any official decision to completely change(not improve) this site?

#1 Of course we want to, it's something we've discussing internally for some time and that's why the site for 3 Step was done in a more modern way using off the shelf products. Moving the GarageGames site to something like it is something we want to do, but it's a rather monumental task as there is over a decade of posts, users, and purchases that would have to be transferred over.

#2 As Scott notes, it would require some major refactoring. The easiest way to do it would be to archive the existing forums and start anew. Otherwise it would require an extremely messy merge that would most likely break in a hundred unexpected ways.

And no one should ever use the Unity forums as an example. They're worse than these ones (and that's saying a lot). It's an example of rolling your own forums the wrong way. Unfortunately, they're in the same boat as we are in terms of trying to merge into a new, stable and supported commercial forum package.

VBulletin and Invision Powered forums, however, are quite nice, well supported options.

#3 Is it a database issue? I mean is it an issue where you have data in the database in one format and it is a pain in the butt to move to another format?

I can certainly understand your dilemma. It would be a huge blow to the community to lose the wealth of resources in the current forums.

For what it is worth I am a good problem solver and if you wanted some extra eyes to look over what you are up against I would be happy too. I really want to see this community grow and one thing holding it back is the website. I have some background in PHP, MySQL, Javascript, Python, and various CM packages. So I understand how to get around a website. I am also good at picking things apart and fixing things. Like stuff that eludes other programmers. If nothing else I will be able to say, "Yeah, that is really bad...". ;) I will guarantee I have seen worse code.

#4 This is getting ridiculous.

Make a resource, preview it, post it ---- SCREWED!

Make a resource, post it, realise you have a typo, edit it ---- SCREWED!

#5 I may start putting resources in files or my own website and just post links. That would be a temporary solution. I know it is not as secure as a the private forums, but you can get the private forums from Google cache anyway. So there is no real code exposure security to begin with.

Again I will reiterate. I will provide another set of eyes for the existing website for FREE. The worst it can do is I will say I cannot help fix it. However, there is a good chance I will spot something another set of eyes missed because that is the nature of code. What is complicated to one person is often simple to another person.

I know, I know, posting on a weekend does not generally reach people working during the week...thanks for listening anyway. Guy, I could throw up Wordpress (I have a copy here demolishun.net) and allow people to sign in only on a sign up thread through GG private forums. That would allow people I allow to put resources there. Would that help?

#6 Backslash issue has existed since forever(ish), but the whole & thing is relatively new (few months).

#7
The video resolution is 400x300.

#8 @Frank, like yourself, I usually prepare stuff in a text editor then copy that when posting. I forgot this time, and suffered badly for it.

I'm not sure if locating resources off site is the way to go, this stuff really belongs together in one place. It's frustrating coming across a resource which had stuff located remotely for which the links are now dead.

I think the &amp nonsense is a relatively new problem. It's not possible now to preview a post then submit it without the forum code corrupting your work.

I would have thought this pretty trivial to fix. I assume that this is part of some protection against SQL injection attacks, so these characters are being encoded when stored in the database. It looks like someone forgot that they also need to be decoded when retrieved for editing.

#9 I have learned that nothing is trivial with this site. We haven't made any changes to the posting code in a long, long time, so another change in a seemingly unrelated area is most likely the cause. Which makes it a very finicky bug to track.

@Frank
I'll see about your offer. I'm not sure exactly what we would need to do to make it happen since we have a lot of business data in the codebase. That has been problematic in the past when people have offered to look over the site to help fix issues.

But I did log the bug as GGC-1376.

#10 probably the best solution is use a 3rd party WYSIWYG tool that can integrate into the existing code base and sort out formatting issues, however nothing is that simple when placing the data into a mysql? database, as it can cause issues with strip slashes, special characters. Maybe an editor that compensates for this.