Forum Migration - May 4th(Delayed - Update Inside) [Updated 6/12/2015]

strumslinger

Update: Looks like I spoke too soon. We're delaying the migration until further notice. Information here: http://bit.ly/1HZLoa0

Hey all, we'll finally be migrating our forums on May 4th.

More information here: http://www.arcgames.com/en/arc-news/detail/9196863

Edited by Moderator on 6/12/15 to include link from news blog.

http://www.arcgames.com/en/arc-news/detail/9222813-announcement%3A-portal-wide-migration-changes

NRGLG - Heavens Tear

How about fixing those new forums before migrating. It's been proven that if someone wanted to, they could seriously mess with them. Even going so far as to be able to cover up things like their name, avatar, the flag button, and a lot more. Which I've purposely done to demonstrate that there's a problem. See for yourself: http://www.arcgames.com/en/forums#/discussion/7895/testing/p1

ZentDreigon - Raging Tide

We should get out popcorn supplies ready for what's to come.

ggalacticparadox

strumslinger wrote: »

Hey all, we'll finally be migrating our forums on May 4th.

More information here: http://www.arcgames.com/en/arc-news/detail/9196863

The coordination for communication on your companies end has been absent. How will the migration work when we have two different accounts - ARC's account, which is present on Vanilla, and the current account, which is not connected to that one?

Furthermore, the new forums can be abused. That sounds like it is a problem waiting to happen. I've ran a full backup of these forums and will be mirroring them tonight on my server, because we all know that PWE/ARC will struggle to shove what content these forums have into the new Vanilla forums software, and will promptly delete these forums from existence.

NRGLG - Heavens Tear

ZentDreigon - Raging Tide wrote: »

We should get out popcorn supplies ready for what's to come.

I can only hope it doesn't get ignored. Problems like this should never be left open for the community's sake.

From what I was reading, the Vanilla forums support Markdown. I don't see the big deal in disabling HTML and CSS and enabling Markdown. It's a great system that is somewhat easy to parse and has great readability results. I've made a version of it myself that only took me a day to write and the results were outstanding.

opkossy

NRGLG - Heavens Tear wrote: »

I can only hope it doesn't get ignored. Problems like this should never be left open for the community's sake.

From what I was reading, the Vanilla forums support Markdown. I don't see the big deal in disabling HTML and CSS and enabling Markdown. It's a great system that is somewhat easy to parse and has great readability results. I've made a version of it myself that only took me a day to write and the results were outstanding.

It's also supposed to have BBCode, but that hasn't actually been something we could use (from my limited experience. I've never actually posted there, just abused the preview and draft abilities to do my own minor tests) over the past two years.

That said, I have spoken to him about the issues as well so at least he's aware of it. He responded pretty quickly to my first time communicating with him considering he's going through all the forums at the moment to handle these forum migrations. So hopefully it means we'll get another response before the big migration happens.

Asterelle - Sanctuary

I can't promise Sweetiebot will ever be able to make the jump. The new forum is very different and much of her core will have to be rewritten. Maybe someday there will be a Sweetiebot 2.0 but for now her future is doubtful. b:sad

If you want to show your support though you can leave a comment in this request thread asking PWE to enable the public API. That would make bringing Sweetiebot over a lot more feasible.

NRGLG - Heavens Tear

@OPKossy
I didn't know it supported BBCode, although that would work better IMO since all of the forums being migrated are vBulletin.

As for talking to them, I do hope it yields results. At least someone other than the community aware.

zoner112012

What about a fix to arc first? I am sure I am not the only one tired of having to close the multitude of tasks that Arc runs in the background.... 2x ArcOSOverlay.exe and 4x ArcBrowser.exe files every time I start up Arc. I have to close them down because it makes my comp all laggy and then I can't even use Arc except to redeem codes...so how about before you guys initiate yet another change on us that NO ONE WANTS...you fix the issues with the system. This is horrendous.

opkossy

NRGLG - Heavens Tear wrote: »

@OPKossy
I didn't know it supported BBCode, although that would work better IMO since all of the forums being migrated are vBulletin.

As for talking to them, I do hope it yields results. At least someone other than the community aware.

You and me both. Whether or not talking to them yields results is going to determine quite a good deal about just what happens with those forums and likely how many of us will end up really using it much.

Asterelle - Sanctuary wrote: »

I can't promise Sweetiebot will ever be able to make the jump. The new forum is very different and much of her core will have to be rewritten. Maybe someday there will be a Sweetiebot 2.0 but for now her future is doubtful. b:sad

If you want to show your support though you can leave a comment in this request thread asking PWE to enable the public API. That would make bringing Sweetiebot over a lot more feasible.

And now you've had me make my first official post there in 2 years because I want to add in my support before it's too late. Congrats! b:chuckle

Zoldi - Morai

strumslinger wrote: »

Hey all, we'll finally be migrating our forums on May 4th.

More information here: http://www.arcgames.com/en/arc-news/detail/9196863

Hey ! Thanks for this official thread even though you might have noticed there was already an unofficial one about this, so it's not a big announcement.
And good luck

eirghan

Yes. I Finally Will Be Able To Make My Avatar A -no-!

As you can tell that wouldnt have been the word i would choose given the option. This forum. Maybe is a little more suited for trolls like me.

XXHotXx - Morai

please reconsider it, vanilla forums are awful

opkossy

eirghan wrote: »

Yes. I Finally Will Be Able To Make My Avatar A -no-!

As you can tell that wouldnt have been the word i would choose given the option. This forum. Maybe is a little more suited for trolls like me.

Don't even joke about that since mods are gonna be mods there too. Dx

I do NOT want to have to patrol avatars in addition to sigs. kthx. b:angry

NRGLG - Heavens Tear

That's something I never really thought about. Over here you didn't have to worry about avatars because they were limited to the ones for the game, but over there it's a free-for-all. Seems like being a mod just got harder.

opkossy

NRGLG - Heavens Tear wrote: »

That's something I never really thought about. Over here you didn't have to worry about avatars because they were limited to the ones for the game, but over there it's a free-for-all. Seems like being a mod just got harder.

Yeah. It was another of the things that made us turn v4liance away from migrating the forums back then. Especially as mods have no tools to actively change player avatars/signatures here and, while v4l stayed on top of it and we didn't have much offenses here, it would be a lot to deal with when everyone could freely alter both at any time.

Just another one of those things that feel oppressive (though we had a nice system here til it broke with the class/level/server/ingame name thing) somewhat but actually do a lot of help. Considering all the forums getting brought together and PWE's consistency, I'm not too sure how well it'll be handled when people start abusing the fact they can freely change their avatars and sigs. Even if they don't use explicit ones, they can still do things like rapidly flashing alternating colors thanks to animated images being totally allowed there...

NRGLG - Heavens Tear

OPKossy wrote: »

Even if they don't use explicit ones, they can still do things like rapidly flashing alternating colors thanks to animated images being totally allowed there...

Ugh. That's such an older forum thing to do, but my god was it horrible when people did it. My poor lil eyes can't take strobes of different colors well.

Note: Oh ****, someone is going to post one right after this post, huh?

opkossy

NRGLG - Heavens Tear wrote: »

Ugh. That's such an older forum thing to do, but my god was it horrible when people did it. My poor lil eyes can't take strobes of different colors well.

Note: Oh ****, someone is going to post one right after this post, huh?

Yeah. It's a royal pain and I never liked or appreciated people doing that back then.

Fortunately, as long as free HTML is a thing, somebody could just cover up all the avatars on a page with a black box. The lesser of two evils, I'm certain.

ovenusarmanio

The free HTML needs to go for non-admins. Allow admins to modify it if it needs to help people with their fancy guides or whatever.

The stickies need to be migrated.

Free sweetiebot.

Use this opportunity to make some kind of promotion for particularly helpful players since we can no longer identify post count. Just something that shows they are veterans, a good idea for who is helpful in general is anyone with a large post count who has posted recently. It can be refined from there (we can help with that) but that's a good jumping point.

krisnda

I'd just like a reply tbh.b:surrender

eirghan

Man even my politically and anatomically correct terms get mod shafted

Kossy and co are gonna get reaaaaaal good at css soon. Can feel it.

opkossy

oVenusArmanio wrote: »

-Smart stuff-

So much this. It's supposed to support BBCode and that's all general users should have. Staff can keep the HTML but otherwise no.

Agree with the latter parts as well. If this is going to be done it should be done in a positive way instead of simply causing more negativity.

Also yes #freesweetiebot2015

eirghan wrote: »

Man even my politically and anatomically correct terms get mod shafted

Kossy and co are gonna get reaaaaaal good at css soon. Can feel it.

I will hunt you down and beat you with a large trout! b:angry

NRGLG - Heavens Tear

oVenusArmanio wrote: »

The free HTML needs to go for non-admins. Allow admins to modify it if it needs to help people with their fancy guides or whatever.

I couldn't agree with you more. I mean, look at how I defiled my own profile page: http://www.arcgames.com/en/forums#/profile/118700/nrglg | People can do that to anyone's profile if they wanted to.

eirghan wrote: »

Kossy and co are gonna get reaaaaaal good at css soon. Can feel it.

OPKossy wrote: »

I will hunt you down and beat you with a large trout! b:angry

Trouts are great for beatings. b:laugh

MageMERC - Harshlands

"..... to make things much easier for you guys....." (from the OP link)

Mmmm, I didnt realize these forums were so difficult to use.

NRGLG - Heavens Tear

Well, I think they are talking about people new to forums.

For people who are familiar or have used vBulletin, this is breaking the principle of least astonishment at the moment, which is quite the opposite of easier use.

Sylvae - Sanctuary

OPKossy wrote: »

Even if they don't use explicit ones, they can still do things like rapidly flashing alternating colors thanks to animated images being totally allowed there...

Any bets on how long until the first lawsuit from someone with epilepsy hits for negligence in allowing that to happen?

opkossy

NRGLG - Heavens Tear wrote: »

Well, I think they are talking about people new to forums.

For people who are familiar or have used vBulletin, this is breaking the principle of least astonishment at the moment, which is quite the opposite of easier use.

Nah. It's less people new to forums and more people that frequent more than one forum they have OR happen to be staff for multiple titles since we all know how the company tends to stretch their employees thin.

For everyone else (aka the vast majority) it's making things less intuitive, harder to deal with, and more of a general pain in the butt. For example, all the BBCode formatting options we have right here seem to be practically hidden (if they show them at all) in the standard post editor over there which formatting a post much more annoying and time consuming for those who don't know the HTML to do it in HTML view mode.

Sylvae - Sanctuary wrote: »

Any bets on how long until the first lawsuit from someone with epilepsy hits for negligence in allowing that to happen?

... Dibs on collecting bet money!

barber

As a constant member of forums since 2000 and seeing a blue million new types of forums come and go. I just gotta say people tend to make mountains out of mole hills...relax, its not a life ending experience

As far as losing post counts, I've had totals of over 15,000 get wiped out overnight because of switches to new forums, heck I lost over 700 when they screwed up the avatars and stuff on here months ago


EDIT: On a side note, as far as for the moderators I feel for you guys trying to get things figured out. I've moderated on tons of forums before for years...InterAct, Datel, Gameshark, a short stint on the IGNBoards when GameShark was using their forums and even 123 DVD XCopy just to name a few...and I know how much of a headache it is to learn all the new options of new forums...so I wish ya all the best with the switch if they do give the modding powers back to you ....good luck

Asterelle - Sanctuary

There's a way to get animated GIF avatars without HTML cheating it!

First go here and delete your forums avatar if you already set one:
http://www.arcgames.com/en/forums#/profile/picture

Then go here and set an animated gif avatar on your arc account
https://www.arcgames.com/en/my/account

After years of seeing broken avatars this is gonna be fun.
Ohh and I think setting HTML/BBCode is configured on a forum wide setting.
I don't think you can change it for individual users.

You can blacklist the "style" attribute in HTML though and it will take care of the abuses.
Im not sure if you can have elevated user HTML privileges but I'd be interested in it b:dirty

opkossy

Asterelle - Sanctuary wrote: »

There's a way to get animated GIF avatars without HTML cheating it!

First go here and delete your forums avatar if you already set one:
http://www.arcgames.com/en/forums#/profile/picture

Then go here and set an animated gif avatar on your arc account
https://www.arcgames.com/en/my/account

After years of seeing broken avatars this is gonna be fun.
Ohh and I think setting HTML/BBCode is configured on a forum wide setting.
I don't think you can change it for individual users.

You can blacklist the "style" attribute in HTML though and it will take care of the abuses.
Im not sure if you can have elevated user HTML privileges but I'd be interested in it b:dirty

Depends on the forum. I know a few of them have it to where while you can enable/disable html as a global setting, you can also modify whether or not certain user groups are able to use it or not. For individual users and not groups though, yeah I don't recall being able to (or at least, I've never attempted since aforementioned user group function) set html use on that level.


Gif avatars. Gif avatars everywhere! Soon a pony invasion, no doubt!

avs33fan

strumslinger wrote: »

Hey all, we'll finally be migrating our forums on May 4th.

More information here: http://www.arcgames.com/en/arc-news/detail/9196863

How are you able to have a new avatar while others havent been able to for the longest time?
Not that it matters now with a new forums coming.


And will you guys be doing anything about the html spam that people can and will be doing?