I think the forum really needs its reboot sooner rather than later. At this point a simple archive of the existing site and replacement with a mobile-friendly one with all the users carried over is all it needs. Er… and perhaps a rather drastic reduction in the entry requirements.
Cas 
I don’t have the time for a reboot, and others jumped on board earlier, but couldn’t deliver either – real life gets in the way of a transition/update, and given that JGO is almost belly-up, it’s hardly worth quite a significant effort… We’re all probably better off to jump ship, to some of the few remaining forums.
Well, I prefer to stay on this ship until last forums ends, like I’ve done with slick forum too 
[quote]Embrace it… all of the issues you mentioned could be solved by just letting the Discord grow, and in the year 2018 it’s easier to grow a Discord server than it is to grow a forum because people don’t like using forums anymore. Hate to say it but it really do be like that sometimes, cut the life support
[/quote]
No, I disagree. The Discord and the forum solve different needs; both are necessary.
I’m much more active on the Discord than the forum. I am definitely younger, so here’s my perspective: Discord is easy. It opens when I start up my computer, it’s always there on my side monitor, and I use it for other stuff too. It’s much more casual: one can talk about memes or politics or life in a way obviously not practical on here.
However, there’s no doubt the discussions on the forum are both more educational and easier to find. Discussions like the Maven thread going on right now are impractical in the Discord, because they just get lost in the chat history after one or two people derail the conversation. The wealth of knowledge here is far to valuable to surrender or ‘let die’ or whatever–I came here googling problems about BufferedImages but I also found solutions to my main game loop and a bunch of other things. And plus, there’s a lot to be said for just the people on here. I don’t want to lose contact with even the weirdest of y’all–friends are important.
I think a reboot is a dangerous idea, because it risks the already tenuous amount of people on here. If the site is down for a week due to unforeseen challenges, that’s going to hurt. I’d still support it though, because I think the clunkiness of some elements here are definitely keeping people away. Random idea of a retention method for the new forum: maybe we could have guest posts so you don’t have to register an account? They could be limited in some way, maybe by IP address.
EDIT - Oh, also, another idea for this forum: We could have a ‘Best of JGO’ series that picks out well written and informative posts and puts them at the top somewhere. Maybe they could get posted on some official Medium account to draw more attention? We should probably replace the game promotions because those are so rare and not hugely helpful.
What what… there is a discord channel…
I think the solution could be as simple as pointing the domain at a new Discourse instance and then moving the old forum to a subdomain and optionally disabling posting.
I’m happy to set the Discourse up, you’d just need to switch the domain over.
What a great way to kill all incoming requests from websites and search-engines
Not really if you redirect particular paths (or all 404s) from the new site to the legacy one. 
I’m with Riven on this one. I think having a consistent theme and format across all posts old and new is quite important.
Also, maintaining two parallel systems will be a nightmare and the old stuff is likely to be discarded which would be a great loss.
Here comes the asshat with the opposite opinions.
Personally, when I first got Discord I hated it. But I hated it because I didn’t know how to use it and Skype was a lot easier.
Now I prefer Discord over Skype as a chatting and voice communication platform.
To maintain both the Website and unofficial discord, you could direct players to the “correct” area via links, channels, etc on where they should go for X type of help or questions. Maybe a nice little tidbit of info on the discord like “Long term threads/questions should be directed to the forum.” thus cleaning up some of the repetitive questions posted and indexed here on the site.
All in all you are all smart guys. Ffs your programmers! Figure out a solution that is best for both worlds. The forum may die, but the content posted here is invaluable. No matter how many people get on discord, they will have to visit the website at some point in time.
Stay positive, lets work to a solution, and see if we can get it implemented!
Cheers
obligatory
Kind of ironic when you consider the careers of the actors involved. I’m sticking with the forum, breaking bad as it may be! :persecutioncomplex:
Hi guys,
I’m back on to try the migration to Flarum. Since I’ve last said that Flarum was going to make a lot of changes for this beta, they released a new version yesterday, which is 0.1.0-beta.8.
Here’s the release page:
https://discuss.flarum.org/d/17745-flarum-0-1-0-beta-8-released
The major changes that happened were changes in the database models, and they changed the attribute names to better follow the Laravel conventions. The changes can be found in this PR:
The original migration tool I worked on that partially migrated the posts and topics is now invalid, as the changes were major, and in a few days (after fiddling with the new beta 8 instance) I’m gonna start again on the migration.
If anyone is interested, they are welcome to collaborate with me in this one. And in case there are more people, I wish to start a separate topic on the migration. I want to keep people updated on the progress, but if I’m the only one doing this, then I think the 6 consequent posts rule might get in the topic, so I’ll just reply here instead.
And for people who ask why Flarum, feel free to suggest your favourite, and I propose that let’s take a voting on what should host the new forum. Saying that, I strongly feel that it is better because
[] It is modern
[] It is free
[] It has an active community
[] It is less memory intensive
I’ll get started in a few days on this thing. And by the way, I’ll also list a few challenges I face.
[] Both Flarum and SMF has multiple tables and different structures. We have to get from multiple tables and insert into multiple tables.
[] The tables in Flarum and SMF cannot be mapped in a 1:1 way. It’s a bit of a problem.
[*] Doing it the functional way (read each topic, then each post in that topic, etc.,) is going to take a lot of time.
So I need a way to do the bulk transactions so that the migration is super fast. For now, I’ll limit the migration to the first 100 topics, and make it work, and later let’s optimize it.
See ya soon guys!
I’d be up for helping you, i think it’s a great thing. How ever I’m not really sure in what way, I guess we should talk about that in discord.
Flarum is great. I use it myself for our project. But unfortunately it’s lacking a lot of user management and thread management features currently which make the life of an admin a hard one.
But… I’ve also noticed that people don’t really use it. Everyone is at Discord. If they’ve got something to say, they just want to blurt it out on Discord rather than make a proper post on the forums.
Not much that can be done about that. I even tried making a plugin which posts on Discord when there’s a new thread on the forums, but it didn’t result in increased forum activity.
As a CS Student, I always kind of wondered why so many forums kind of just died after like 2016. It’s really weird trying to find the most recent info on forums about insert topic here and having almost nothing after around 2016. It’s very frustrating.
I suspect the continued rise of stackoverflow was the final nail in the coffin.
I think we’re seeing a centralization of information on the interwebs. Fewer and fewer sites hold all the information.
To be fair, from an end user (aka pretty much all of us here) perspective, that is a good thing. The average forum simply never was a good place to get information in the first place.
Ever tried getting some info on technology that hasn’t been in wide use since the early 2000s lately? You will miss finding StackOverflow links badly.
This does kill off the community aspect. However, that was mostly a fortunate side-effect in the first place and other things like, yes, the Discord are stepping in here.
So,
while I would generally agree with this, here we are actually experiencing the opposite effect:
Separation of concerns.
Where we crammed everything into one place before, because we often only had one place, we are now using the right tool for each “job”.