Forum Migration Thread

[saerni.2584]

For all those "why wasn't this migrated over from the old forum" complaints and comments.

[Regina Buenaobra.6193]

As mentioned in the blog post, if you had existing discussions in the old forums, feel free to re-create them on these forums. Old content will not be automatically migrated.

[Jonny.6013]

It does seem a strange decision not to retain forum discussions relating to the first five years of the game's history. Has there been any kind of explanation for that decision?

[Fenom.9457]

Calling it now, Cantha thread coming any second

[Seaunicorn.9317]

As a relatively new player, the old forum was a treasure trove for me, with so much of content. A bit sad to see all those posts wiped right off the bat. :/

[devastoscz.9851]

Seeing as the subforums were basically maintained, it seems odd that the content wasn't migrated when the changes aren't radical. Also I'm super salty cause I wrote a 6 paragraph response to a post 10 minutes before this migration happened. FML.

[TheGrimm.5624]

I understand its a new day on the forum but will the old posts be ported over at some point?

[Ken Virgo.6084]

@"Regina Buenaobra.6193" said:As mentioned in the blog post, if you had existing discussions in the old forums, feel free to re-create them on these forums. Old content will not be automatically migrated.

Most likely not as per regina.

[PlagueParade.7942]

I liked the old forums. A lot less clutter.

[TheGrimm.5624]

Thanks, hadn't seen the blog post yet, checking that now.

[fizz.4536]

@Jonny.6013 said:It does seem a strange decision not to retain forum discussions relating to the first five years of the game's history. Has there been any kind of explanation for that decision?

It may seem like an odd decision, but it's probably easier to just start fresh with a new database. There's a lot of information on the old forum, but there's also a lot of trash posts which probably wouldn't be worth moving.

[Gaile Gray.6029]

Hey guys,

We've seen a few questions about migration, and I'd like to give you some background:

As many of you know, the old forums have had a few problems over time. Some things were "hard coded" but they're things we would really have liked to be able to change. (I can't tell you how many poor forum members I've had to reassure when their post was removed -- with no points or penalty -- simply as a housekeeping measure to remove their inadvertent quote of someone else's unacceptable comment. The reason this caused alarm was because the word "infraction" was embedded in the message that they received, and we were unable to remove it.

There were so many things wrong with the old forums that fixing them was not an option, and moving to new, well-supported software from a reputable company became our objective. So we started vetting different forum providers -- months and months ago, because we knew this was a significant decision and we wanted to be sure we "chose wisely." ;) With that investigation, we also checked into the possibility of migrating existing content into a new forum system, and that option was simply not possible in any system we considered. It's not that we didn't do it, it's that we literally couldn't do it.

Too, I believe that the forum community itself is a very good judge of what's good, current, and valuable... even "evergreen" in the context of a forum. So migration by the community is what we're suggesting, after a member appraises the value of a post and its relevance to the game today. They can port, or they can suggest that the original poster ports their own content. (If someone reposts content originally written by another forum member, as a courtesy I suggest they lead it with "Originally post by [name]" to give full credit to the originally poster.

I hope that answers the question of migration. Thanks to everyone who takes a look at the old forums with an eye to valuable content there, and then moves their content or helps others bring it here.

[Endless Soul.5178]

That's kind of too bad, I had a lot of comments I would go back and revisit in my profile. It all seems to be lost to the ether now.

[Menadena.7482]

:( There is some really good stuff in active discussions. Like bugs that are being worked on.

[Astralporing.1957]

I can understand that migrating the old threads might have been too complicated a problem for the Anet staff, but i can't really understand the decision to just casualy delete the whole forum history.

No, saying "you can recreate the threads on the new forums" won't work. Yes, many topics will make a comeback, but that's not the same as re-creating them. That is just not something that users can do.

Also, remember, that there's a lot of info in those 5 years of forum history. Lot of it is in threads that aren't currently active, byt that doesn't make those posts no longer relevant.

For one, there's a lot of dev posts that are currently relatively easy to reference in related topics, but after old forum is deleted will be gone. And since Anet is not too keen on posting too much, asking the relevant questions again is not really likely to get the results at all.

...unless that's the point, and Anet would like to use forum change as a excuse to get themselves rid of all those posts, and all the past inconvenient threads?

So, by all means, lock the old forums, and start afresh on the new ones, but do not delete the old posts. And by "don't delete" i don't mean "in 6 weeks". I mean "don't do it ever"

[Jonny.6013]

@fizz.4536 said:

@Jonny.6013 said:It does seem a strange decision not to retain forum discussions relating to the first five years of the game's history. Has there been any kind of explanation for that decision?

It may seem like an odd decision, but it's probably easier to just start fresh with a new database. There's a lot of information on the old forum, but there's also a lot of trash posts which probably wouldn't be worth moving.

That's perfectly true, and probably too labourious to work out which bits to keep and which to trash.

I suppose my point is that the trash forms part of the history of the game. Perhaps it's just me but part of the interest of the forum is looking back at older threads and discussions from earlier times. A lot of that information would be technically out of date now, but still interesting for those of us who played during that period. It's a shame that isn't being archived, in my view.

[Astralporing.1957]

...and now my post that i have already written, and that was visible and posted, just went and disappeared after i made a slight edit to it. With no info about what had happened.

Edit:...and now it's visible again.

Are you really sure that this forum engine is better?

[Torinor.9521]

Can we please get the old release notes migrated?

[smiley.1438]

what about all the lost knowledge in the API subforums?that hurts.

[Cliodna.8351]

Forum looks great. Some will need to find theire way in the new forum.

Anet great job

[Gaile Gray.6029]

More information:

We are unable to retain the forum in an sort of "archive" form, because it lives on antiquated hardware that is, quite honestly, on it's last (technological) legs. From what I was told, the server should have had a few updates by now, but because we didn't want to risk the forums completely with taking that step, we held off on those updates until we could launch these forums.

Essentially, we have been operating on a wing and a prayer for a while now, knowing that at any time the forums could topple with no way of resurrecting them. Sure, we have backups, but the way the old forums were configured, the back-ups would not have been helpful in rebuilding the old forums.

Unless something completely unforeseen happens, the old forums should be in place at least until the end of October. After that, we must remove all content as we close down / retire the server on which the old forums are installed.

I was very sad to learn that we would not be able to "mothball" the old forums indefinitely, but having talked with several folks on the tech side, I fully understand that we need to retire the server soon and that moving or in other ways trying to archive truly is not possible.

[Gaile Gray.6029]

@Torinor.9521 said:Can we please get the old release notes migrated?

You should be able to find every update note on the official wiki.

[Hot Sauce.2867]

@"Regina Buenaobra.6193" said:As mentioned in the blog post, if you had existing discussions in the old forums, feel free to re-create them on these forums. Old content will not be automatically migrated.

But as others have stated, I think certain things should be migrated, like some of the information that is in the API dev and all of the release notes. These would be great candidates to move over here IMO, even if done only manually by a dev.

[Manawind.3701]

Best bet would just be a sticky post that links to the wiki's patch notes, so that there is a connection from here to there.

[Alatar.7364]

I have to agree. There were beautiful and useful Guids and Contents on the old Forums.Is there any reason in particular why the content could not/ was not moved?