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'm sorry if this has been suggested before, but what if you could have the maker of the thread have the ability to clear spam from the thread. It would be especially helpful for the contests and battle of the threads. Of course, if the maker deletes it, it would not effect karma points, due to biases and such things toward certain users.
Suggestions -More reliable mods -Thread creator can have the power of a mod in his own thread -Search bar -List of player's created threads on player's profile page -Different text colors
-Thread creator can have the power of a mod in his own thread
That'll go bad - people would abuse the power so much. It's easy to just tell a Moderator to do stuff in a thread rather than give a user Moderator thread powers.
-Different text colors
That'll confuse members and is rather irritating to read a lot of different colors.
Moderators would be so hateful against users. Not that I've seen it, but many people complain that a mod did something for no reason. I see your point in all of this, but I was just making a few points that most of AG's community would be fond of. Not just/or me.
Moderators would be so hateful against users. Not that I've seen it, but many people complain that a mod did something for no reason.
They are Moderators for some reasons - one of those reasons is that they are very trustworthy.
If a user is complaining it must be because they were banned - they broke a rule and got banned. Moderators don't take action against users for no reason. They also lock or delete threads for a reason - there's no reason to dislike a Moderator or think that you need more 'reliable' Moderators because they enforce the rules well.
I see your point in all of this, but I was just making a few points that most of AG's community would be fond of. Not just/or me.
Yeah, but most of those ideas are horrible.
Giving users power inside their own thread like that is just bad - a lot of people would abuse it.
I understand if you get a lot of good reputation then you could possibly lock your thread if you want, but not off the bat like that. But still, I don't think the Administrators would give users powers like that.
No, this will be a moderator function. Same with locking. As I've previously mentioned elsewhere, we MAY give the original poster the ability to submit their thread to the moderation team as a "lease lock my thread" request.
I'm not sure if this is discussed in overall community-wise or strictly on the Reputation System of AG3, but has anything been ultimately decided about posts that have plenty of negative votes, user and mod wise? Will users have the option to automatically hide/filter out posts that have X amount of negative votes, mods automatically notified of said posts, internal systems automatically notified? Or is it out there already and I need to go search for it, because I've been playing the part of Rip Van Winkle recently? :P
Freak, some of what you're asking will depend on the forum engine we use/build, so I can't comment on them. We don't even know yet if we'll have a down-vote option, but I'm sure we'll have a "flag this thread" option for moderators to see.
And the Reputation system will come after AG3 launches, too.
