Welcome to the new AfterDawn discussion forums!

Having served us for over 13 years we have today retired our old discussion forums engine for good. The forums were built in-house by us at AfterDawn, but keeping the forum engine maintained and fresh was too much for our small development team. The forums are now running on XenForo, developed by XenForo Ltd. We have been working on the migration for months to make sure everything works as smoothly as possible the day we launch (today, yay!), but there are bound to be some hickups here and there.

As you can tell a lot has changed from the old version. Apart from the colors (which may or may not reflect the upcoming layout refresh of AfterDawn.com itself), many other things have changed as well.

Here are some of the key changes:

• Login
  • AfterDawn.com accounts work for logging in to the forums, but you need to login separately to the forums and the "main site"
  • you can now login and sign-up using Facebook, Google or Twitter
    • if you have an existing account, visit the External Accounts page to link your account to FB/G+/Twitter. You can find the page by clicking on your nickname at the top.
      Doing so won't change your user name or anything - you can just easily sign in by clicking a button. No need to type in user name and password or anything
• Responsive layout
  • you can now browse the forums easily on your phone or your tablet as well
• Rich Text editor
  • the forums now use a Rich Text editor for typing up messages. This makes it easier to stylize your messages
  • you can switch to "plain BB code" by clicking on the wrench & paper icon at the right of the menu bar
• Attachments
  • you can now attach files to messages
  • currently allowed attachment types are zip, txt, pdf, png, jpg, jpeg, jpe, and gif
  • attachments can be up to 16MB in size
• BB-codes
  • the number of BB-codes (i.e. codes to format text, add content etc.) has at least quadrupled
  • you can find most of the BB-codes from the help pages - not all of them have a button in the editor
  • some of the new codes include: TABLE, MEDIA (embed Youtube video, for example), SPOILER (hide content from view), PHP and HTML code, and many more
• Mentioning users
  • users can be notified "Twitter-style" by addressing them in a message (for example @dRD )
  • when notified users get an alert via the forum alert system letting them know they have been mentioned in a post (this can be switched off)
• Quick navigation
  • clicking on the quick navigation icon ( ) you can quickly move across the forums
• Forum / thread watching
  • threads and forums can be followed (watched) with or without email (or site alert) notifications
  • the link to watch or unwatch a thread is located at the top right corner of the thread
• Trophies
  • instead of user levels based on post count alone, XenForo has Trophy system
  • Trophies have different numbers of points associated with them
  • Trophy points count toward Trophy User Titles
  • Trophy points accumulate in various ways. The number of posts is still a large factor, but in addition to those likes (see below), the age of membership etc. all can be a factor when earning points
• Likes
  • posts by others can be "liked"
  • you can like which ever post you like - if you find the post funny, helpful, or you just happen to agree with if, feel free to hit "Like". Since it counts towards Trophy points (see above), people will appreciate your likes.
• User titles
  • there are currently the following user titles defined
    • Newbie (0 points)
      
    • Member (5 points)
      
    • Regular member (25 points)
      
    • Active member (50 points)
      
    • Senior member (100 points)
  • the AfterDawn Addict title will probably return as well, but I still need to figure out a way of defining the points for that correctly

There you go. That's just scratching the surface of the changes. There's probably a dozen important things I've forgotten to mention, and a hundred other details that need clarification. So feel free to ask me anything!

We would also greatly appreciate all and any feedback regarding the functionality of the forums, the layout, logging in, etc. etc. Especially if you're experiencing any kinds of problems, please let us know!

Edits:
The forums rooms will be heavily re-organized in the coming days and weeks. We'll drop obsolete forums, merge forums together, and move some forums (especially the console ones) to sub-forums.

We decided not to import most of the single post threads from the old discussion forums since they most likely didn't bring any value to the forums. A single post isn't discussion - it's monologue. =P

 

Sweet

Been a long time coming, the old forum engine just didn't cut it anymore, and from everything I've read, XenForo seems highly rated by those who have switched to it, even from vBulletin etc.

Good work guys

 

Since XenForo at it's current stage cannot be cached by Varnish, I've made the (somewhat drastic) move to serve the forums directly from our servers in the Netherlands. This probably makes using the forums a smoother experience especially for users that are logged in.

 

Added information about the upcoming re-organization, and the fact that most of the single-post threads weren't imported.

I'll probably write a separate tutorial on how the forums work (probably to the help section?), but a couple of things I wanted to mention:

• you can preview a message by hitting on the "More Options..." button
• multiple messages can be quoted - even from multiple threads - by using the "+ Quote" link. It's found next to the "Reply" link
• link to a specific post can be grabbed easily by clicking on the number of the message (found next to Like, +Quote and Reply links)
• spam and other inappropriate content can be reported by hitting on the "Report" link next to the post timestamp
• polls can be created in any forum - the poll and its options are set when creating a new thread
• threads can be prefixed with a pre-defined prefix, and filtered based on those prefixes. Currently there are only problem prefixes (Problem, Solved), and two un-grouped (Guide, Poll) prefixes defined. I'm open to suggestions!
• XenForo automatically saves drafts of your message as you type. The drafts move across browsers, so you can start typing a post on your PC, move to your Mac, and finish the post from your hammock on your Nexus 7. Sweet, eh?

 

Thanks! Noticed that your registration date was off by 7 years or so. =) Looks like it got reset here on XenForo side of things when I re-activated your account last week.

 

Exactly. It sends the message to the server every few minutes (can't remember the exact timeout), and it gets saved to a database. When you return to the thread drafts table is looked up, and if there's an unsaved post there it gets filled to the message editor.

Ha! I've had my hammock up for a while now (remember, this is Finland, it's cold out there), and I'll definitely do some posting there. Even if it means I'll be freezing my ass off!

Speaking of asses, I've configured XenForo to censor a few words I didn't think we needed to use over here. Those include puppy and fusk. Let's see if they get censored! =D

 

I have actually. It's every 60 seconds for 48 hours.

Doing Addict status via user groups is possible, although I'd rather have just one set of rules to define everything. But if we still want to keep the Addict goal at 2500 posts alone, user groups would be a good way to go.

Yup, was an easy quick fix for you. Just need to run a fix on the entire database to make sure there are no other oddities.

And yeah, no fusking fusks here. fusk it.

 

This is fantastic Jari. Well done.

 

7thsinger, no ban, DARN!!!!

 

Many have requested for "more color" or just stated that the gray theme feels dull. I'm looking into adding some color to the mix, but it's not quite as simple as I wish it were.

That's a good idea, and I've been thinking about implementing the very thing. There's an add-on to XenForo for marking post as best answer. That could work perfectly for crediting answers.

 

Thanks @Mrguss ! Do you mean the buttons should be visible all the time? Keeping them visible all the time might create a bit of a clutter at the top, but I have been thinking about making the "Log in or Sign up" tab more visible - for example by changing it's color to green and increasing its size somewhat.