Fate of the MSPA Forums

jacquerel , I'm sorry that your previous experience with WP has been so turbulent. I hope we can change your mind as time goes on. Regarding your concerns, I would agree that WP as a whole cannot dedicate a ton of resources to forum stuff (it's basically me right now). In the end though, it's only so we can quickly deliver more content (previously in finishing the comic by 4/13, and now Hiveswap), which is, after all, the reason why everybody is here in the first place, right?

imglasses , jacquerel and the One Guy have good points on why we want to do the whole thing natively again. I would also like to elaborate that I hope the "officialness" lets people treat it more as a central hub for the community. At the very least, I hope it's going to better serve certain members of the fanbase compared to tools like reddit or Tumblr. As for the old posts, what I have to say is a little more tricky. It is true that the new forums will be brand spanking new (so fresh and so clean), mostly for security reasons. Does that mean all is lost forever? Not necessarily, but what happens from there is extremely uncertain and I'm uncomfortable saying more on the subject.

I am excited about the prospect of new official forums, and I would remind everyone that Blap previously stated he would close these forums once an official MSPA Forums returns. So, even if we wanted to stay here, I'm not sure we could.

That said, without history beyond what the internet archive saved, I'm probably in the same boat as Jac. I don't use the forums much any more, but I do really value the conversations from when I was more active.

obsidalicious The only piece of information that was told to me, and that I'm allowed to say is that "old forum data was compromised." This is pretty vague to me, and I think that was the intention. As a general rule, I would recommend changing your password on accounts with exactly the same credentials, regardless of whether this means that passwords were stolen or if it is just something comparatively innocuous like they managed to change the HTML on the main page or something. The reason is that I think nobody can be 100% sure in the realm of digital security, and the fact that any sort of exploit existed in the first place puts doubt in my mind about the robustness of the version of vBulletin the old forums used. I can say one of the priorities for the new forums is rock solid stability and security.

Not to pile everything on you, but since you're the only one we can ask I might as well lay out the query of whether or not you know why no backups were saved, or at the very least if you know if the backups saved from previous years are still around? Letting the forums fall into the void is one thing, but I got the impression from some of the conversations earlier in this thread that doing that at least once every year was kind of a standard (or even mandatory?) practice for private websites.

At the very least I know that saving backups was a thing that happened for a while, after all the forums before the last forums were saved and in a "quarantine zone" of sorts that we could browse through at our leisure, surely someone knows where the copies of those are?

sorry guys but

lyla sigh My apologies for the vagueness of my answer before, but that's about all I got right now. I have very specific instructions to get the forum up first and treat getting the old data is an entirely separate thing that will occur after the launch.

I trust Memento's confirmation.

E: Ninja'd

Question: When can I get around to deleting this account :mspa:

How much can you tell us on current plans and goals for the new forums and possible integration with old forums?

Ok, I trust these informations, then.

If you have any clout with What Pumpkin at all could you recommend they just hire a community liaison already?
If it's really impossible for them to spare anyone to say a single sentence like "we're working on it" because they're busy working at the game then they clearly have a big hole in their staff list.
It's clear that they do not have any such individual on staff right now who has been worked off their feet, because there's been no news or community dialogue about any other What Pumpkin product either, and it's not your job either, though I am glad you are taking the time to do it given that nobody else could be bothered.

It's a hole that's been obvious for years because this (late responses, changes that run directly counter to how the community currently works and come as a surprise even to the volunteer staff, extremely unpopular actions that nobody can explain apart from "we were told this had to happen") was an issue literally every time they wanted to make a change to the forums in the past, or had to due to outside effects, so I'm astounded it's still not been filled... but if they want to run a community they need someone whose job it is to talk to that community.

You're in on it too! WHY MUST YOU HURT US.

@ath I can't speak for the rest of WP at all, but I definitely signed an NDA.

Well, awesome to hear that it IS being worked on. Just knowing that has lowered my salt levels significantly.

I do hope at least some of the old forum stuff was saved, though. There's a lot of fandom history in those old comic discussion threads, and a lot of projects that were based almost exclusively in the forums. Would be a shame if all of it was lost.