Major Forum Upgrade Incoming

[Serebii]

Hey all

I'm just letting you all know that on the weekend of March 24th/25th, starting the Saturday night, we'll be doing some work on the forums. This will be a huge forum upgrade.

We'll be moving to a new forum system that allows for more dynamic features, notifications etc. The forums will be up to the modern standards that unfortunately this vBulletin system no longer provides.

Don't worry, everything should transfer over. All your posts, PMs etc. so it should still be good and the forum legacy from 2004 onwards shall remain.

Coinciding with this, there will be some changes for the forums. We'll be merging a lot of redundancies. Forums that have minimal discussions such as spin-off ones combined into one. Generations combined further together and so forth.

It's no secret that in the past we've been a bit too strict in how we maintained the forums as well, such as not allowing certain discussion threads to be made until a game had been out for a long while.
Obviously this was an idiotic thing to do and did degrade a bit of our forum userbase (which already was in a downward trend much with all forums due to other ways to discuss your favourite things through social media), so we're scrapping such mentalities and coming in fresh with a new fresh take on how to moderate the forums. We will strive to be a friendlier place and yes, that means Custom Avatars will finally be allowed (within reason, of course).

There will be many more changes afoot, with the forums gradually getting added to once it goes live.

I'll bring you more information here when we progress!

Until next time, see ya

~Serebii

 

[Pokegirl Fan~]

Are we finally able to use custom avatars once the upgrade happens?

 

[PrinceOfFacade]

Are we finally able to use custom avatars once the upgrade happens?

For real, that would make for a massive improvement. I would love to have a custom Ghost avatar.

 

[Cometstarlight]

Oh wow, sounds great! Glad to see some change for the better!

 

[Gamzee Makara]

This could be awesome, but custom Avatars would have to be HEAVILY policed due to politics and cultures. No political ones or bashing(left, center or right) ones, no real-life pics of anyone, and especially no racist, sexist or homophobic ones(Especially Pepes)...as well as anything covered by previous rules.

 

[Satoshi & Touko]

Yeah, it would be cool to be able to have my adorable little Ayla's adorable face as my avatar (not the same one as my profile pic though).

<3<3<3

 

[Pokegirl Fan~]

Also will the username changes from October happen before then?

Oh and a couple more things, will my privacy settings for vms, pms, etc stay the same and will posts be marked as unread until we actually read them instead of being marked read because of being idle for too long?

 

[Alola Adventurer]

Will the Visitor Message character limit still be the same, or will the character limit get smaller?

And will users be able to change usernames on their own after the upgrade every now and then? (e.g. "You can change your username every 90 days.")

 

[Dragalge]

I am quite excited for this! Custom avatars especially will be nice to have and upgrading the forums in general will surely help in the long run!

 

[spyrois2cool]

Custom avatars! Yay! That’ll make changing avatars a lot easier! Course I’ll still be using 99% Pokémon avatars. Only avatar (as of now) that isn’t Pokémon is my custom avatar I use everywhere (aka, my Spyro avatar in my actual profile). However, this forum has me using other fun avatars such as my current one, and the Christmas mew I always use Fromm Decemember to about February or March. I can’t wait for more advanced features! So many things coming out and changing! I tend to be enthusiastic about it all, unless it’s something that could be failed or ruined.

 

[Captain Jigglypuff]

Will there be any changes in the rules of specific forums? Particularly about double post not being allowed in any topic or reviving any topic not touched in six months? I think the Club section needs to have exceptions to those rules particularly in Clubs where a TV show only airs one or two seasons each year and there are several months in between seasons that have no news or activity.

 

[The Great Butler]

Will the text coding tags still be the same ones?

 

[Mega Altaria]

It will be good that for the first time on this forum, custom avatars for all users will finally be allowed. I'm still wondering if user ranks will still be kept.

 

[Team Volt Grunt]

The changes sound great so far! I'm hoping we'll be able to change our usernames as well. The current system of having only one mod starting a thread for name change requests 2 times a year with the restriction of not changing our names for 2 years is really old. The name change thread from October still hasn't resulted in any name changes.

 

[Vipsoccermaster]

It will be good that for the first time on this forum, custom avatars for all users will finally be allowed. I'm still wondering if user ranks will still be kept.

Custom avatars will be nice, though not sure if I'll utilize the feature all that much. As for user ranks, they will most likely be kept. And speaking of ranks, I also wonder if they'll also have Gen VI and Gen VII ranks, since they haven't been a thing yet.

 

[Leonhart]

I'm eagerly anticipating the custom avatars, although I'm worried that the forum will seem vastly different when the form upgrade is complete.

 

[Bolt the Cat]

Lemme guess, XenForo? Wouldn't surprise me, a lot of forums have been jumping ship from vBulletin to XenForo lately (in fact this is the last forum I belong to that still uses vBulletin). Kind of surprised you'd start using notifications though, I always assumed that was because the userbase was too big for it (I mean at the pace some of the more active threads run, you could get like, 10 quote notifications a minute or something, I would've imagined that would strain the servers or something). Also glad the rules are being relaxed a bit, especially some of the restrictions involving discussions. That did always sort of bother me. All in all, sounds like the forums making a lot of changes that I've always wanted to see, can't wait for the update.

 

[Negrek]

Is there any chance the character limit on posts could be raised on the new forums? For fanfic authors the 50k character limit can be pretty annoying, since long chapters have to be split up into two or more posts. Raising the limit to something like 75k, which is around 12,500 words, would be much appreciated.

 

[Tsukuyomi56]

Being able to use custom avatars will be nice though I am afraid I will not be using it that much since I don't have much pictures to use. Also glad some of the rules will be relaxed a little.

 

[bobandbill]

Are we finally able to use custom avatars once the upgrade happens?

See the opening post. =p

Also will the username changes from October happen before then?

Oh and a couple more things, will my privacy settings for vms, pms, etc stay the same and will posts be marked as unread until we actually read them instead of being marked read because of being idle for too long?

Up to admins there with username changes. As for privacy settings, possibly, and I imagine they have similar if not the same options after the change.

Will the Visitor Message character limit still be the same, or will the character limit get smaller?

And will users be able to change usernames on their own after the upgrade every now and then? (e.g. "You can change your username every 90 days.")

I suppose there's no reason for it to be made smaller - the same if not larger can be expected. Unsure about the username thing; that depends on how the server will handle it after the change of forum software. It'll be something we'll consider after the move.

Will there be any changes in the rules of specific forums? Particularly about double post not being allowed in any topic or reviving any topic not touched in six months? I think the Club section needs to have exceptions to those rules particularly in Clubs where a TV show only airs one or two seasons each year and there are several months in between seasons that have no news or activity.

There may be slight adjustments, and you're welcome to make suggestions to section mods (or if there are none, higher staff).

Will the text coding tags still be the same ones?

Someone else will have to answer to confirm that, but after a quick check the basic bbcode remains constant from what I see.

It will be good that for the first time on this forum, custom avatars for all users will finally be allowed. I'm still wondering if user ranks will still be kept.

Good point on the userranks; I'm unsure but I'm sure the new forum software could support it or some similar system.

The changes sound great so far! I'm hoping we'll be able to change our usernames as well. The current system of having only one mod starting a thread for name change requests 2 times a year with the restriction of not changing our names for 2 years is really old. The name change thread from October still hasn't resulted in any name changes.

As said to someone else, we'll look into it after the forum software move and considering how the server will cope.

Lemme guess, XenForo? Wouldn't surprise me, a lot of forums have been jumping ship from vBulletin to XenForo lately (in fact this is the last forum I belong to that still uses vBulletin). Kind of surprised you'd start using notifications though, I always assumed that was because the userbase was too big for it (I mean at the pace some of the more active threads run, you could get like, 10 quote notifications a minute or something, I would've imagined that would strain the servers or something). Also glad the rules are being relaxed a bit, especially some of the restrictions involving discussions. That did always sort of bother me. All in all, sounds like the forums making a lot of changes that I've always wanted to see, can't wait for the update.

Maaaybe. :V

Is there any chance the character limit on posts could be raised on the new forums? For fanfic authors the 50k character limit can be pretty annoying, since long chapters have to be split up into two or more posts. Raising the limit to something like 75k, which is around 12,500 words, would be much appreciated.

Up to the admins but I can certainly highlight it post-move. Been affected by that limit myself, haha.