Forum & Website Overhaul

[amandakay]

As a java web application developer, I read these forums, see Cord's posts, and can 100% feel the pain. My work supports code first written around 2005 (or perhaps a bit earlier), and it's a real pita sometimes. New devs don't know the stack, your senior devs eventually retire, and it's a hard sell to your stakeholders to justify rewriting stuff which currently works, especially knowing how long it'll take to re-write it...time which could be spent on new things rather than old things. When you do re-write something, someone has to decide how much is re-written, what stack is used, how compatible it should be with the old application, etc. Game development is a bit of a different beast from forums/web development. We use different tools, different libraries...SSG would either need to be lucky and have someone who keeps up with web forum technologies on the side, would need to cross-train someone, or hire someone with the skill set...but then they probably don't need a dedicated web developer beyond the initial massive project. It would be fun to do, though...well, fun for a crazy developer who likes those kinds of things. Hmm...I wonder if they could do some kind of automated data export from the existing forums, then use a script to auto-populate new accounts from our existing accounts, or something like temporarily reserving user names based on a person's email account with the option to import account data from the old website...yep I think too much.

[Boraxxe]

...your senior devs eventually retire...

That's gotta be murder.
You have that one guy. He's always there. His work is flawless. He never makes waves.
And then, he's gone.
And no one thought to give him a sponge to absorb that savvy.
You can't get him back.

Ack!
Whadda ya mean, everybody's mad?
It worked yesterday!

Grin.

[auximenes]

Would hate to lose my name. But would hate even MORE to lose my join date. That's the true badge of honor.

If we could manually add it to our title on the new boards that would help although some players would fabricate that date. It would hurt to lose the join date since to me it's an important indicator of what knowledge the player (probably) has.

[Marancil]

Choosing a new forum software is hard. I recently registered on half a dozen new sites and their forums. Having first hand experience setting up forums, upgrading and maintaining, and having dealt with several different "manufacturers" of the software I am extremely and totally opposed to tag based hierarchies with infinite scrolling implemented by, to name one, Discourse. There is material for a lengthy discussion, but I just wanted to mention what I would NOT want to see on this site.