Website/Forum Maintenance and Development

[sleepingferret]

The Website and Forum transfer is finally completed. I do give my sincere apologies for the delays, it seems my hosting provider was having issues locking down a rampant bit of code running around on people's accounts. The issue may still be yet unresolved, however I have reset my own hosting account information and have since decided to move forward with plans to begin work on moving the community over to vBulletin.

The beta release has been issued for those of us with licenses, so with that in mind I have decided a few things:

1) Now is a good time to implement vBulletin as planned. As upgrading to the actual release version will be easier than moving from any other software.

2) It is also a good time to "rebuild". While I will be preserving as much "essential" data from the old site as deemed necessary and needed. I will not be importing data from the forums.

This does however, mean community members will be required to re-register. Re-registering this time however will give you access to any new features being added with vBulletin.

If you have any questions please contact me.

Thanks and kind regards,

Ryan

[VJain]

Way to delete my post -_-'.

[Agent47]

hello. post after lurking =D

[mameth]

hello everyone =D

[TheOnlyAce]

"The Alamo"? Really?

[Skull]

This is the finest vBulletin software?

Edit: Well can you enable allow using image bbcode for signatures?

[sleepingferret]

This is a beta release of vBulletin 4.0, I paid for 4.x CMS publishing suite license which grants me access to the latest 3.x forum software however the beta version of 4.0 was released and I decided to install and use it. While I've had a few minor issues, there hasn't been anything to completely bent out of shape about.

The major downside of course is that I'll have to spend time doing any custom CSS work (or having it done) myself for now. As no previous styles for 3.x are guaranteed to work with 4.x, but again I consider that to a minor issue. I'll take functionality over looks for the immediate future.

As for the signature permissions, that has been addressed and changed. (That should have been enabled to begin with....that was my mistake for overlooking it).

[Manze]

When I look at the forums, it kinda seems like NOTD Aftermath was more of an afterthought than the center of the fora. I didn't even notice the subsections existed until I scrolled down all the way - they look as if they were just put there as an afterthought. It would look better were they to be put underneath the Starlite Operations forum group - the three forums in here first, then the ones for the game, then the rest. These three subforums are sort of the website/administrative section, so it makes sense for them to be on top.

Sorry if this should have been in another thread; I'm not entirely sure how things work here as opposed to the old forums.

[sleepingferret]

NOTD Aftermath is currently the only official project as the domain name suggestions, that was officially backed to my knowledge under anyone's reign as the administrator of the project/site. And while, I'm by no means any where close to being done with the site (I chose basic functionality over looks); I mostly agreed to take the reigns:

1) To preserve the community's existence
2) To attempt to promote new community growth
3) Maintain the NOTD Aftermath project in adherence to it's founder's principles
4) Ensure any future development projects (such those done for SC2) were done in adherence to the project's founder's principles

Now as far as additional projects and other community activities not related to the NOTD Aftermath project, none have ever been brought up to my knowledge. Thus the forums are currently organized with said project being in the "limelight". Should this change in the future, either new forums will be added or forum tiles and/or descriptions will be edited to reflect such changes.

All "general" category discussion forums are of course just that, as they always have been. Some of course, as they were before divided by "topic", but there is still "The Mess Hall" for general banter about whatever.

[Topaazi]

so it's time to rebuild the community, eh? Perhaps we could consider this as a new chapter in the world of "NotDA"

[MarineInfantry]

New chapter in the world of NotA? I dun think so. Let's just say we switched combat leaders :P

[PsychoMedic]

Hooray the forums are back. Thanks for all your work! :D

[MarineInfantry]

Yeah.... the forums are back -.- thank god. I thought he said it was just gonna be 72 HOURS. not like 2 weeks :mad:

[faults]

it's really sad to see all that content built of over the years discarded but this is a fresh new start to notdam!

[sleepingferret]

I still technically have it, but importing a crappy forum database structure into one like vBulletin's is not something I really wanted to mess with. I may use my test site rights to see how a data import would go, but I'd rather not break things since they're back up.

[TheOnlyAce]

Make a forum where all the 'old topics' are and lock em. You can port over important topics like suggestion topics, version development topics and the like, while the rest get thrown in the archives and locked.

[Death_Phoenix]

Ferret, I take it you now the new Pipedream? Great initiative.

One thing though, which you should probably consider, is that the community has taken a really big nosedive in the past few months. Sure, people are reporting they are playing regularly, but the fact is when the old site went down for those few weeks, we lost a significant portion of the fora-browsers. Now that you're trying to rebuild the fora, it would be wise to reduce the number of subforums for this initial phase.

Essentially, treat this as if it were the first time it was being established. When new users join they will see like 30 subforums, and within each subforum only 1-2 threads. It's not a very good look; and you can't expect the small user base to fill up those subforums by themselves. It is far easier to have a fewer number of subforums, and when they reach adequate traffic and capacity, then branch out.

[trance)adonis]

I have waited quite a while to see how the forum and website will evolve, and have seen that it has not moved much since it was created. Now I agree with you Ferret that importing old forum database will be a messy job and don't really see the great need for it. But there are few things that this website with benefit from. Old Website had some really good guides about class usage and overall guides about team play, as well there was a detailed information on all classes, there was also a notd wiki which i can't find any more, all of those things will help promote NotD to new people and will make forum more active IMO.

[sleepingferret]

I still have all the old site files somewhere around, I'm digging through them and messing around with stuff on a test site as I get time. It's a slow process, especially when I get interrupted with work and what not. But it always was my intentions to restore things such as the wiki and the articles regarding classes and such.

[F1ip]

Make a forum where all the 'old topics' are and lock em. You can port over important topics like suggestion topics, version development topics and the like, while the rest get thrown in the archives and locked.

this would be swell