Repent! The end is near!

[Smirftsch]

Oh well...not for the world...or OldUnreal, but it very much seems we have to say goodbye to good ol' YaBB forums.
Within the next weeks OU will be moved to a new server and support for perl is rather bad nowadays. Also it seems that development of YaBB very much ceased to exist.

So...where are we heading to? For now phpBB seems to be a good choice, but right now we are working on a converter to get all the data out of here, most likely with a step over SMF to phpBB then. However, suggestions are welcome.

That again means we will have to expect maybe a few days downtime, but I will put in some updated information once we have prepared everything.

[Hyper]

Remember, you heard it first from Charlie!

On a serious note: The change is fine. Sometimes change needs to happen. If the existing forum threads and user accounts can be saved and converted to phpBB, then that would be wonderful. We have quite some history here. If I remember correctly, you earlier mentioned the limitations of the current YaBB software and risk of instability. If phpBB suits OldUnreal better, go ahead. It is quite a database, so no small task I suppose. Good luck. And if conversion turns out to be impossible, a new and empty forum could be a plan B. Maybe with some way to keep the existing content in a read-only archive.

Please do make backups before converting anything in case a clusterkitten happens.

[.:..:]

Please do make backups before converting anything in case a clusterkitten happens.

The onosecond https://youtu.be/X6NJkWbM1xk

[yrex .]

Suggestions that would improve the website for modern audience:

Obviously, we should move to twitter or reddit or discord like all cool kids. If we move to twitter, let's not forget to organize some #hashtag deathmatches once in a while that prove, whose morality is righter. If on reddit, it should become an echo chamber.



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To streamline the user experience and increase security, the only way of logging in allowed should be through Facebook, with obligatory 2FA. Once in a while, people should be blocked from logging in until they install and run Facebook antivirus that only works on 64-bit Windows 10 PCs.

All downloads, attachments, etc should require logging in.

To compensate for that, ads with these big green "Download" buttons should be stuck all over the place to provide users with relevant content.

Every few forum posts, there should be an ad that pretends to be a post.

Once in a while, people should be forced to play the unwinnable game of recognizing fire hydrants, crossroads and store fronts.

The website should have ironically named "Community Guidelines For Diversity And Vibrant Society" that forbid speaking of fictional violence and killing, while at the same time forbidding posting anything that could possibly appeal to children.

For security, the website should not run without javascript, and with javascript it should lag to death from all the analytics, ads and fancy "responsive" full of animations HTML5 that seems to have a life of its own. The menus should be hidden under three horizontal lines that morph into an X when clicked.

There should be a confusing labyrinth of minimalist menus, huge margins around text, huge text next to tiny text, gray text on gray background, very thin fonts, full-width slides with stock images of entire family happily humping tablets and smartphones and that old man with forced smile or generic unstoppable autoplayed videos in an endless loop to eat up all your bandwidth. All content should be organized into rule of three describing common mythconceptions that are del.icio.us. All actually useful links should be crammed into a footer preceeded by infinite scrolling. If someone dares to fight this abomination with adblock/greasemonkey/etc, they should be banned and tornemnted forever with unwinnable variant of reCAPTCHA for a criminal DMCA violation against a legally enforced DRM.

There should be a customer support section where every thread gets a reply with a canned response from a bot.

The website should be blocked completely over VPNs and Tor. After all, only criminals and perverts care about privacy.

At the end of each page, there should be a Taboola/Outbrain/RevContent/etc feed.

The entire website should have an Electron app that's essentially a bloated crippled Chrome locked to displaying that website. Gotta tap tap at that snap app!

PayPal should be replaced by Patreon.

That's how we should prepare to move on. It's called courage. To step into the next generation and embrace the change and go with the flow. Legacy systems haven't kept pace.

[Hyper]

[...]

That pretty much sums up the state of the web today, unfortunately.
Oh, maybe add the function where any post an user makes will only be visible to that poster only unless it is reviewed by the almighty AI censoring bot.


Sometimes I'm so happy that I don't have social media accounts, mostly interact on forums, have al my PC's with Windows 7, don't keep my backups in the cloud and play at least one game where the servers, the hosting, the content creation and even the master servers are in the hands of the community.

/grandpa signing out.

[Pitbull]

Hooray!! More stuff for me to break.

[strategy-(DOG)-]

good choice to switch to phpBB!
the -(DOG)-forum runs stable on this framework for years...

[Hellkeeper]

The website should have ironically named "Community Guidelines For Diversity And Vibrant Society" that forbid speaking of fictional violence and killing, while at the same time forbidding posting anything that could possibly appeal to children.

I love this idea, this is what Unreal needs.

[Kajgue]

Yes, I think this is a good choice.

Quite a few people from the community have mentioned to me that they find the site very challenging to navigate, even to the point I had to step by step teach them how to make a post (some icons, such as the 'reply' button on the forum display were not even showing for them).

[Hyper]

Looks like we made it out alive!
Layout needs some serious polishing, but so far, so good.