UPDATE ON TIMELINE: The Future of the Penny Arcade Forums

Gilgaron

I've tried to help migrate a woodworking forum once and will say that it would be a pleasant surprise to switch platforms and be able to bring anything across. For manual migration having as long an overlap as possible will help. A non trivial amount of users won't bother and advertising to new users may be problematic. I have no useful web dev skills but I do System Analyst IT work if you need a hand with anything.

minor incident

Sterica wrote: »

I mean, Paf isn't technically PA branding. And it's a new era, so Neo would be good.

NEOPAF, nobody has heard of that, right?

Not bad, but I think we need something that better represents how we’re entering our Reset Era

Sterica

We have already nixed any kind of social media sites. This was a forum, and it either continues or dies as one.

Also Discord kinda does have forums now, but they by and large suck as a forum and just feel like a bunch of separate chat channels.

Hahnsoo1

Athenor wrote: »

Dark Raven X wrote: »

Panic!

Kidding. It's nice to have clarity. What the heck is the new name gonna be? Dime Colonnade has a nice off brand ring to it!

I don't want to start thinking about a new name, because you just know that any kind of naming/branding discussion is going to bring out the various cliques in the forum to hash things out, and that might get bloody.

And then we'll settle on something like "Buttwang" or something equally strange.

Sterica

I wouldn't worry about new users. Something like 95% of all new users here are spam bots, so we were always going to have a dwindling population. This just expedited things, but if people care enough to keep it going for a bit longer then we can work to do that.

I mean we still have a very roughly four-digit active population (and like 2000 if you count active-ish lurkers).

furlion

It is the end of an era but like so many others have said i am willing to pay a premium to have the forums continue to exist. If patreon is a no go due to the possibility of abuse, what about a monthly fee? Whatever it is that happens i just want this place to keep going because i so enjoy interacting with al(most)l of you.

Ramius

Ramius wrote: »

Weaver wrote: »

We can call it twitter, nobody's using that, right?

I can get ya "new-twitter.co" or "now-twitter.com" but I wouldn't put money on either surviving a C&D

newtwitters.com : A place for blathering newts.

Weaver

I sort of auto-assume anything we suggest out here will already have awareness in the internal discussions, but I found this?

https://xenforo.com/

SniperGuy

Post Arcadia is my terrible idea. It's got double meaning!

Otherwise I like Hahnsoo's idea, Buttwang has a ring to it.

Sterica

I think we're going to have to face the reality of the forums closing one day because our highest donor decided to share their yeti erotica with us or, more likely, became a Nazi or something.

We just have to be committed to moderating even if it means closing the forums. I'd rather the forums be gone than devolve into something reprehensible.

cB557

This news is kinda scary, at least as far as updates about video game forum administration can be. But at least this means the survival of the forums isn't just gonna come down to whether Penny Arcade decides to keep them going or not. Being able to try to keep the forums going and succeed or fail of our own accord, whichever way it goes, is a state of affairs I prefer to just hoping that they don't decide to pull the plug today.

Soggybiscuit

Id suggest we avoid any thing with butt or wang in it. Funny enough, bigassfans[dot]com is not a porn site (they sell industrial size ceiling fans - google it) but it usually gets filtered out by standard filtering software. The head electrician at a plant I did a job at always had to spend a day arguing with IT to get the site unblocked when he needed to do maintenance on their products.

syndalis

Zibblsnrt wrote: »

Athenor wrote: »

Hopefully this will allow us to get under the hood and fix/update things?

Do we have visibility into how much the current contract with Vanilla is worth, or what it would cost to maintain it?

We currently have some get-under-the-hood capabilities, a mix of "getting directly under the hood" and "contact with Vanilla people."

Under the hood is still a terrifying nightmare of intermingled custom bits and kludges that have accrued up over many many years so there'll still be issues there probably for as long as the current hosting situation continues. Buuut we're in a better position to put out fires than we were, say, when quotes or OPs vanished a little while back. (A lot of that period was things breaking while the communications channels weren't in place.)

Of course, should we get our own hosting/etc set up, the resultant forum will, in fact, Be Ours as far as that kind of thing goes.

Xaquin wrote: »

also I guess if we're going to have to rebrand we'd probably want to go with 'Xaquin and Acquaintances Forum'

catchy and rolls off the tongue

I admit I'm at least kind of a fan of the sheer staggering hubris of simply calling the successor The Forums.

I’ll admit some ignorance here…

What is vanilla’s modding/codebase written in? Is this php? ruby? like, what is the duct tape and bubblegum that gave us ravens and hydras back in the day written in?

cB557

Weaver wrote: »

I sort of auto-assume anything we suggest out here will already have awareness in the internal discussions, but I found this?

https://xenforo.com/

Yeah another forum I'm on uses xenforo and I quite like it. I was thinking about recommending it myself, but likewise figured the staff probably already knew about it. Plus migrating forum software is a nightmare, as far as I understand it, so I kinda figured it's not on the table.

Neveron

Ramius wrote: »

Zibblsnrt wrote: »

I admit I'm at least kind of a fan of the sheer staggering hubris of simply calling the successor The Forums.

I can get ya "theforums.live" and "theforumslive.com". "theforums.com" is a no-go.

Looks like .forum is a top level domain these days, and going into whois I think the.forum is available.

(Unfortunately it also seems to be $2500, jfc.)

Ramius

Weaver wrote: »

I sort of auto-assume anything we suggest out here will already have awareness in the internal discussions, but I found this?

https://xenforo.com/

Yeah, xenforo is a leading candidate in my book, as well as possibly https://invisioncommunity.com/ and https://flarum.org/ although I've heard flarum performs poorly on mobile ...

If anyone has first-hand experience with other forum platforms, please do share.

Sterica

I would go into this understanding that we'll possibly lose a good chunk of the history. Like, hosted images will definitely not be moving forward.

Zek

Let us know if you need volunteers for any of the technical work, I know quite a few of us have extensive web dev experience.

I don't feel strongly about preserving Vanilla, my two cents would be to choose the solution that is best for sustainable costs and ease of maintenance moving forward.

Zibblsnrt

cB557 wrote: »

This news is kinda scary, at least as far as updates about video game forum administration can be. But at least this means the survival of the forums isn't just gonna come down to whether Penny Arcade decides to keep them going or not. Being able to try to keep the forums going and succeed or fail of our own accord, whichever way it goes, is a state of affairs I prefer to just hoping that they don't decide to pull the plug today.

Definitely. And the current plug is paid for through next December, so I'm not currently worried about that situation changing while the community sets up an alternative place to live.

syndalis

Sterica wrote: »

I would go into this understanding that we'll possibly lose a good chunk of the history. Like, hosted images will definitely not be moving forward.

It’s solvable, especially with the timeline we have.

Please make sure you keep the audience making decisions large enough.

edit: tempered of course with cdn/storage requirements… I doubt we want to pay for 20 years of image hosting.

King Riptor

I'll miss this place if it goes and I hope we can find a solution. That said separating
from PA is probably a good idea anyway. The name has a weird stigma and the boards really have nothing to do with the brand anymore.
Also gonna echo maybe we find a new host because Vanilla is kinda jank

Heffling

Hahnsoo1 wrote: »

Athenor wrote: »

Dark Raven X wrote: »

Panic!

Kidding. It's nice to have clarity. What the heck is the new name gonna be? Dime Colonnade has a nice off brand ring to it!

I don't want to start thinking about a new name, because you just know that any kind of naming/branding discussion is going to bring out the various cliques in the forum to hash things out, and that might get bloody.

And then we'll settle on something like "Buttwang" or something equally strange.

This probably ranks higher in google search results than penny arcade forum, to be fair.

SniperGuy

I would not be particularly sad if we managed to just move accounts over and no forum history, but I'm not sure how alone in that I am. Removing a barrier to entry in moving accounts over is nice if possible.

I do really like the aesthetic of the boards, some forums out there are incredibly gaudy and crazy looking in comparison.

minor incident

Ramius wrote: »

Weaver wrote: »

I sort of auto-assume anything we suggest out here will already have awareness in the internal discussions, but I found this?

https://xenforo.com/

Yeah, xenforo is a leading candidate in my book, as well as possibly https://invisioncommunity.com/ and https://flarum.org/ although I've heard flarum performs poorly on mobile ...

If anyone has first-hand experience with other forum platforms, please do share.

Late 90s install of phpBB or nothing.



(Okay no, Xenforo is actually really good)

TelMarine

Ramius wrote: »

Weaver wrote: »

I sort of auto-assume anything we suggest out here will already have awareness in the internal discussions, but I found this?

https://xenforo.com/

Yeah, xenforo is a leading candidate in my book, as well as possibly https://invisioncommunity.com/ and https://flarum.org/ although I've heard flarum performs poorly on mobile ...

If anyone has first-hand experience with other forum platforms, please do share.

There's also Discourse: https://www.discourse.org

It is open source, has been around for a while (e.g., still gets security updates), can be customized via theming, and has a lot of different configuration options. Here's an example of what it usually looks like out of the box:

https://keycloak.discourse.group/

Heffling

I just want to say the biggest thank you to all of the mod staff that have supported this place throughout the years. I have made many good friends, have been able to help people, and am a better person by far than I was when I joined up almost two decades ago. We wouldn't have lasted nearly this long without you.

Unknown

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Tox

My only thoughts on administration is that if it's not going to continue to be Ramius (and thank you for what you've done for the community)...

If one or more mods are gonna have the admin role, I'd say it should be multiple, from different areas of the site, whether or not they have any elevated status among the mod team.

Not only will that help response time, but it's good insurance in case someone gets burned out or something.

As far as the name, I'm fine trusting whatever the mods decide, but if they want to do nominations or like a final up/down of their final decision just to gage feelings, those wouldn't be bad ideas

Zibblsnrt

SniperGuy wrote: »

I would not be particularly sad if we managed to just move accounts over and no forum history, but I'm not sure how alone in that I am. Removing a barrier to entry in moving accounts over is nice if possible.

I do really like the aesthetic of the boards, some forums out there are incredibly gaudy and crazy looking in comparison.

Moving accounts likely won't be a problem provided we don't end up doing something weird like transferring the place from a forum to a Mastodon instance. Doing that would probably be the most important part of any migration, if just because you'd want to be sure everyone is still who they say they are on the other side!

Posts would be doable but probably with a lot more issues, since a lot of the intra-forum links are in a format that assumes, well, our specific forum setup. Those little »s after "so-and-so wrote:" would probably break, for instance. It might be doable, but that's a question for people much deeper immersed in forum-software lore than I am.

Ramius

syndalis wrote: »

Zibblsnrt wrote: »

Athenor wrote: »

Hopefully this will allow us to get under the hood and fix/update things?

Do we have visibility into how much the current contract with Vanilla is worth, or what it would cost to maintain it?

We currently have some get-under-the-hood capabilities, a mix of "getting directly under the hood" and "contact with Vanilla people."

Under the hood is still a terrifying nightmare of intermingled custom bits and kludges that have accrued up over many many years so there'll still be issues there probably for as long as the current hosting situation continues. Buuut we're in a better position to put out fires than we were, say, when quotes or OPs vanished a little while back. (A lot of that period was things breaking while the communications channels weren't in place.)

Of course, should we get our own hosting/etc set up, the resultant forum will, in fact, Be Ours as far as that kind of thing goes.

Xaquin wrote: »

also I guess if we're going to have to rebrand we'd probably want to go with 'Xaquin and Acquaintances Forum'

catchy and rolls off the tongue

I admit I'm at least kind of a fan of the sheer staggering hubris of simply calling the successor The Forums.

I’ll admit some ignorance here…

What is vanilla’s modding/codebase written in? Is this php? ruby? like, what is the duct tape and bubblegum that gave us ravens and hydras back in the day written in?

The code is PHP. But under Vanilla Cloud, we do not have access to the PHP code. There are a number of add-ons that were developed by Vanilla staff (IcyLiquid), when they were active members of these forums. We can tweak settings but cannot edit the code itself. According to Vanilla docs I've seen, some of our features are officially no-longer-supported, like BBCode, but apparently we've been grandfathered in. That does cause occasional issues though, as their devs are not testing well against unsupported features, and fixing BBCode related bugs is not a priority for their devs.

Paladin

For the name and domain, might want to keep options under wraps prior to group decisionmaking to prevent troublemakers from prematurely poaching them.

Something that may help earlier is to survey how many people will be interested in migrating and the range of their planned support level if crowdfunding to ease getting quotes

Hahnsoo1

Tox wrote: »

As far as the name, I'm fine trusting whatever the mods decide, but if they want to nominations or like a final up/down of their final decision just to gage feelings, those wouldn't be bad ideas

Our new forum name becomes "Temporary Placeholder Name" permanently...

syndalis

Ramius wrote: »

syndalis wrote: »

Zibblsnrt wrote: »

Athenor wrote: »

Hopefully this will allow us to get under the hood and fix/update things?

Do we have visibility into how much the current contract with Vanilla is worth, or what it would cost to maintain it?

We currently have some get-under-the-hood capabilities, a mix of "getting directly under the hood" and "contact with Vanilla people."

Under the hood is still a terrifying nightmare of intermingled custom bits and kludges that have accrued up over many many years so there'll still be issues there probably for as long as the current hosting situation continues. Buuut we're in a better position to put out fires than we were, say, when quotes or OPs vanished a little while back. (A lot of that period was things breaking while the communications channels weren't in place.)

Of course, should we get our own hosting/etc set up, the resultant forum will, in fact, Be Ours as far as that kind of thing goes.

Xaquin wrote: »

also I guess if we're going to have to rebrand we'd probably want to go with 'Xaquin and Acquaintances Forum'

catchy and rolls off the tongue

I admit I'm at least kind of a fan of the sheer staggering hubris of simply calling the successor The Forums.

I’ll admit some ignorance here…

What is vanilla’s modding/codebase written in? Is this php? ruby? like, what is the duct tape and bubblegum that gave us ravens and hydras back in the day written in?

The code is PHP. But under Vanilla Cloud, we do not have access to the PHP code. There are a number of add-ons that were developed by Vanilla staff (IcyLiquid), when they were active members of these forums. We can tweak settings but cannot edit the code itself. According to Vanilla docs I've seen, some of our features are officially no-longer-supported, like BBCode, but apparently we've been grandfathered in. That does cause occasional issues though, as their devs are not testing well against unsupported features, and fixing BBCode related bugs is not a priority for their devs.

whoa…bbcode isn’t officially supported?

What are they using now, markdown?

Reznik

I've only dabbled with it for very small forums, so I have no idea how it performs at this kind of scale or what options there are for migrating to it, but I have enjoyed MyBB as a forum software and it seems to have a lot of community support.

Pinfeldorf

To be honest, I think it's only fair that we rename the new forums after Raijin. Something like, "The Truck Stop Toilet Forums Dot Com".

Unknown

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Chanus

so that link explaining i can use BBCode in my post that is infuriatingly within my thumb radius of the Post Comment button and i've hit dozens of times but never intentionally is also a lie???

Undead Scottsman

Did the higher ups give any reason why not and not, like, anytime in the past decade+?

Unknown

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Zek

I'd also suggest we keep in mind how we might be able to appeal to new posters. I know preserving the community is top priority, but we're likely to lose people in the transition one way or another. IMO if this new forum is purely defined as "the place for PA forum refugees," there's a good chance it will fade into obscurity.

I get that Discord's forums are not really forums at all. But I do think that we should have an official Discord server. That's pretty much the definitive place to have a community like this these days. It's a lot easier to refer someone there than it is to point them to an old school standalone forum.