Welcome to Aurora 4x! 👋

General Discussion
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Welcome back, everyone.

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I weep for the old forum. Not only it was a wonderful piece of early Web 2.0 architecture, it contained almost two decades’ worth of discussions, conversations and wisdom about this game. I sincerely hope we can return to it one day, both to preserve our history and to enjoy a far more convenient discussion platforms. Meanwhile, this piece of crap right here has offered me to download an app when I accessed it on mobile. i am a little bit upset.

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I am sure we all would prefer the original forums to still exist. I had tens of thousands of my own posts and a huge amount of personal effort involved in those two decades of discussions. Many other people made massive contributions. It is catastrophic in terms of the lost material.

However, life doesn’t always give you what you want. The old forums might still rise again, but at this point that doesn’t look likely. So we can either mourn the old forums and quietly let the game die with them, or we can start again and try to create something new. Personally, I have never been very good at giving up, so I try to live by the famous Confucius quote

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So I’ve made a choice to move forward and try to make the best of a difficult situation. It’s very similar to the decision to move from VB6 to C# for Aurora. VB6 involved twelve years of hard work, but I still decided to abandon that code, start again and spend four years rebuilding Aurora from scratch because I thought it was the best long-term decision.

I understand I some players may not like the change and may decide to no longer follow the game because they prefer the old forum format. That is entirely up to them. I can only make the decisions I think are best for the future of Aurora. I cannot hope that everyone will agree with those decisions.

Discourse is obviously NOT phpBB. They both have their pros and cons and anyone used to phpBB is initially going to find Discourse very jarring. However, Discourse is far more modern, easy for new players to use (with the features they will expect), much easier to manage and maintain and actively under development.

in terms of Discourse asking you to download an app, that is because, unlike phpBB, Discourse has specific mobile apps and is designed to work with phones, whereas phpBB will load the website on a phone-based browser.

As an aside, I suffered a central vein occlusion (a stroke in my eye) in my left eye four weeks ago, so I have been trying to sort out the new forums while my vision gets increasingly worse and my doctors try to establish the cause. I don’t mention this to gain sympathy, but rather to emphasise that complaining about life, while doing nothing to change it, is not who I am.

Besides, I have lost count of the events in my life that appeared to be disasters but turned out to be new dawns. After all, Aurora is the Roman goddess of the dawn.

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Of course it’s good to have a proper place for an updates and discussions again, rather than just the Discord. It’s just so incredibly frustrating how in our day and age, something as simple as maintaining an old forum might turn out to be an impossible task.

I can’t see anyone abandoning this game over forums, as they are entirely separate from the game itself. The only issue could have been the loss of documentation, but as far as I can see, at least the text changelogs seem to be well-preserved, and missing screenshots are still accessible on the Wayback Machine. It’s just a matter of re-creating the old “Changes” directory that was so convenient to navigate.

As for your health, you don’t need to “gain” sympathy because you already have the deepest sympathies from all of us in here. Please get well soon!

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Welcome back alive, boys.

I will miss the old forum with all its threads
RIP.

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I can’t speak to the demands of maintaining or restoring the old forum, as that was done by Erik Luken very successfully, for many years. I do know it required a lot of time, money and effort on his part and it was greatly appreciated.

Without proper forums serving as a home, the game would be diminished. Part of Aurora is the community, debating the game, creating AARs, making suggestions, etc. and another key element is maintaining the extensive change logs in one place, so I disagree about the importance of replacing the pentarch forums.

I have already recreated the ‘changes directory’ on here with all of the old change logs. Its called Patch Notes, with everything in one place. It is much more convenient than the phpBB forums in terms of finding what you need, especially with the hyperlinks at the start of each change log, highlighting the major changes.

Wayback machine is very useful, so I would encourage anyone wanting to recover their own material to check it out.

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Just FYI, the notifications inbox sends as

Steve Walmsley notifications@aurora4x.discoursemail.com

Not sure if this is intentional. Apologies if this isn’t the right spot to report, but I couldn’t decide on a “good” category.

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Apparently, its part of the automated hosting.

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Thanks Steve for setting this up! I agree, it’s a big change and will take some getting used to but I personally like forums over Reddit/Discord so old dog has to learn some new tricks.