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Extremely important information about the future of our forums (Staff only)

From what I'm reading up on their features, it matches all of them, except (I'm not sure on this, just that those features are not listed in their list of features for Forums)

  • The ability to change the username color to highlight someone's satus as a staff member. If you hover your mouse over the person's name, however, it will inform you if they are a staff member through a pop-up box.
  • The ability to "highlight" threads the same way we currently do (ie, having them appear in every single user's notification list). It is possible to automatically redirect someone to a specific thread once they log in, though.
 
Okay. Thank you for the information.
 
KLOL506 said:
Would blog posts be affected in anyway by this? Just asking.
Click to expand...
Blogs will not be affected as far as I have been informed. Only the forums and eventually the message walls.
 
@KLOL506

No problem.

@Kepekley23

Thank you for the help.
 
Thank you for the information Agnaa.

I have some possibly great news. I asked around and was recommended a company who are developing forums that I was just in email contact with, and they seem to be able to provide exactly what we are looking for, customised XenForo solutions with invitation only registration options.

I will try to place them in contact with my friend tomorrow for coordination.

They might even be able to transfer our old forum threads, but that is not certain yet.
 
As someone who heavily relies on email notifications to be active in this wiki, it would be better if the forum has a subscribe/notification function.

Other than that I don't have anything to say. I'm fine with the other stuff.
 
Antvasima said:
Regarding Xenforo, is it possible to require email registration, and not allow multiple accounts for the same email address?
Click to expand...
Yes. You need to register via e-mail on a xenforo forum. It's impossible to do so otherwise. However, I am not sure if xenforo allows or restricts multiple accounts from the same e-mail id.

Spinosaurus75DinosaurFan said:
As someone who heavily relies on email notifications to be active in this wiki, it would be better if the forum has a subscribe/notification function.
Click to expand...
Yes, xenforo has such features. You can customise your profile to set what kind of e-mail notifications you want. Forum threads also have a "watch thread" feature which is the same as the "Follow" thread feature here. And in e-mail notifications, you can set whether you get on-site alerts or e-mail notifications for when someone responds to threads you are "watching" or when someone quotes your posts.
 
Thank you for the information.
 
How about the comeback of the comment sections under Main Space pages when the forum passes away? Old-timers remember that we had disabled them back in 2015, and now if we want to save constant discussions on the wiki itself, it'd be a good solution.
 
We can't. Even without forums occupying our attention, managing comment sections for nearly 22,000 pages is impractical to say the least.
 
I forgot to ask:

Nothing is going to happen to blogs, right? Or are they getting the axe as well?

Edit: Never mind. I found the answer up above.
 
Sera is correct.
 
Hypothetically speaking, if blogs did get axed we can simply transfer the blogs to wikia articles as I've explained here. Calculations, however, would still be affected - though there's alternatives since we have to move forums anyway or even using a cloud service like Dropbox would suffice for sharing and reviewing calcs. Again, this is speaking purely hypothetically.
 
I'm uncertain. Given that we will migrate our forums soon, it would be much easier to manage comments than today. Future members who join the wiki, but not the future forum, would ask some generic questions (Under Tiering System for example) — we would respond and give them the link to the future forum. Comment sections might become the most comfortable place to ask questions next year. For newcomers at least.
 
You have to keep in mind our vandalism problem. There may be wikias who are larger than even we are, with 50-100K pages and they still have comment sections, but their wikias are not prone to extreme cases of vandalism like ours is, and some have VSTF members as admins there too.

Clearly we will let future community members understand our situation once we migrate, preferably via a message on the front page, and that our forum practices are continued offsite, how to join, etc. We're not just forgetting about the little guy, we have to consider our situation though.

Edit: Additionally, even now with forums still active, newcomers tend to use discussions anyway to ask beginner's questions. Can't really blame them, the Discussions button is in plain sight while Forums is hidden under the "Explore" tab.
 
@Sera

I will link to the new forum in the front page, and the community messages, yes.

@TGOP

It is also a very good idea to link to it in the wiki welcome message, also yes.
 
I am still waiting for my friend to get the time to talk with the company that is able to provide solutions. It is comprised of former Fandom technical team employees who come highly recommended, are experts at XenForo setups, and seem like very nice people. Basically exactly what we are looking for.
 
Should the external forum's style match that of the wiki's one?
 
Preferably as closely as possible, in order to ease the transition process.
 
If the style will be customizable, I can do work with colors. Although the former technical team members could help us with the style replication as well.
 
Thank you for the offer to help.
 
My friend said that he would thoroughly evaluate all of the information I have sent him this weekend (today and tomorrow).
 
As a simple member who has no idea how to help, when is the change expected to happen, like right after New Years or even earlier than that, how much time do we have to transition, also how drastically will the chnages be, will the profiles and categories stay the same, and it's just the Forums that change, regardless, wherever we move, I hope to keep up with Wiki activity
 
It is just the forums that will be moved, near the end of the year or a little later. Everything else will stay the same. However, this is a very drastic change in itself, and will require a lot of collaboration between the staff to handle properly.
 
I was recommended a company of former Fandom technical staff members, who are experts at XenForo setups, and are able to provide invitation only registration and can hopefully move over most of our existing forum discussion threads.

My friend will have a video meeting with them soon.
 
However, as I mentioned earlier, we would have to do quite a lot of preparation work in this wiki to accommodate the move.

First I would have to send invitations to all of the staff members via fanfiction.net.

Then the staff members would have to help out with sending out registration links to all of the established and active regular members one-by-one in a coordinated manner via the private wiki chat function.

Then we would have to set up a low-quality old school wiki forum that will remain after the switch, so it is easier to continuously communicate with new or returning members who wish to register.

Then we have to set up a "Polls" forum in Discussions, and move a few thousand current poll threads there.

Then we have to update the front page, the automated welcome message, and all relevant links and community message functions to inform our members and visitors about the new forum.

And in addition to this we have to make sure that the new forum functions properly and has a layout and standard settings that are easy to get used to.
 
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