The New Forums

[JVM]

Should've seen this coming, but didn't.

I hope Arbok plans to add more themes again as time goes -- when the previous new forum opened up, there were additions for a while, but those stopped once there were around eight. I'm hoping Arbok adds another one or two before closing the book on this one. I liked '20th Century Boys' because I'm old school. Forget the name of the one I'm using right now.

It loads faster and more consistently for me, at least.

[Arbok]

First off, I loved aspects of the old forums. I loved certain features there and I loved the style designs (which kicked the butt of the current crop of designs).

That said, the forum architecture was quite old and the code was simply unmanageable, meaning it was time for a new board that could be made stable and easily updated. It also was about time it was made responsive given the mobile traffic it sees, and that was done during the update as well.

One of the roadblocks for doing this was the Shadow Arena as well... which is now rendered useless. However, traffic there had died greatly lately which made the decision easier. It is locked for the time being and will eventually be purged.

Feel free to use this thread for comments on the new board, which will evolve over time.

And yes, there will be at least one more style. I don't really love any of the current styles, and loved quite a few of the old ones (...not the Pokémon one, though... that one missed the mark when I looked at it recently).

[Space Hunter M]

Here's to at least another decade of internet Godzilla fans who can't get along very well.

[Superrex]

I really hope the new board styles that will be added will allow us to see what the topic replied to most recently is for each sub-forum on the board index. So far, the only one that is able to do it is the Gotengo board style.

[MoarCrossovers]

Well… this new format will have some getting used to.

[GigaBowserG]

Wow, nice! Could get used to this. So I guess there was a little truth to the fooling yesterday

[JVM]

First off, I loved aspects of the old forums. I loved certain features there and I loved the style designs (which kicked the butt of the current crop of designs).

That said, the forum architecture was quite old and the code was simply unmanageable, meaning it was time for a new board that could be made stable and easily updated. It also was about time it was made responsive given the mobile traffic it sees, and that was done during the update as well.

One of the roadblocks for doing this was the Shadow Arena as well... which is now rendered useless. However, traffic there had died greatly lately which made the decision easier. It is locked for the time being and will eventually be purged.

Feel free to use this thread for comments on the new board, which will evolve over time.

And yes, there will be at least one more style. I don't really love any of the current styles, and loved quite a few of the old ones (...not the Pokémon one, though... that one missed the mark when I looked at it recently).

Yeah, even though it's been six years (Jesus, six years?) this board still feels very young to me, compared to the older one. I should've realized quickly that there'd be some big upgrades around the corner, given phpBB's nature.

I was a big fan of the original '20th Century Boys' - there were a lot of fine styles, but none of them beat my nostalgia for the board's original look. I'm using the Gotengo one now, personally.

I look forward to the new style and hope to see more styles in the future

[Can of Conspiracy]

Signature images are here to stay then, unless I disable sigs altogether, correct?

[GodzillaFreak99]

I like it. Though I will miss the old layout dearly.

[Young Guy]

I hate it. There was absolutely no reason to change it. If it ain't broken, don't fix it.

EDIT: And where are the teams and favourite kaiju on our profiles?

[StAiRcAsE KiTtY]

I miss the old Godzilla Fire theme. That was eye catching. Don't care much for any of the new themes yet.

[Man of Steel]

Why has the custom ranks option been removed? We didn't ask for this...

[Spuro]

So on the old layout we had the option to display text signatures, but block picture/gif signatures. Now I've seeing image sigs all over the place, so is their any way we can block 'em without disabling the text sigs?

[BlankAccount]

What happened to to the Blood Thirsty theme board option? That's my go to preference.

[g2vd]

I only used the default purple Atrogon Theme, but I did like the MKG Theme but it was just too blue for me. I can't really say anything about this redesign because everything's blocked off and cropped on mobile.

I can still disable image sigs right?

[JAGzilla]

Well, this is a surprise. Honestly, I'd thought the real reason for shutting down the forums yesterday was so the mods didn't have a hundred April Fools threads to clean up. But if the new forums run more smoothly and are less vulnerable to hacking, I'm all for this.

I'll miss the Mecha-Ghidorah style; haven't decided which of the current styles, if any, I like yet. I'm currently set on the Godzilla Generations one, which is okay. It's harder to tell at a glance whether threads have been updated or not, though; not sure if all the new styles are like that. I'll have to test drive the rest of them.

And I am also wondering if image sigs can still be hidden. I always had them disabled on the old forums.

[JVM]

I hate it. There was absolutely no reason to change it. If it ain't broken, don't fix it.

Why has the custom ranks option been removed? We didn't ask for this...

I just want to carefully highlight this thread, which highlighted forum problems that came from phpBB coding issues -- I'm just spitballing here, because I don't work here and all, but I know that phpBB coding only lasts so long before it becomes very open to simple vulnerabilities hackers can exploit, and as BattraBoi mentioned here, at least one hacker had utilized a backdoor on TK already. So upgrading to a newer version of phpBB obviously fixes a lot of that, but creates new problems, just like upgrading from Windows XP to Windows 10. Software's tricky. The other thing is it sounds like the code got very, very bloated, and I imagine it was hard to purge the gobbledy-gonk without collateral damage, based on the Mirror Arena.

I'd also, say, presumably, when Vega coded in the Custom Ranks option, as well as other lost items, he used scripts/options that are not compatible with the latest version of the phpBB forum software. I'm sure he could fix all of this if he were still a staff member. And if a new manager joins, I'm sure they can try to re-create these options.

[Spuro]

Also, the spoiler tags aren't really working.

Example:

Spoiler:

See, nothing is hidden here.

[3000]

Kudos on the new mobile layout. Makes browsing the forum on my phone waaaaay easier.

I hate it. There was absolutely no reason to change it. If it ain't broken, don't fix it.

But... the forums WERE broken and did need fixing?

[M.U.T.O.]

Finally! Quick Reply is automatically open! This is a welcome change.