Should the community spider and index the GG forums?

#1 I don't think this forum will be around much longer... They where working on new one I think?

#2 I have heard the same things. I don't think you will have this to worry about in the near future. There has been a lot of questions about forum functionality and community abilities as of late. All which I am sure are being watch by GG while they make the changes.

Short answer just hold tight.

#3 I hope the knowledge in these forums will still be available. Granted, you can't easily find what you need, but it's still there. Years and years of problem solving and nice little tricks.

TDN is taking too long to get to its critical mass, and sadly most of the pages are unmaintained by the original authors. That means it can't be presented as the all new source of knowledge at the moment. I hope it eventually will, but sometimes the forums are just easier when you don't want to publish formal documentation.

Given the work GG has done with GGE, I am confident that it will something nobody of us would have thought about, but most of us want.

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Nebulagame Development Site
D-log

#4 I highly doubt that the forum system would go away in terms of accessibility. Rather, it would most likely be accessible, but read-only. A number of other development communities have done that as they move to new technologies. Since the forum information is so important, I can't imagine it just being "gone".

#5 If anyone who is involved in the decision making process reads this, please add my vote to those who would be extremely dissapointed if the "old" forum information vanishes. I have only been working with Torque a month or so now. I cannot tell you how incredibly helpful the forums have been...I don't care if everyone says they suck, maybe they do, but they are so much better than nothing that it is unreal. The forums, by my count get over 100 new posts a day on average. Many are replies to very old posts. Those posts have answers in them, or links to resources that I would never know exist otherwise. I looked at other game engines, and I can tell you that of the affordable ones, I saw alot that dont get anywhere near 100 posts a day!

Even making them read only makes me queasy. If I search the posts and find my question already there, but inadequately answered, what would I do? Copy and paste to the new forums? I would understand the rationale behind making them read-only, and I would also imagine the "old" forums would become less used, but please let's search for an answer that incorporates them, somehow.

#6 @Steven, a possible compromise could be that the old forums would be read only, with a simple "create new post with reference" option or something of that nature, which would automatically create a new thread on the new forums, with a link to the old post. I imagine that would be pretty handy, if in fact the forums will be read-only.

#7 These forums will continue to be accessible in some form or another. Right now we are assessing how difficult it would be to migrate all of this content over to the new forums. If that proves too difficult, costly, or time-intensive, then these forums may have to become an archive of sorts. If that happens, we will explore accessibility options like the one that Ross proposed.

#8 @Eric
Just Copy and Paste :)

Sorry couldnt help it..

Eric how large are these forums data wise? just wondering...

#9 If GG is migrating to the newest version of phpBB, archiving the current database would be a trivial task and you could set the permissions so the threads are read only.
It will only be difficult if you are migrating to another forum software.