PWI Forums Migration Discussion

bloodedone87

SylenThunder - Sanctuary wrote: »

Torchlight 1 and 2 were fun, but once you're done, there's not a lot of re-play-ability in them.
STO was too riddled with microtransactions to be enjoyable.
NW wasn't quite as bad, but after finishing the main questline, it wasn't a lot of fun anymore so I quit playing. Now I hear the expansions and such are so buggy that even Cryptic has given an official apology.
I played with a few others, but none really held my interest. They were either like PWI with different graphics/quests/ect., or they just didn't have enough meat to hold my attention for long.

Even now, PWI is loosing the "fun" factor. The big factions are basically ruining the game for everyone else. They're doing it on purpose, and it's not like we have any support from PWE to do anything about it anyway.

Once PWI dies, I'll just move onto my other projects like my 7 Days to Die servers I host, or other games that I am currently testing or working on developers with.

You should move onto your other projects now cause even with this bad decisions that PWE is taking the game will still be here for long long time.
I mean its not the first time PWE makes awfull decision and ppl say that the game is going to die but surprisingly the game is still alive after so many years this dieing predictions started.

The big factions controling the PVP aspect of the game and kinda ruining for everyone else that is into PVP( not me if you dont count NW) are doing this since ages.

Reliea - Sanctuary

It's depressing is what it is.
But in the end our opinion doesn't matter at all.
I can't believe at least they wouldn't try to migrate threads, considering the years of info and assistance contained within.
I probably won't bother with the new forum, I'll stick to faction forums for info about stuff. I don't support ARC or any of its various BS outside of updating the PWI client.
I legitimately despise every decision the company makes.
I almost wish they'd just go "Ok guys, PWI is over, we are totally disinterested in managing this game anymore" so we could all move on peacefully instead of dragging us through this seemingly slow death.

seitori

Yep! PWE's customer service records kinda Suck it Hard (never listening to anything we had to say and all, not to mention firing the wrong people from the staff (the good 1's who actually did try to help everyone) rather then the big ones who constantly miss-managed the entire company and then laid the blames on everyone else that were working there) to many of the good 1's fell victim to that situation...

I honestly don't know if I will play another one of their games again after PWi go's down, I used to play Jade Dynasty aswell (but quit playing it long ago, when I noticed how crappily it was ran aswell) I guess it would depend on the quality of the game (it would have to be a pretty high quality game though to compensate for the absolutely dreadful amount of lack of management and all the miss-managements)

Asterelle - Sanctuary

I did a quick feasibility check of how hard it will be to port Sweetiebot to Vanilla forums and it's actually impossible at the moment. Sweetiebot works by scraping HTML pages but the new forum is run entirely through javascript **** which requires an actual browser (PWI forums don't require javascript).

There is a Vanilla Forums API which looks like it could probably be used to make porting not too bad but it is currently disabled on Arc Forums.

I put in a request to enable the public API here http://www.arcgames.com/en/forums#/discussion/7907/enable-vanilla-forums-api

Go make a post there in support if you want Sweetiebot to live. Else she will die with the PWI forums b:sad.

seitori

Asterelle - Sanctuary wrote: »

I did a quick feasibility check of how hard it will be to port Sweetiebot to Vanilla forums and it's actually impossible at the moment. Sweetiebot works by scraping HTML pages but the new forum is run entirely through javascript **** which requires an actual browser (PWI forums don't require javascript).

There is a Vanilla Forums API which looks like it could probably be used to make porting not too bad but it is currently disabled on Arc Forums.

I put in a request to enable the public API here http://www.arcgames.com/en/forums#/discussion/7907/enable-vanilla-forums-api

Go make a post there in support if you want Sweetiebot to live. Else she will die with the PWI forums b:sad.

b:sad RIP Sweetiebot b:sad

That Sux it big time, Sweetiebot was practically the last light the Forums still had when it came to entertainment & light-heartedness...{b:surrender}b:cry

Serafemme - Lost City

I sent a tweet to the Arc team asking about if our posts would be transferred. They told me that the posts are going to be migrated to Vanilla.

ggalacticparadox

Serafemme - Lost City wrote: »

I sent a tweet to the Arc team asking about if our posts would be transferred. They told me that the posts are going to be migrated to Vanilla.

I don't force that happening. I believe that it would be nearly impossible to port two separate forum-types (HTML vs Javascript) into one another. It just won't happen. Coming from someone who works with various databases, an immense amount of work would be needed to take the SQL database that vBulletin uses and port it to whatever database that Vanilla is working with. Even if it would transfer, it would be scrambled and fail to parse properly.

SylenThunder - Twilight Temple

ggalacticparadox wrote: »

I don't force that happening. I believe that it would be nearly impossible to port two separate forum-types (HTML vs Javascript) into one another. It just won't happen. Coming from someone who works with various databases, an immense amount of work would be needed to take the SQL database that vBulletin uses and port it to whatever database that Vanilla is working with. Even if it would transfer, it would be scrambled and fail to parse properly.

http://vanillaforums.com/discussion/828/can-my-existing-forum-be-migrated-to-vanilla

From the Vanilla FAQ, they have the ability to import pretty much everything.

ggalacticparadox

SylenThunder - Sanctuary wrote: »

http://vanillaforums.com/discussion/828/can-my-existing-forum-be-migrated-to-vanilla

From the Vanilla FAQ, they have the ability to import pretty much everything.

Interesting. That's good to know, I suppose. The question that remains is if PWE/ARC will actually take the time to do this transfer. Unlikely, as they make no money doing so.

eyebegrindin

Asterelle - Sanctuary wrote: »

I did a quick feasibility check of how hard it will be to port Sweetiebot to Vanilla forums and it's actually impossible at the moment. Sweetiebot works by scraping HTML pages but the new forum is run entirely through javascript **** which requires an actual browser (PWI forums don't require javascript).

There is a Vanilla Forums API which looks like it could probably be used to make porting not too bad but it is currently disabled on Arc Forums.

I put in a request to enable the public API here http://www.arcgames.com/en/forums#/discussion/7907/enable-vanilla-forums-api

Go make a post there in support if you want Sweetiebot to live. Else she will die with the PWI forums b:sad.

can we give her a viking send off?

bloodedone87

I have a question:
The mods that we have now will remain the same if this unwanted thing '' Forum Migration'' will happen?
I do hope so.

ggalacticparadox

bloodedone87 wrote: »

I have a question:
The mods that we have now will remain the same if this unwanted thing '' Forum Migration'' will happen?
I do hope so.

In theory, yes. In practice, however, probably not. PWE/ARC doesn't have the best track record for following through with anything.

opkossy

bloodedone87 wrote: »

I have a question:
The mods that we have now will remain the same if this unwanted thing '' Forum Migration'' will happen?
I do hope so.

Doubt it. Even some members of their own staff didn't (or still don't in a few cases I'm sure) have the appropriate permissions and that's while they were relaying official info. So I'm not expecting them to give any of the former mods that capability again. At least not at first. If it happens later on is to be seen.

bloodedone87

OPKossy wrote: »

Doubt it. Even some members of their own staff didn't (or still don't in a few cases I'm sure) have the appropriate permissions and that's while they were relaying official info. So I'm not expecting them to give any of the former mods that capability again. At least not at first. If it happens later on is to be seen.

b:cryb:cryb:cry

avs33fan

Personally I dont care about avatars, post counts or any of that stuff.
It will essentially be the same as this. Lots of people crying. Lots of people complaining. Lots of people trolling. And PWI support staff telling people who send in tickets to take it to the forums.

I have seen what happens when PWI tries to update things (server reboots, hardware installs), so I expect this switch over, that will wont go well.

NRGLG - Heavens Tear

I started making a mirror of the forums because I don't believe PWE when they say that the posts aren't going to be deleted. That sounds like total BS, based on their usual competence. I also don't believe they will migrate it to the same structure it is now. I'm pretty sure they are going to shove everything into some sort of giant clusterf**k that's hard to navigate.

Regardless, I wanted to update anyone who gives a ****. I've downloaded only 6GB of data so far, which is like 2% according to the calculations. It's taking longer than I thought. Usually I can download a site in no time, but ugh, this is taking a while (note: the time taken is not because of a low-end internet service (I'm quite the opposite actually), it's because navigating through the pages is taking the bot time). On a positive note, all forum stickies have been saved, along with any images in them. So at least those will be fine. I'll keep running the bot until these forums go offline. Hopefully I'll be able to download at least 50% of it.

opkossy

Oh cool. At least the most important bits are taken care of now.

I got some recent acknowledgement that it may not be as bad as it initially seemed. I'd still appreciate you having that backup though just in case.

Asterelle - Sanctuary

Yeah I have a hard time believing they will migrate anything.
On the Vanilla forums you have to comment under your arc account while here most people comment under a custom VBulletin account tied to your in-game character. Are they going to merge the VBulletin accounts into your arc account somehow or would they generate inaccessible copies of the vbulletin accounts you probably won't be able to log in as?

While Vanilla staff says they are able to port legacy forums I'm sure that assumes a 1-to-1 mapping between the old accounts and the new accounts and I don't think that is going to be feasible with us.

Speaking of feasible I discovered the javascript embedded forums on
http://www.arcgames.com/en/forums#/

is just a mirror of the real forum hosted at vanillaforums.com

ie: http://perfectworld.vanillaforums.com/discussion/7907

Navigating the forums might not be as reliant on javascript as I thought. The API would still make things a lot easier but I'm a bit more optimistic about Sweetiebot's future.

Does anyone know how you're supposed to be able to type in BBcode over there though?

opkossy

Last few times I tried and made some test posts, BBCode was a no-go over there.

The issues you mentioned are some of the things we had brought up with Val back when this was getting discussed and were a part of why he pushed for us keeping our current forums and getting a software upgrade instead. We managed to keep the forums, but never got the upgrade before he left and a lot of the things he was spearheading died off when he left the company.


Funny thing is, I was browsing the vanillaforums.com version since earlier and wasn't even paying attention to the URL to notice that it wasn't in the javascript one anymore. I wonder if it's because I opened a few topics in new tabs or something.



Edit: That said, it does use HTML and there is an option to enable/disable HTML view when creating a post. I haven't checked to see if it's a post by post basis, though. If it's a global change, one could use that instead.

SylenThunder - Twilight Temple

NRGLG - Heavens Tear wrote: »

I started making a mirror of the forums because I don't believe PWE when they say that the posts aren't going to be deleted. That sounds like total BS, based on their usual competence. I also don't believe they will migrate it to the same structure it is now. I'm pretty sure they are going to shove everything into some sort of giant clusterf**k that's hard to navigate.

Regardless, I wanted to update anyone who gives a ****. I've downloaded only 6GB of data so far, which is like 2% according to the calculations. It's taking longer than I thought. Usually I can download a site in no time, but ugh, this is taking a while (note: the time taken is not because of a low-end internet service (I'm quite the opposite actually), it's because navigating through the pages is taking the bot time). On a positive note, all forum stickies have been saved, along with any images in them. So at least those will be fine. I'll keep running the bot until these forums go offline. Hopefully I'll be able to download at least 50% of it.

I'm curious, what are you using to spider the site?

I set up httrack a while ago, it's at 94%, and shows only 597MB in size. So far looks like a full image too. ( I even got the PWI ad pictures >.<)

krisnda

SylenThunder - Sanctuary wrote: »

Torchlight 1 and 2 were fun, but once you're done, there's not a lot of re-play-ability in them.
STO was too riddled with microtransactions to be enjoyable.
NW wasn't quite as bad, but after finishing the main questline, it wasn't a lot of fun anymore so I quit playing. Now I hear the expansions and such are so buggy that even Cryptic has given an official apology.
I played with a few others, but none really held my interest. They were either like PWI with different graphics/quests/ect., or they just didn't have enough meat to hold my attention for long.

Even now, PWI is loosing the "fun" factor. The big factions are basically ruining the game for everyone else. They're doing it on purpose, and it's not like we have any support from PWE to do anything about it anyway.

Once PWI dies, I'll just move onto my other projects like my 7 Days to Die servers I host, or other games that I am currently testing or working on developers with.

This was really the only PWI game I've played, and I loved the game, loved helping the lower levels with quests and such, even doing the rare TW with guildmates and such. *sigh* Those were the days.

I just hope our Mod powers still work when the switch happens lol.

Sylen, I may have to poke you about that last sentence. b:cute

Bellicious - Dreamweaver

SylenThunder - Sanctuary wrote: »

I'm curious, what are you using to spider the site?

I set up httrack a while ago, it's at 94%, and shows only 597MB in size. So far looks like a full image too. ( I even got the PWI ad pictures >.<)

I just started with HTTrack myself 25mins ago though if you're going to be uploading it I may stop my rip.

SylenThunder - Sanctuary wrote: »

Once PWI dies, I'll just move onto my other projects like my 7 Days to Die servers I host, or other games that I am currently testing or working on developers with.

I played that once on a public server and couldn't find anything useful, everything had already been looted. Any tips to a better 7 days to die experience?

NRGLG - Heavens Tear

Bellicious - Dreamweaver wrote: »

I just started with HTTrack myself 25mins ago though if you're going to be uploading it I may stop my rip.

I was going to upload mine. You can stop if you want. My connection is far above average and on top of things. PWI Forums just have a ton of pages. So many, many, pages. That's what is taking time to parse out.

SylenThunder - Sanctuary wrote: »

I'm curious, what are you using to spider the site?

I set up httrack a while ago, it's at 94%, and shows only 597MB in size. So far looks like a full image too. ( I even got the PWI ad pictures >.<)

Full images here as well. Also using HTTrack, as it's the only application that reliably handles javascript links. I stated somewhere that it would probably be ~500GB of data. If you're saying it's around 600GB, I'll believe it. Mine was speculation based on the statistics that I had already gotten.

Also, were you going to upload your backup somewhere? Cause I may not end up with a finished copy. I kinda wished they had mentioned that they were migrating a few weeks earlier. The bot is bad at parallel navigation.

SylenThunder - Twilight Temple

NRGLG - Heavens Tear wrote: »

I was going to upload mine. You can stop if you want. My connection is far above average and on top of things. PWI Forums just have a ton of pages. So many, many, pages. That's what is taking time to parse out.



Full images here as well. Also using HTTrack, as it's the only application that reliably handles javascript links. I stated somewhere that it would probably be ~500GB of data. If you're saying it's around 600GB, I'll believe it. Mine was speculation based on the statistics that I had already gotten.

Also, were you going to upload your backup somewhere? Cause I may not end up with a finished copy. I kinda wished they had mentioned that they were migrating a few weeks earlier. The bot is bad at parallel navigation.

600MB, not GB, and its at 95% and 653MB now, so I expect the full site will be just under 1GB. I'm doing it mostly for my archive. I don't have a decent upload so it will take me forever to host.

NRGLG - Heavens Tear

SylenThunder - Sanctuary wrote: »

600MB, not GB, and its at 95% and 653MB now, so I expect the full site will be just under 1GB. I'm doing it mostly for my archive. I don't have a decent upload so it will take me forever to host.

Strange. Very, strange. That's small. I'm also archiving images that are posted on pages. Not linked images, but images that are directly viewed on the site. Those might be adding extra bloat. I wanted a full mirror though.

Edit: That size just seems so small. I was thinking that maybe you told the bot to not follow robots.txt, but then I found out they don't even have one... Also, maybe it's the user agent you're using. The bot is acting like my current version of Chrome. Since vBulletin will otherwise use the crawler layout for the display.

SylenThunder - Twilight Temple

NRGLG - Heavens Tear wrote: »

Strange. Very, strange. That's small. I'm also archiving images that are posted on pages. Not linked images, but images that are directly viewed on the site. Those might be adding extra bloat. I wanted a full mirror though.

Edit: That size just seems so small. I was thinking that maybe you told the bot to not follow robots.txt, but then I found out they don't even have one... Also, maybe it's the user agent you're using. The bot is acting like my current version of Chrome. Since vBulletin will otherwise use the crawler layout for the display.

I just set it with the default settings. Only change I made was to push max threads to 8. It's been running 4 and a half hours now, is at 96%, and shows 723MB size so far.

Bell, I PM'ed you so Krisnda doesn't nuke me. b:surrender

Molniya - Dreamweaver

Considering I can't even LOG IN on the main Arc site anymore (and I have no idea why, there is literally NOTHING that would be stopping it, it just endlessly tries forever...), I guess I'm just going have to not do anything on the forums anymore. Sigh.

AlysonRose - Heavens Tear

"post counts won't carry over"

Do you hear that? The collective sound of shriveling epeens b:shocked

I for one welcome our forced emigration, as it is nearly inconceivable that ANYTHING could be less functional than what we have had to use these last 7 years.

Avatars? Broke.

The block function? Broke.

Colors that are ugly and make links camouflaged, a and sections such as tech support that are utterly abandoned.

A parade of CMs that barely do anything, because they can't, and even then fail to pretend to be doing anything, bad mouth the company, and get black bagged.

Mods that actively participate in derailing topics rather than provide order.

A total lack of communication regarding sales, events, and other notables such as THIS VERY THREAD'S TOPIC leaving it to the PLAYERS to actually do anything for months at a time.

I know a lot of that is unrelated to the forum we use, but really, hardly anyone even uses the forum. People still WC for the blessing code daily b:shutup

Zoldi - Morai

I assume most of the current forumers disagree with this migration. This is probably a good thing for them to regroup every games but most of us don't care.
Then some of us will stop visiting the forums and some others will continue. But anyway, this might not be a major change for the community because a lot of PWI players just don't use it at all.

war34child

AlysonRose - Heavens Tear wrote: »

txt

At least this is one of the last gaming forums around the whole world, which isn't/wasn't completely dead.


Let's see if we really get a permanent support on the new forum. Or if PWI will just get buried on last spot of a list of 100+ games in the future.

Btw., I agree, mods which are not employees of PWE/belong to the player base should have never existed. It was just the cheapest option for them. A GM/CM which plays the game for 2h per day should have a better contact to player base and would know what's going on.