Upcoming forum change.

[KasperVld]

If we do decide to go with the new software the goal is to take as much information from one forum to the other. That includes posts, threads, reputation, usergroup settings etcetera. Of course there will be subtle differences but at this time I don't know what they'll be yet.

[vexx32]

I wonder if things like everyone's rep and post count, rep, join date etc. could be archived, then artificially set, like how they do for official profiles. These things can be helpful, as they do offer a little info about the people you're talking to.

I mean, you can tell some with thousands of posts probably has a little experience in things.

Potential new features do sound cool though.

Post count really ought to be trivial -- I mean, every single forum has it, really, and in each it's basically the same thing. It's just a number stored within the profile, incremented whenever you post. It can be artificially incremented on most forum software, so if there're issues, you can have a script run through them all and artificially increment them. Not too tough.

Reputation tends to be implemented slightly differently across the different softwares -- some have just numbers, some (like vB) have both rep amounts and include the ability to make a comment, some implement it as a way of 'liking' posts (a la Facebook, really), and so forth. As a result, it may not always be possible to cleanly port things over. However, if you are privy to the exact differences (and perhaps know some MySQL or something), it's perfectly possible to write a script to copy it over and change the data as needed.

Posts and threads are usually implemented in much the same way across forums (or at least stored in the DBs much the same, anyway), and can usually be cleanly ported across.

It just depends how similarly the features are implemented in the disparate software packages, really... but in the end, I'm sure Kasper and the others will make every effort to retain as much data as possible.

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