> Naamit, "historical posts" of what? By whom? Are you just looking for NIR posts, because I routinely look at "all of those in lots of topics in lots of categories", probably 2-4 times per year when I'm looking for something.

I'd lobby for every post, Krakii. NIR and customer alike. All directories, folders, subfolders, etc. Think about how impossible it's been to identify whose legacy lives on at Halcyon Hills. Consider the defects you've posted about over the years, enhancements, suggestions, discoveries - If it isn't captured, it's toast. Can you remember all those details? Doubtful.

---

Some lady softly says, "Naamit is over-rated."
You reply, speaking to the lady, "At least I have ratings."

Okay, you meant an actual save.

Hard-disk space is pretty cheap. <shrug> It'd be boring as crap to do, but "print to Adobe PDF driver" for thousands of posts per display wouldn't be that tough.

But that would be "someone sinking time into it," rather than any sort of automated system.

>>I can't say it didn't cross my mind.

I thought the same.



Clunk

(Buy your swords at CBD weapons in Zul Logoth.)

nothing says appropriately communicating like shutting down avenues of communication.

I'll be foregoing my usual long-winded post this time because it isn't necessary. Nice and short:


This is an incredibly dumb decision.

---

https://gswiki.play.net/Avawren

Shutting down the forums is a bad idea. And I say this as someone who thinks these forums are so outdated they are barely functional, but I'd STILL take that over not having the forums at all. Both discord and the wiki have great uses, but neither of them is a suitable replacement for the forums.

If this announcement was that the old forums were being shut down to be replaced with newer more functional forums, then great! But if they are just being shut down with no substitute, information about the game, events, towns, etc, will become far far more difficult to track down and keep up with.

This seems like a bad decision, and I hope either more information will be forthcoming to make sense of this, or that this decision gets reversed.

Is it really that expensive to run a basic forum? Maybe we can start selling add space on our gear to save the forums;

>look armor
This platemail bears the hallmarks of dwarven armorsmiths, the natural blue-grey lustre of the vultite is streaked with veins of bright silver like seams of ore through granite. Either through adept dwarven hand or divine intervention the veins of silver foregather upon the armor's breastplate forming the outline of a blacksmith's anvil. Tenuous motes of golvern have been expertly worked into the armor at this nexus resulting in a warm golden lambency around the anvil's silhouette. You also notice a small enchanter's glyph. A strange necrotic haze radiates from the armor. Glowing runes surround the armor slowly encircling it as you focus on them a disembodied female voice echoes through your mind "Starbucks makes great coffee"

All jokes aside if youre going to reduce my services by removing the forums I want a reduction in premiums since all services I signed up for are no longer being provided.

Or maybe we could raise enough money to GO FUND THEM enough to buy a VBulletin/whatever message board license...

--
ESP TUNE TOWNCRIER or ;tune towncrier
Web: http://gstowncrier.com/
Daily Email: gstowncrier.com/subscribe/

gstowncrier.com/where-to-find-the-towncrier/

Send in news: https://bit.ly/2ISsz2l

P.S. Help Wanted, Inquire Within

I highly doubt running the forums is expensive at all. Just like renting space on a server for this nearly entirely text game is probably insignificant.

>With the forum traffic low and the information spread in various areas, we feel we aren't being as effective as we could be with communication. We're a smaller game, it doesn't make sense to have things on the wiki, forums, front page of play.net, Discord, in-game, and on social media.

I think the majority of us understand the fairly obvious need to ditch these forums. I'm pretty amazed we made it to 2022 still running (decades-old?) custom-built forum software. It's clearly not cost-effective at this point.

But, I think your assessment that having any forum is "spreading our communication too thin", is a mistake. While the traffic is clearly low these days, I think a forum still provides a critically different form of interaction that is clearly a decent part of our community. And all these games really are is community, so dropping any aspect of that is a big risk, in my opinion.

I'm sure we could find cheap alternative forum software that could be run much more easily and still allow for account-authentication (like Discord) and would serve our needs well. (Possibly a change in forum policy, such as where announcements go also makes sense.) I think a proposal that still included an alternative forum option, at least for a way to provide player-to-player support and player-to-GM feedback, would be easier to swallow.

- Greminty

>With the forum traffic low and the information spread in various areas, we feel we aren't being as effective as we could be with communication. We're a smaller game, it doesn't make sense to have things on the wiki, forums, front page of play.net, Discord, in-game, and on social media. I think we do a good job currently with utilizing everything, but I also don't think it's a very good use of time to fragment everything everywhere.

These forums had higher traffic when they were the only place out of game to get answers. Compare the volume of traffic between GemStone and DragonRealms on these boards, year by year. When Discord didn't exist, there was lots here. Before the unofficials, there was a lot more.

I think Discord is great for some things but it seems the straw that broke the camel's back was making it an avenue for official communication. We had various chat rooms all throughout the 90s, when the player population was much greater, but I don't think we ever tried to use them for this. Announcements were relayed to the in-game news and to the forums, usually verbatim. I understand times change and the need to move away from the walled garden, but without a forum a chunk of "how the game is played" is going to be missing. And I understand Discord is great for getting questions answered quickly -- this is a reason it is so good. And, in this context, the reason it is bad.

I think it would be sensible to ask players to digest Discord announcements to other channels and having staff moderators correct them. This is less time-intensive than having staff trying to work in shifts trying to repost information. For example, players will post official announcements on the unofficials, but usually followed by their own blistering commentary and FTFYs. So this would be prone to issues we don't have now, but it would still work and be sustainable over time. Because announcements can come at any time, and the chat is continuous, having any one person trying to digest it is more than a full-time job. Even trying to digest a few hours of chat takes quite awhile, as some of us know.

All this goes the same for announcements made in one place. Instead of copy/pasting everywhere, I'd suggest taking a look at where the announcements are being made, and constrain it to one location that has a way to automatically relay the same info to the other channels. If they go do Discord first, then there should be a way to mark them as announcements and have a bot relay it somewhere else - RSS, Atom, maybe just a JSON file. News media sites have been doing this for a long time, and it works. Have a couple staff members moderate this periodically and release approved messages to social media, and the wiki and other sites grab the new data maybe once a day, copy into a new page for their own moderators to move to the appropriate location.

Thanks for the clarification, Wyrom. While Discord is good for fast real-time chat, it has a lack of permanence about it - which is not ideal for those trying to keep track of both changes to the game and to Elanthia's history. Also, yes, the existing forums are clunky, to say the least, plus the site could use some general modernizing/freshening up (https?).

Sothog's player

However, they also need to tie into the Simutronics billing database, because currently in order to post you have to have an account. (Or at least, that's the way it is supposed to be...)

>However, they also need to tie into the Simutronics billing database, because currently in order to post you have to have an account. (Or at least, that's the way it is supposed to be...)

Or just do something similar to what Discord does. There are plenty of ways it doesn't need to directly touch the billing database (and shouldn't).

Wyrom,

You, I trust. Please just make sure that, while the boards are still around, announcements are being shared? I can name a few that have been in the Discord mechanics channel that haven't been mirrored here. If the boards are still around, then those of us who patently ignore Discord should have the boards as a backup.

Cheers.

BURNETTL

Yeah this is an ongoing problem. It's why I do keep trying to dip my toe back into Discord. I don't last long but I keep trying off an on. I'm currently not using it because there is so many aspects about using Discord that I just flat out can't stand. It brings to fore a lot of the worst aspects of social interaction. (sigh)

Once the forums go down really hope that the Wiki will get updated and I guess I'll have to follow GS on Twitter or something (which I seldom use either) just to be aware of news announcements. Maybe the calendar will improve, its felt spotty to me for years before and doesn't look much better now.

I agree. Discord is exactly that. A place that brings discord.