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, we should make ALL forums have more medieval names.
Lol, that might turn certain people away... I know I'd be overwhelmed if they took the whole medieval thing that far! Plus I'd have trouble remembering which discussions go in which sections if the names weren't clearly relevant to each particular section!
Medieval names would fit with the sites theme, and they mentioned adding more medieval ranks, so that'd make the site unique.
It's fine the way it is now because it's fairly subtle and not overwhelming, but make everything medieval and pretty soon this whole place will be filled with DND enthusiasts! =P
It is necessary for AG3 to have a translation system considering the number of races there are in this website.
All posts must be made in English, according to the site rules. If a user who doesn't speak English really wants to participate in the forums and wishes to translate his messages into English, it's his own responsibility to use an offsite translator.
That doesn't seem fair to the user. If a person doesn't know how to translate languages, how can he fit in the AG community? Isn't that a goal of the company?
Google translator isn't the best thing, but it works. This is an American website, they're not going to cater to every language. I wouldn't expect a French website to cater to me since I don't know their language, I'd just use a translator if I really wanted to use it.
