[quote=User talk]Thanks for the offer, but one of the first things we all agreed on when starting Minepedia back in August ]
Isn't this kind of the same thing?
Ugh! Had to go through 7 pages of posts just to be sure my question hasn't been answered already. It hasn't. So here it is, along with a few comments on other matters.
Question:
Will this move facilitate an upgrade to a more robust bulletin board software? Something like vBulletin. Because quite frankly, while I use phpBB myself and am quite pleased with it, let there be no mistake: phpBB isn't suited for the size of the community you guys built here, neither it has many of the facilities that could make this community even better.
...
Now, some comments on the whole thing:
On Curse
I don't know them. Until now I never even have heard of them. When that happens I usually become healthy fearful. Healthy, as in not throwing a fit. But waiting to see.
The only reason I visit these forums is to chat a bit, get news on the game, try to raise a few kids into adulthood,... essentially pass time. So anything good coming out of it will be great, while anything bad won't really affect me. As long as there won't ever be premium content policies, I'll be a happy camper. Especially because, if for nothing else, this will be a great help for the biggest problem this community has been forced to deal with: traffic load. So congratulations, on my behalf!
On troll/noob invasions
I hate the word noob. I believe that in 50 years, when the internet becomes older than dirt and no one can claim they were born before it, this word will have evolved into one of the worst things you can call someone. I say this because what once used to be simply another way of writing the "newb" contraction, is now being used as an offense to signify a newb that acts like an idiot. There always have been a tendency to keep depreciating people with little or no experience. And more often than not, it's not just newbies that act like idiots that people call noob. But I digress... hugely.
Indeed, it's not that this forum is a paragon of virtue, good manners and well articulated individuals all meant to keep threads on topic and generally respect their fellow community member. On par with many other gaming communities, this forum is just yet another place were a not so-significant, but quite vocal, percentage of the members waste their time being vulgar and refusing to accept the gift of evolution to mankind; intelligence. So, if Curse could mean an influx of more of these, we would just be getting more of the same. No surprise there and not something we don't get already without curse; more of the same.
On ads and blockers
I use AdBlocker. Oh boy, do I use it! The internet becomes unmanageable to anyone who actually puts the food on their plate out of it, if they don't use it. The visual offense is too great these days, even when we consider the fact most of us have trained our minds to actually not look at them, or even sometimes realize ads are there. Such is their ubiquitousness.
But what I do with AdBlocker is to use its site rules to enable/disable it on a per site basis. When I reached around 300 posts on this forum and realized I would probably stay for a while, while observing that indeed the people responsible for minecraftforum.net were making a good thing, I set it to disable on this domain name. That's how I usually work with AdBlocker.
Rollback Post to RevisionRollBack
I was trying to think of a signature and this is what came up.
Question:
Will this move facilitate an upgrade to a more robust bulletin board software? Something like vBulletin. Because quite frankly, while I use phpBB myself and am quite pleased with it, let there be no mistake: phpBB isn't suited for the size of this community you guys built here.
The largest forum in the world runs on phpBB. It's for one of those free MMORPGs. I don't remember what it's called. I'm sure it's been modified more than Frankenstein to support the load.
Anyway, I used to work for a company that does what Curse does, which is buy up community sites that other people have created and then monetize them (basically, put ads on them.) The upshot is that the company provides decent server hardware, and pays for everything with the ads. It's a fair trade, I think, as long as the new owners are sensitive to the community and don't just dump a bunch of them all over the place. It's a delicate balance, but it can be done if you just think it through from both perspectives.
I agree that vBulletin is better forum software. It has a hell of a lot more features than phpBB. Some of these are useful to end users and some of them are useful (like, seriously, extremely useful) to mods & admins. Whenever my company bought up a site, one of the first things we would do is convert it to vBulletin. (It comes with software called ImpEx, which makes that reasonably easy to do. You have to redo the template for vBulletin, but most or all of the settings, and all of the user accounts, forums, posts, etc. are preserved.) vBulletin has an absolutely huge mod community, so there are plugins for basically everything ever.
Question:
Will this move facilitate an upgrade to a more robust bulletin board software? Something like vBulletin. Because quite frankly, while I use phpBB myself and am quite pleased with it, let there be no mistake: phpBB isn't suited for the size of the community you guys built here, neither it has many of the facilities that could make this community even better.
Amen to that.
PhpBB is nice (And free) but with this many people you start getting into it's limits.
Hell, even SMF handles huge communities better than PhpBB. vBulletin though is the king; and it's the king for a reason.
Quote from huns »
The largest forum in the world runs on phpBB. It's for one of those free MMORPGs. I don't remember what it's called. I'm sure it's been modified more than Frankenstein to support the load.
That would be Gaia Online and yeah, that board is so modded its not even funny not to mention they have constant problems. http://www.big-boards.com/
EDIT: Heavens to mergatroid, this might be a good sign the forum software needs changing when it takes 3 submits to get the post to show. Thankfully I always CTRL+c my posts before I hit "submit".
Pro-Curse:
- Curse will allow the three forum/wiki admins to stop having to pay $2300 a month for servers that get asploded by Creepers whenever traffic gets high
- Curse will bring more traffic to these forums from external sources, potentially bringing in more Minecrafters/-ians to the mix and get Notch some more sales
- Curse will also provide better servers for the forums and the wiki that can actually handle all the traffic
Anti-Curse:
- Curse is seen by some as an evil conglomerate corporation that swallows up the work of others and lets viruses get through to the end user (I think... I'm not entirely sure if I understand everything that has been posted previously on this thread, as I have never had dealings with either Curse or any stuff of this sort).
- In order for the admins to not have to pay out of their own pocket, we have to have 2 adverts on the forums, as well as the Curse logo.
- Potentially, the Curse client may need to be used to download mods; some have voiced the potential insecurity of this tool to be their main gripe (again, if I understood correctly).
My take:
- I've never even heard of Curse before this thread and my first reaction to seeing the Curse flame built in Minecraft was "Lolwut? Cool flame bro, but what does that have to do with Minecraft?"
- I have not actually had any of my posts eaten, so I can't say I had gripes with how the system was (well, except for the occasional Creeper... but before I post, I always copy my entire post and keep it in my clipboard just in case something does go wrong).
- When it comes to letting the WoW user influx onto the forums, I don't at all doubt that we will receive trolls, flamers and haters. I also don't doubt that we will get our share of intelligent, well-spoken users that can handle a sensible conversation. Hopefully, the ratio of trolls to seemingly intelligent people will stay the same as it is now, because it seems fine to me.
- Getting stuff for free is always great. Power to the admins for not having to pay for the forum and wiki servers! :biggrin.gif:
- Sure, adverts are annoying. I actually did not notice when they got implemented, though. What pains me is that I *do* have to pay for bandwidth over a certain limit set by my ISP, so I guess I'll just have to use less Internet (I prefer Google Chrome to Firefox... FF just seems to run slower on my computer, even though I don't have any toolbars or stuff like that installed). Oh, and I only found out about that Curse logo being in the bottom corner from the first post in this thread that mentioned it, which tells me that it's not going to be much of a pain to not look at (aside: double negative ftl, but I can't really put it another way... XP).
- The closest things that I use as mods are INVedit, Cartograph and putting in my own skins and texture packs. If it comes down to me having to get the Curse client, I'll say right now that I won't because I don't particularly care about mods or other people's textures.
In short, it would have been nice if the admins told us, "Hey, we're thinking about joining up with Curse to improve our servers and decrease our personal costs! What do you guys think?" But they didn't, so we're just going to have to get over it and go on with our lives. They're the people that are truly in charge of these sites. They listen to us, but in the end they make the decisions that affect their pages.
Also, on an entirely unrelated note, I just realized that there are TWO Minecraft wikis and BOTH are called Minepedia. One is run by the forum admins (the Curse logo is at the bottom left side of the wiki) and the other is run by some other guy that apparently got trolled a lot, as recorded by the Minecraft article on Encyclopedia Dramatica (NSFW; this is not intended to be an advertisement).
Rollback Post to RevisionRollBack
Make your own "sammich", you base, three-suited, filthy, worsted-stocking knave!
@Alterega: The curse client handles mods for other games, and make it easy to download them and keep them up to date, but is not necessary for downloading said mods. However, Notch's official stance is that he doesnt like mods and doesnt want them in his game. Because of that, curse will not support any minecraft mods.
However, i suspect that if Notch really doesnt want mods in MC, he will do something in the coding to make it harder to use them. He will never be able to shut them out completely, but he could make it complicated enough that few people will have the computer know-how to use them.
All this aside, people really need to stop crying. This is a great move for the forums, and we will be working with a reputable source. A couple small banner ads at the top and bottom of the forums is absolutely nothing (i only have adblocker for the ones that pop up in the middle of the screen and stick there), we will not suddenly be flooded with viruses (really, thats just crazy talk), we already have plenty of trolls around here, not to mention the numerous "you must play single player my way" people, increasing the number of users wont change that.
EDIT: This whole thing actually feels a lot like a parent telling their young child to eat his/her vegetables. Of course the kid doesnt want to, and is mad at his/her parents for making him/her, but in the end, its good for the child, and (s)he will only benefit from it.
Rollback Post to RevisionRollBack
Quote from Zanith »
There was a man who feared not the reaper
He dug in the earth ever deeper
Diamonds of his
Were lost, with a hiss
There is a man who now fears the creeper
@Alterega: The curse client handles mods for other games, and make it easy to download them and keep them up to date, but is not necessary for downloading said mods. However, Notch's official stance is that he doesnt like mods and doesnt want them in his game. Because of that, curse will not support any minecraft mods.
He's only against the current implementation of certain mods because they screw directly with his code and then distribute that code, which is technically illegal distribution of his work. It's not good business to support piracy of your own stuff. He's already stated he's going to implement an API so that modders can work without having to gut his actual coding.
Edit: Recent Twitter quote
@PowerPounder There will be an official API for mods. The current system is Bad.
10:56 AM Nov 15th via web in reply to PowerPounder
Rollback Post to RevisionRollBack
Quote from will_holmes »
Quote from anon »
Every time I come to these forums, I think more and more that I'm the only person who plays Minecraft normally.
Every time I come to these forums, I think more and more that there is no such thing as playing Minecraft normally.
Perhaps when he creates the API, Minecraft can be added to the Curse Client. I would support Curse distributing mods that use an officially supported API.
In fact, I would prefer it. Using a forum to manage mods doesn't really work that well. It's difficult to browse them or find the one you want. It would be great if something like that would happen when he creates the API.
In fact - I'd like to see Curse add Minecraft texture pack support right now! I think that would be a great feature, especially since texture packs are officially supported. Support for mods could be added later, but texture packs can be done now. I'd love to be able to browse and preview texture packs in the client or at their site!
Consider it a suggestion :smile.gif:. Minecraft texture packs in the Curse client.
Rollback Post to RevisionRollBack
When all is said and done, Will you have said more than you have done?
I've noticed that, ever since the switch to Curse, the search feature seems to take 10-20 refreshes to get any result out of them. It appears as though the server Curse is using for this forum is actually even less robust than the one we had when the forum was fueled by donations instead of ad bars...
I've noticed that, ever since the switch to Curse, the search feature seems to take 10-20 refreshes to get any result out of them. It appears as though the server Curse is using for this forum is actually even less robust than the one we had when the forum was fueled by donations instead of ad bars...
I have to agree with this.
I'm getting more site lag, takes 4 tries to submit 3/4th of posts, not to mention,
When you submit a post, and you're used to having "view your posts" on the top, but you CLICK ON THE AD INSTEAD, that doesn't help.
Along with how almost every page crashes my browser stating that "ADOBE FLASH HAS CRASHED" - another result of the ads.
I've also looked around curse's history, especially those with partnerships and advertisements, and I began to cry.
Oh, I'm not saying it hasn't happened to other people before the servers slowed down, I'm just pointing out that it has never happened to me before today.
Honestly, how would I know if other people had had it before?
Isn't this kind of the same thing?
Question:
Will this move facilitate an upgrade to a more robust bulletin board software? Something like vBulletin. Because quite frankly, while I use phpBB myself and am quite pleased with it, let there be no mistake: phpBB isn't suited for the size of the community you guys built here, neither it has many of the facilities that could make this community even better.
...
Now, some comments on the whole thing:
On Curse
I don't know them. Until now I never even have heard of them. When that happens I usually become healthy fearful. Healthy, as in not throwing a fit. But waiting to see.
The only reason I visit these forums is to chat a bit, get news on the game, try to raise a few kids into adulthood,... essentially pass time. So anything good coming out of it will be great, while anything bad won't really affect me. As long as there won't ever be premium content policies, I'll be a happy camper. Especially because, if for nothing else, this will be a great help for the biggest problem this community has been forced to deal with: traffic load. So congratulations, on my behalf!
On troll/noob invasions
I hate the word noob. I believe that in 50 years, when the internet becomes older than dirt and no one can claim they were born before it, this word will have evolved into one of the worst things you can call someone. I say this because what once used to be simply another way of writing the "newb" contraction, is now being used as an offense to signify a newb that acts like an idiot. There always have been a tendency to keep depreciating people with little or no experience. And more often than not, it's not just newbies that act like idiots that people call noob. But I digress... hugely.
Indeed, it's not that this forum is a paragon of virtue, good manners and well articulated individuals all meant to keep threads on topic and generally respect their fellow community member. On par with many other gaming communities, this forum is just yet another place were a not so-significant, but quite vocal, percentage of the members waste their time being vulgar and refusing to accept the gift of evolution to mankind; intelligence. So, if Curse could mean an influx of more of these, we would just be getting more of the same. No surprise there and not something we don't get already without curse; more of the same.
On ads and blockers
I use AdBlocker. Oh boy, do I use it! The internet becomes unmanageable to anyone who actually puts the food on their plate out of it, if they don't use it. The visual offense is too great these days, even when we consider the fact most of us have trained our minds to actually not look at them, or even sometimes realize ads are there. Such is their ubiquitousness.
But what I do with AdBlocker is to use its site rules to enable/disable it on a per site basis. When I reached around 300 posts on this forum and realized I would probably stay for a while, while observing that indeed the people responsible for minecraftforum.net were making a good thing, I set it to disable on this domain name. That's how I usually work with AdBlocker.
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Curse PremiumThe largest forum in the world runs on phpBB. It's for one of those free MMORPGs. I don't remember what it's called. I'm sure it's been modified more than Frankenstein to support the load.
Anyway, I used to work for a company that does what Curse does, which is buy up community sites that other people have created and then monetize them (basically, put ads on them.) The upshot is that the company provides decent server hardware, and pays for everything with the ads. It's a fair trade, I think, as long as the new owners are sensitive to the community and don't just dump a bunch of them all over the place. It's a delicate balance, but it can be done if you just think it through from both perspectives.
I agree that vBulletin is better forum software. It has a hell of a lot more features than phpBB. Some of these are useful to end users and some of them are useful (like, seriously, extremely useful) to mods & admins. Whenever my company bought up a site, one of the first things we would do is convert it to vBulletin. (It comes with software called ImpEx, which makes that reasonably easy to do. You have to redo the template for vBulletin, but most or all of the settings, and all of the user accounts, forums, posts, etc. are preserved.) vBulletin has an absolutely huge mod community, so there are plugins for basically everything ever.
Amen to that.
PhpBB is nice (And free) but with this many people you start getting into it's limits.
Hell, even SMF handles huge communities better than PhpBB. vBulletin though is the king; and it's the king for a reason.
That would be Gaia Online and yeah, that board is so modded its not even funny not to mention they have constant problems. http://www.big-boards.com/
EDIT: Heavens to mergatroid, this might be a good sign the forum software needs changing when it takes 3 submits to get the post to show. Thankfully I always CTRL+c my posts before I hit "submit".
Pro-Curse:
- Curse will allow the three forum/wiki admins to stop having to pay $2300 a month for servers that get asploded by Creepers whenever traffic gets high
- Curse will bring more traffic to these forums from external sources, potentially bringing in more Minecrafters/-ians to the mix and get Notch some more sales
- Curse will also provide better servers for the forums and the wiki that can actually handle all the traffic
Anti-Curse:
- Curse is seen by some as an evil conglomerate corporation that swallows up the work of others and lets viruses get through to the end user (I think... I'm not entirely sure if I understand everything that has been posted previously on this thread, as I have never had dealings with either Curse or any stuff of this sort).
- In order for the admins to not have to pay out of their own pocket, we have to have 2 adverts on the forums, as well as the Curse logo.
- Potentially, the Curse client may need to be used to download mods; some have voiced the potential insecurity of this tool to be their main gripe (again, if I understood correctly).
My take:
- I've never even heard of Curse before this thread and my first reaction to seeing the Curse flame built in Minecraft was "Lolwut? Cool flame bro, but what does that have to do with Minecraft?"
- I have not actually had any of my posts eaten, so I can't say I had gripes with how the system was (well, except for the occasional Creeper... but before I post, I always copy my entire post and keep it in my clipboard just in case something does go wrong).
- When it comes to letting the WoW user influx onto the forums, I don't at all doubt that we will receive trolls, flamers and haters. I also don't doubt that we will get our share of intelligent, well-spoken users that can handle a sensible conversation. Hopefully, the ratio of trolls to seemingly intelligent people will stay the same as it is now, because it seems fine to me.
- Getting stuff for free is always great. Power to the admins for not having to pay for the forum and wiki servers! :biggrin.gif:
- Sure, adverts are annoying. I actually did not notice when they got implemented, though. What pains me is that I *do* have to pay for bandwidth over a certain limit set by my ISP, so I guess I'll just have to use less Internet (I prefer Google Chrome to Firefox... FF just seems to run slower on my computer, even though I don't have any toolbars or stuff like that installed). Oh, and I only found out about that Curse logo being in the bottom corner from the first post in this thread that mentioned it, which tells me that it's not going to be much of a pain to not look at (aside: double negative ftl, but I can't really put it another way... XP).
- The closest things that I use as mods are INVedit, Cartograph and putting in my own skins and texture packs. If it comes down to me having to get the Curse client, I'll say right now that I won't because I don't particularly care about mods or other people's textures.
In short, it would have been nice if the admins told us, "Hey, we're thinking about joining up with Curse to improve our servers and decrease our personal costs! What do you guys think?" But they didn't, so we're just going to have to get over it and go on with our lives. They're the people that are truly in charge of these sites. They listen to us, but in the end they make the decisions that affect their pages.
Also, on an entirely unrelated note, I just realized that there are TWO Minecraft wikis and BOTH are called Minepedia. One is run by the forum admins (the Curse logo is at the bottom left side of the wiki) and the other is run by some other guy that apparently got trolled a lot, as recorded by the Minecraft article on Encyclopedia Dramatica (NSFW; this is not intended to be an advertisement).
However, i suspect that if Notch really doesnt want mods in MC, he will do something in the coding to make it harder to use them. He will never be able to shut them out completely, but he could make it complicated enough that few people will have the computer know-how to use them.
All this aside, people really need to stop crying. This is a great move for the forums, and we will be working with a reputable source. A couple small banner ads at the top and bottom of the forums is absolutely nothing (i only have adblocker for the ones that pop up in the middle of the screen and stick there), we will not suddenly be flooded with viruses (really, thats just crazy talk), we already have plenty of trolls around here, not to mention the numerous "you must play single player my way" people, increasing the number of users wont change that.
EDIT: This whole thing actually feels a lot like a parent telling their young child to eat his/her vegetables. Of course the kid doesnt want to, and is mad at his/her parents for making him/her, but in the end, its good for the child, and (s)he will only benefit from it.
Thanks for alleviating hardware problems, doods.
He's only against the current implementation of certain mods because they screw directly with his code and then distribute that code, which is technically illegal distribution of his work. It's not good business to support piracy of your own stuff. He's already stated he's going to implement an API so that modders can work without having to gut his actual coding.
Edit: Recent Twitter quote
@PowerPounder There will be an official API for mods. The current system is Bad.
10:56 AM Nov 15th via web in reply to PowerPounder
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Curse PremiumIn fact, I would prefer it. Using a forum to manage mods doesn't really work that well. It's difficult to browse them or find the one you want. It would be great if something like that would happen when he creates the API.
In fact - I'd like to see Curse add Minecraft texture pack support right now! I think that would be a great feature, especially since texture packs are officially supported. Support for mods could be added later, but texture packs can be done now. I'd love to be able to browse and preview texture packs in the client or at their site!
Consider it a suggestion :smile.gif:. Minecraft texture packs in the Curse client.
Endorsement:
One Sided Windows: http://www.minecraftforum.net/viewtopic.php?f=1&t=27244
Compasses & Grand Magnets: http://www.minecraftforum.net/viewtopic.php?f=1&t=24619
I have to agree with this.
I'm getting more site lag, takes 4 tries to submit 3/4th of posts, not to mention,
When you submit a post, and you're used to having "view your posts" on the top, but you CLICK ON THE AD INSTEAD, that doesn't help.
Along with how almost every page crashes my browser stating that "ADOBE FLASH HAS CRASHED" - another result of the ads.
I've also looked around curse's history, especially those with partnerships and advertisements, and I began to cry.
I can't vouch for the problems with ads since I use an adblocker.
The National Socialist of minecraftforums, since 2010!
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Curse PremiumWhat standard is that?
I have actually only experienced this problem once so far... and that was today. I thought, "Huh... this is new..." Then I noticed this topic.
I know correlation doesn't prove causation, but it does imply it. Suspiciously so, in this case.
viewtopic.php?f=7&t=65259
Here, allay your suspicions. This has been going on for about a month.
Honestly, how would I know if other people had had it before?
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