#41 All your Torque is belong to Winterleaf now.

#42

Quote:All your Torque is belong to Winterleaf now.

What do you mean with that?

#43 @Lukas Thanks he has already hit me up with an E-Mail and I sent him back an email with my prob thanks again for sending him my way

Terry

#44 @Dwarf King - I assume Duion has realised, that or at least is assuming, that the new forums are paid for by Lukas who is working on the Winterleaf version of T3D and that what is left of the community, at least the T3D MIT part of it, have just jumped feet first into forums not run by the community but by someone with a vested interest in a certain flavour of T3D MIT, that have no interest in any of the other Torque engines. The situation is pretty much the same as the torque.net proposal, as far as I can see i.e. if the torque.org domain and website is not owned and paid for by the community it is subject to sudden closure at the whim of somebody that may suddenly have no interest in keeping the domain and the forums going.

Of course, Lukas may go for full disclosure and dispel lingering doubts by stating the exact status of the domain name.

Still, given an early post on this forum by Duion in which he put a 'non-productive' member of this community in his place for pointing out the obvious, I can only assume that another one of Duion's personalities has temporarily taken over his body and typed the last post out in a fit of mischief making. No doubt on the morrow he will be back to singing the praises of the new forums. One can't help but draw similarities to the band on the titanic continuing to play as the water approached head height.

#45 Last I checked, a) Lukas was part of the community and isn't slave labor for WLE(Lukas may want to double-check his contract though ;) ) so yes, it is still community driven.

b) It was Lukas' own initiative, not something that WLE as a company put forward. If it was, they've got the Shadowy New World Order Orginzation thing down pat.

Fact is that, as mentioned in here prior, GG isn't able to keep the forums up in a useable state, so new forums are needed. Lukas took the opporunity to set some up and people in the IRC have been giving it a test whirl and enjoyed it.

As such, it's prudent to shift to forums that are more modern, less spam ridden, and actively moderated by the community with lots of potential to expand as the community sees fit.

Further, Tron owns the Torque3d.org domain name, so if Tron decides that the forums are no good, he can point them elsewhere. In short, this makes the new forums more based on the community's choices than anything else.

If you feel that it's being handled incorrectly, or have suggestions on a better way for things to be set up, make a post about it. No one's going to throw down bans because you dislike the new forums or whatever.

#46 I want to add that I fully agree with Azaezel and Jeff on this. GG has moved on and it's time we did as well. I'm also concerned that having our own forums implies hosting costs, and one of my plans for after 3.7 is to sit back and see if there's a way we can make that a more community-shared thing rather than just relying on Lukas to pay our server bills.

We'll also contact GG and see how they want to manage the transition. I figured it'd be prudent to see if there is actually a concerted shift towards these new forums; no point getting GG to change stuff if this isn't a long-term deal. That doesn't imply lack of support - I for one strongly support the new forums, and I know other SC members have been keen to migrate away from gg.com for a while. We just don't want to be too hasty, though we know the long-term health of the community (i.e. people finding their way to the new site) is important.

#47

Quote:my plans for after 3.7 is to sit back and see if there's a way we can make that a more community-shared thing rather than just relying on Lukas to pay our server bills.

*Cough cough there's a weekly-tips button at the bottom of the page*
Edit: nvm people are tipping me 5$ per week I see, thats more than enough :P

Yes I don't own the domain name, I just run the server. I don't mind bumping someone else up to admin/founder/whatever so I'm not the only Supreme Leader, and so someone else can make backups. The question is who.....

And yes this is not a WLE initiative, if eases your mind, it might help knowing that WLE in general is stepping out of the engine market, and we are now branding Omni as a Torque3D branch rather than a whole seperate engine. I.e. we want to stay connected with Torque3D. That said, I've always been around Torque3D, I can never leave so this is my own initiative and no one is pulling the strings here!

Paul, I think they are buying it!

I wanted to set-up something like public backups, but haven't quite figured it out yet :P

Edit: also can we please keep our pitchforks down, to me it seemed like Duion made a joke. No need to offend him for just that comment.

#48 @Jeff Raab - I did make a post about it, see above. Not against moving the forums but it would be best if it seemed as if it was simply a revamp of these forums as opposed to a shaving off of the T3D MIT community.

#49 Last man out turn off the lights. Somehow Yeats seems appropriate:

Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned.
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.

#50 Just wanted to chime in and say I'm impressed with the quality of the discussion and initiative of the community. I'm following this blog and its comments closely.

@StuporMundi - Friendly reminder, I'll be the last man out. The lights on this site aren't going out anytime, though they might dim a little bit if this new forum works out.

#51 @Michael : Haaa... A GG Response ! Fine ! I See Spams are removed. So you didn't abandon the navire ! Phew !

#52 We just had a meeting today to discuss the spam issue and are now taking steps to make it possible for volunteers to aid in the spammer destruction. Essentially, approved volunteers will have access to a new button. As I've mentioned before, moderators/admins have access to a "Nuke" button. This button will disable an account, remove all posts, and wipe the user. It's dangerous and risky to put in the hands of any user outside of GG.

What our web team is going to work on is a "soft nuke" or "drone strike" button, which will be safer than my nuke. It will still disable an account and hide the posts, but should hopefully also notify me of these strikes. I can then quickly perform a final nuke. There are more details being worked out and the final result may change. As soon as we have something ready, I'll provide the ability to any and all volunteers.

#53 I teach coding into an university, in France, and I say to my students : "You should NEVER use DELETE commands...". Each time I say this sentence, I see an air of misunderstanding in their eyes.^^ And I continue with "Building knowledge is difficult, deleting it is easy."... Some understand, some not.^^

The main goal you MUST have, GG, is to manage knowledgeS building. As you did since many years. Unfortunately, your history shows some fails with this. Instant Action closing is a milestone. I remember, I was afraid (like this week end).

I Think, the best attitude is to think about how to restore "Old Orange GG Bar", I mean : How to manage to get daily Blogs posts, to get weekly (2-3 days resources posts), and so on. (not CSS color update :) ). You should not think how to delete. But think how to build knowledge.

#54 Ironically, this change of things can be discussed at the new forums here.

#55 I think the disable-hide-notify option is good. That basically is what I was suggesting originally - it forces them to make a new account every time they want to post spam that is visible.

#56 I fear that they do not care, if they have to make a new account.

#57 Google 'hellban' ;).

#58 @Michael Perry - if you look at my previous posts in this thread it's clear that I don't really support the new forums. The edited post that Lukas refers to gave my reasons but I decided that the potential pitfalls were so obvious, given how search engines work that it didn't require restating but I will restate it now as you possibly didn't realise my last post was somewhat sarcastic.

The community is about to lose the protective umbrella given by thousands of links strewn throughout the internet pointing at this site. Possibly Lukas doesn't realise that torque is a common English word and a search of that term turns up 137,000 pages with it. Torque3D was the fifth result on the first page and it pointed here.

But then anyone looks at my previous posts and no doubt they will conclude that I am fairly clueless about such things and who can blame them, so it does seem pointless to argue against the move anymore, it's not a move I will be making anyway.

#59 @StuporMundi

What you are talking about is Search Engine Optimization(SEO). Sadly many people believe they know all about it and it is all about smacking the right words into the meta-tags and then they are good to go. Of course that is all wrong and as such many even skilled programmers fails to understand the very complicated nature of this area of Data Science(yups this is indeed a kind of science too).


Contents and relevance on the the many websites as well as your search preferences all play in when you get a result presented to you after a Google search. A search engine is not just a search engine either. As such many search engine index and rate sites differently. Some search engines keeps a long track of your search history and present you with results that it believe to be relevant to your interests and history.

The word "torque" is used a lot here on this site and as such it will in google be indexed high. HOWEVER, most new game engine users will search for "3d game engine" or simply "game engine" or perhaps not "Torque".

SEO is about much more than just programming, It also about knowing new users search habits, how different search engines work etc.

About being divided or not divided then I am rather divided in that question...

#60 @Dwarf king - I am aware of all that. Many people won't come here through a search engine result, more likely they will have read comments posted elsewhere and click the link in the article and as no-one on Torque3D.org seems to be spending hours writing articles and linking them there, no doubt the vast majority of those links will bring them here. Clearly the last new arrival did not get pointed at Torque3d.org because he is there in the forums asking questions and being told to go look at Torque3d.org.

That is likely to continue happening for some time. At which point will the 2 forums completely seperate so that new arrivals don't get notified because there is no-one to notify them.

The google search also includes how frequently content is updated. I wouldn't state that there is a great deal going on at the new forums and if posts and blogs get less and less frequent, which will happen in a small community, it will go into a vicious circle and eventually it will all dry up. Not to mention that new arrivals get less and less. The problems with increasing the user base do not lie in forums with a bit of spam.

New members only trickle in at best. Website and forums do not work on 'The field of dreams' principle. Just because a forum or website is put in place doesn't drive traffic to it, that takes a lot of constant work and effort in getting the information out there. It doesn't matter whether forums are here or there in the long run because almost no-one is searching for these engines and those that come looking that turn up here probably came from an old article link. It doesn't matter if there are a 1000 blog posts on the new hello kitty forums and only one here, because no-one is searching anyway, and instead of keeping the community together and putting effort into promoting the engines by writing up articles and posting at all the available link sites a discussion like this is going on. There was an argument for doing this before Mich made the position of GG clear, less so now.

It's pedantic really to argue over issues about where search engine results will lead and way too much effort is wasted in meaningless debate. In the time I just took to answer your comments I could have written a short article on why Torque 3D is still a great option for small teams that could be screwed over financially by the UE4 percentage cut. Instead I'm having to pick my words carefully so as not to be offensive.

Basically, another forum to be avoided as a motivation drain.