask me why a internal-search engine helps, I would say a searcher helps user to find certain topics that are related to what they want to know. Besides, it can eliminate the time that should be originally consumed by users to "climb up" a thread. Just like what i did before posting here. Moreover, one of the most common mistakes made by forum users is "double-posting", which in other words, posting the same idea or topic within a topic that were mentioned not so long ago(e.g. at the previous few pages.) Copy-cat posts are annoying and space-consuming, but a searcher can certainly help solving this problem.
3) Spamming Issue: When I caught a little sight about the topic "spammerland", the first thought that came up my mind is that "Every single forum cannot and will not escape from spamming, why just don't open a land for those spammers to spam their posts?". Of course, I'm not encouraging any spamming action amoung any forum. I refer "spamming" is just incoherent chating,"spammers" are people who really like to talk but only simple and pure talks without contructive sharing for chating with other users or getting points only. While "spammerland" refers to a new thread such as called "Babblingland", in a more positive name for posts lacking intelligence to go. I found this successful in some forums(other websites) luring large fraction of spammers into this kind of thread from other serious threads. Well,therefore much easier for mods to cope with spamming problems.
There are actually much more functions I would like to suggest for AG3, but I don't want to press too much stresses on the AG3 forums developing group. The above are my most-wanted. I deeply appreciate developing group's efforts on creating a better forums for us users. Thank you so much and good luck.
Okay, so, spent a few moments on the Beta just now. I am REALLY liking what I'm seeing. It's nice to know that you all care about our requests and improvements rather than just being involved in self affairs. Just like with a business, it's us as the players that help make Armor Games what it is, and the Beta looks fantastic...I cannot WAIT to see this thing in full action...
OR secretly just not award points for comments under 3 (or 7) words but let them show up
well, (a) we're not awarding points for forum posts, and (b) keeping spammy replies makes the forums look trashy.
There should be a separate section for contests.
The problem there is that the contests that are put in the forums are generally about a topic within that forum, ie a poetry contest in the creative writing forum, etc.
I think the forums could do good with a 'review' button
Key-Word Searcher
This is typical with more forum engines, but since we don't know which engine we'll use, I can't speculate on any of these ideas.
"spammers" are people who really like to talk but only simple and pure talks without contructive sharing for chating with other users or getting points only.
Hopefully since we won't award points for forum posts, the 'spammers' will use their activity stream comments to have these sorts of conversations. Our moderators will be instructed to direct side conversations to status updates/comments, or private inbox messages.
Kevin, we're already examining several. We didn't have vBulletin on the list because it's a commercial application, but after examining the requirements we realized the technology wasn't compatible.
Gaboloth, I don't understand your question. Are you saying that if you link an image, that you want to see it in the editor box while you're still typing? That kind of thing?
Kevin, we're already examining several. We didn't have vBulletin on the list because it's a commercial application, but after examining the requirements we realized the technology wasn't compatible.
Isn't it all HTML, though? I'm sure you can remove certain parts of it.
Ultimately it renders HTML for your browser, but the technology that *generates* that HTML needs to be compatible with our servers. For example, vBulletin only supports one type of database engine (MySQL) which we do not use, and cannot use in parallel with what we already have, so because vBulletin is inflexible in this regard, we must disqualify it from our research.
