IMPORTANT: Downtime and migration notice

[Sheep]

Hi everyone! As you're all aware, a forum software upgrade has been planned for PokéCommunity for several years now. We've been hard at work making this happen and are pleased to announce that the migration is planned to occur on 25 November. Below we'll be providing more information as well as outling some frequently asked questions on this migration - please take some time to read through it, as a lot will be changing.

FAQ​

When will this migration happen?
Currently it is slated for 25 November.

How long will the migration take?
We expect it to last up to two days, but updates will be provided if this changes.

What forum software are you moving to?
We're moving to XenForo.

Will I have to reset my password?
Yes, you will need to reset your password to log back in. Ensure your account is tied to an email address you can access. The good news is that this migration will fix the ongoing issue of certain users who try to reset their password encountering a persistent password reset loop.

What will happen to Supporters?
We plan to change the Supporter rank to be automatically applied to an account after 500 posts are made. Once you hit this threshold (if you're not a legacy Supporter who already has the role) you will automatically be assigned the Supporter usergroup and get all benefits associated with it (bigger PM box, images in flairs, no ads, etc). Please note that this change may not occur until several weeks after our software migration, to ensure we can do the necessary testing on the feature so it can roll out without issues. An information thread on this will be provided at a later date, once we are ready to roll out the feature.

What about existing Supporters?
We're always extremely thankful for your donations. We are looking into ways to thank our original Supporters and hope you can be patient with us while we work this out!

Will my Likes carry over?
Unfortunately Likes will not carry over as they are a custom feature built into our current software and therefore not as easy to port.

Will my site Album images carry over?
The images themselves should continue to exist and function properly if embedded/linked to, but we will no longer have an album feature to upload new images at this time. We may consider installing an add-on for this in the future.

What's going to happen to my badges?
The current badge system will be archived. We plan to re-introduce badges in the near future. Once this is implemented, we will hand out as many badges as possible back to the users who earned them. Other badges (such as meeting specific post counts) will be handed out automatically by our system.

Will my posts, private messages, and visitor messages (profile posts) carry over?
Yes, all of this will carry over.

Will my attachments carry over?
Yes, this will carry over.

Will my profile design carry over?
Unfortunately not.

Will my Flair carry over?
It will not. However, we will still have the Post Flair feature after migration. Please save the code for your flairs externally - you can re-apply them post-migration!

Will my thread/post BBCode carry over?
Yes, all of our custom BBCodes will carry over. We plan to condense our custom BBCodes slightly so some will be removed, however these will just be BBCodes that function the same way as certain others - duplicates. It will not affect your customized thread or post, as any removed BBCodes will be autoreplaced with the correct BBCode.

Will my Blog carry over?
Blog entries will carry over to a Blogs forum. However, the forum will be archived so the team can decide how, and if, we should bring Blogs back.

Will all forum styles be available on migration?
We plan to have 10 total styles on migration and will be adding more in the future. The styles we plan to have are a mix of old styles that were available years ago, and new styles which are available currently on present PC. Popular themes like The Johto Elite will be available - no need to worry about your favorite dark theme going away!

Are forum splashes going to stay?
Forum splashes are the banners each forum has at the top, which usually includes a banner image and text (such as a link to the rules). Sadly this feature will not be available anymore when we migrate, but we are considering our options for bringing it back.

Oh yay, you're moving to XenForo! Does that mean I can change my username myself?
Yes, you will finally be able to do this!

Can I finally ping people?
Yes!

Why is this migration beneficial?
We've been using an old vBulletin software as our base for a very long time now. This new software will provide us with many things we didn't have - the ability to ping people, multi-person private conversations, direct embeds without needing to wrap links in specific BBCode tags, a WYSIWYG post editor, reduced lag when posting in threads with many posts, better spam cleaning tools, expert support, and a multitude of plugins to customize the community in ways we could not have done before, among many, many others.

Potential Issues​

A move of this scale will not come without issues, and we kindly ask for your patience for us to work any bugs out if we encounter them. We will do our best to make sure things function well.

Currently, the issues you may expect to see are:

• Private messages that have been read in the past suddenly showing up as unread messages. If this occurs, you will need to click into each of these messages to mark them read. Using the "mark all as read" button will unfortunately not work.
• When searching for profile posts (called visitor messages on vBulletin), posts made before our migration may not be visible and thus the search function would yield no results, except for profile posts made after migration.

 

[Kip]

This has for sure been a long time coming. I will miss the small quirks and things that make PC unique (at least in the short term) as you can only get with a heavily-customised piece of software used over decades. However I do look forward to having a more modern, stable system with a huge range of potential to expand in the future. And hopefully over time, some of these little extras will come back.

I have a few questions:

- Will supporter e-mail (i.e. @pokecommunity.com) still continue to work, and will it be available to new users? (I ask because I still use mine!)
- If you are changing supporter benefits to a certain postcount, what (if any) additional benefits may be offered for future donators?
- I know this may be a 'me' thing, but it is nice going through some old profiles and seeing all the customisations. Will there be an effort to archive these profiles as they look now? A lot of these users are old friends that are not around any more and have not been online in years, so I don't they will be online to save their profiles. It's just a neat piece of history I'd like to try and preserve if I can.

 

[Incineroar]

I am so excited to see this finally happening. I know this was still being discussed when I was on staff, but I'm really happy to see it going ahead in the coming days, and I'm really looking forward to the new PC once it's all said and done with. I'll have to make sure all my stuff is saved beforehand though, but I'm excited to see what's on the other side!

 

[Ghost Owl]

Exciting. :D

RIP to the mountains of janky horrible code I wrote that has continued to run here all these years.

 

[Explorer of Time]

Will we be able to change our notification settings? I really want to be able to turn off notifications for post likes.

 

[Incineroar]

Exciting. :D

RIP to the mountains of janky horrible code I wrote that has continued to run here all these years.

It's served well here, and you did a phenomenal amount of work here. Better than anything I could do hahaha

 

[Sheep]

Will we be able to change our notification settings? I really want to be able to turn off notifications for post likes.

Yep! That'll be in your Preferences page. ^^

I have a few questions:

- Will supporter e-mail (i.e. @pokecommunity.com) still continue to work, and will it be available to new users? (I ask because I still use mine!)
- If you are changing supporter benefits to a certain postcount, what (if any) additional benefits may be offered for future donators?
- I know this may be a 'me' thing, but it is nice going through some old profiles and seeing all the customisations. Will there be an effort to archive these profiles as they look now? A lot of these users are old friends that are not around any more and have not been online in years, so I don't they will be online to save their profiles. It's just a neat piece of history I'd like to try and preserve if I can.

- If you have a supporter email that should still continue to work, yes! But it hasn't been available for new users in many years now so it's considered an archived feature.
- Donations will be removed going forward, so we won't accept future ones anymore. We wanted to make these perks available without having to spend money, so we chose to remove that feature.
- Unfortunately probably not. There may be archival sites that have snapshots of old pages available to look at, but there simply isn't much reason for us to archive them ourselves due to the already high cost and dev work to get things to function on XF PC. :( We just had so much to do already that we couldn't really consider things like this.

 

[Mgh1995]

Hi

 

[Lavemu☆]

Hi

Hello Mgh1995! if your looking for somewhere to introduce yourself, I'd recommend the Meet and greet section! :D

 

[miragespot]

Will it be possible to change my password to the same password? I ask because I just changed my password after returning here from several years off.

 

[Hālian]

Out of curiosity, what are the benefits to using XenForo over the latest version of vBulletin?

- If you have a supporter email that should still continue to work, yes! But it hasn't been available for new users in many years now so it's considered an archived feature.

Is it feasible to revive this feature for legacy supporters?

 

[Platinum Lucario]

To actually think, PC has been on vBulletin 3.8.11 since waaaaaaaaaaaaaay back in like... early 2008. And it's been stuck on that version ever since, with some pretty awesome unique vBulletin mods/hacks used for changing the interface in many different ways possible. This is how the entire forums was made in a very unique style, the way we've all come to love PC for how it is. ^^ But as you probably would've figured by now, vBulletin 3.x is end of life since 2017.

It's about time PC got a brand new forum software to run PHP code in it. I'm also really curious as to why XenForo was chosen, instead of say... a fork of an open source forum software? Is there any benefits that XenForo has over vBulletin 3.8.11? Just hopefully it's less expensive than a vBulletin licence.

I'm really looking forward to the changes this will bring, hopefully it's just as modifiable as it was with the vBulletin 3.8.11 mods/hacks. Or is it more restrictive?

 

[Sheep]

Will it be possible to change my password to the same password? I ask because I just changed my password after returning here from several years off.

From my understanding this should be fine! But let me double check and get back to you.

Out of curiosity, what are the benefits to using XenForo over the latest version of vBulletin?

Is it feasible to revive this feature for legacy supporters?

We massively prefer XenForo over newer versions of vBulletin. It has good anti-spam features, is very customizable with a wide range of available (and actively maintained) plugins, has good support, and is generally much more visually appealing to us among other things. We enjoyed using vBulletin 3 as our base for a long time but it's very outdated now. XenForo is just the better option for us in these times.

As for bringing back PC emails for legacy supporters, that's not a bad suggestion! I'll pass it along to discuss. ^^

To actually think, PC has been on vBulletin 3.8.11 since waaaaaaaaaaaaaay back in like... early 2008. And it's been stuck on that version ever since, with some pretty awesome unique vBulletin mods/hacks used for changing the interface in many different ways possible. This is how the entire forums was made in a very unique style, the way we've all come to love PC for how it is. ^^ But as you probably would've figured by now, vBulletin 3.x is end of life since 2017.

It's about time PC got a brand new forum software to run PHP code in it. I'm also really curious as to why XenForo was chosen, instead of say... a fork of an open source forum software? Is there any benefits that XenForo has over vBulletin 3.8.11? Just hopefully it's less expensive than a vBulletin licence.

I'm really looking forward to the changes this will bring, hopefully it's just as modifiable as it was with the vBulletin 3.8.11 mods/hacks. Or is it more restrictive?

Definitely more modifiable!

As for why XF was chosen, see the above reply. We just have no interest in using more modern versions of vB for multiple reasons. vB 3.x isn't really usable in 2023 either as it's frankly ancient and we're missing out on updates, have much less plugins (especially ones that are still maintained) available to us, etc.

 

[Mahdir211]

Can I still create groups

 

[Mahdir211]

Will my site Album images carry over?
The images themselves should continue to exist and function properly if embedded/linked to, but we will no longer have an album feature to upload new images at this time. We may consider installing an add-on for this in the future.

Will this work: https://xenforo.com/docs/xf2/media-gallery/

 

[Sheep]

Can I still create groups

Social Groups were archived years ago so no, you won't be able to on XenForo. We'll talk with the staff on if there's enough of a reason to bring it back in the future but right now there are no plans to sadly.

Will my site Album images carry over?
The images themselves should continue to exist and function properly if embedded/linked to, but we will no longer have an album feature to upload new images at this time. We may consider installing an add-on for this in the future.

Will this work: https://xenforo.com/docs/xf2/media-gallery/

Yeah, we're aware of that plugin. But we have a lot of other things we need to get sorted out currently so albums/galleries are on the backburner (if they do end up making it over at all) as they weren't massively popular to begin with. There are a lot of features for us to maintain already and we're trying to cut down a bit so the site is more manageable in the future!

 

[Venia Silente]

I trust that the glorious PC CSS will survive as has been mentioned before, since at least for me that has always been the selling feature; tho trimming some of the tags sounds like a pretty good idea.

One thing that worries me a lil bit: how is extensibility coming up in a paid ecosystem like Xenforo? I take pretty much everything from tags, threadmarks, social integration, etc, has to be acquired separately?

 

[Mahdir211]

Social Groups were archived years ago so no, you won't be able to on XenForo. We'll talk with the staff on if there's enough of a reason to bring it back in the future but right now there are no plans to sadly.



Yeah, we're aware of that plugin. But we have a lot of other things we need to get sorted out currently so albums/galleries are on the backburner (if they do end up making it over at all) as they weren't massively popular to begin with. There are a lot of features for us to maintain already and we're trying to cut down a bit so the site is more manageable in the future!

ok

 

[Sheep]

isnt xenforo the same platform (broken link removed) uses?

Yep! Many forums use XenForo though and it's a well-known forum software. 👍 But our site won't look anything like theirs despite using the same software of course, since our themes and visual style are different.

 

[Kip]

(I swear I should look at my notifications more often >_<)

- Donations will be removed going forward, so we won't accept future ones anymore. We wanted to make these perks available without having to spend money, so we chose to remove that feature.

Good news for a lot of users here. It's a nice idea to reward users for loyalty. In which case, however, where will PCs hosting costs come from? Is there some way we can support the site if needed? A Patreon, for example?

- Unfortunately probably not. There may be archival sites that have snapshots of old pages available to look at, but there simply isn't much reason for us to archive them ourselves due to the already high cost and dev work to get things to function on XF PC. :( We just had so much to do already that we couldn't really consider things like this.

OK, makes sense. I've gone ahead and archived my and a few other profiles on the Wayback Machine. If anyone else would like to do that btw, you can use it here: https://web.archive.org/save/ It's free, and if you make an account you can also save a screenshot of the page.

I did have another question. I have set my gallery to public, however when I try to view it is says I need to log in. I'd like to archive it using the same method - is there a way of making it public so the archiver can get it? I can download it manually if not.