New & Exciting Changes Are Coming!

[MiRai]

Greetings, Dual-Boxing!

Lax, Svpernova, and myself, as well as numerous others, have been discussing the future of this site for quite some time, and today I come bearing some news.

Over the past year or so, some things around the site may have felt somewhat stagnant and boring, feature-wise, or maybe even a little broken in some areas if you happen to look at certain pages. We know, and during this time, we’ve been discussing what we wanted to do with both the site and the community, and in what direction we wanted to go, moving forward.

The technical details are that this site is currently running vBulletin 4—it’s quite outdated at this point and its back-end is in need of some laborious changes if we want to attempt to maintain where we’re currently at. Years ago, we upgraded to vB4 from vB3, and so moving to vB5 might seem like the simplest solution, but unfortunately, it isn’t. Not only is vB5 quite lackluster in its current form, but migrating over to it would also require either a complete re-work of our current theme, assuming we wanted to keep it, or us finding something compatible with vB5 that meets or exceeds our expectations, for this community.

We’ve struggled with this discussion for some time, but a recent acquisition has made us reconsider the direction, all together.

A few months ago, we acquired the multiboxing.com domain, and because of that, we wanted to give the community a proper upgrade that it deserves, and, in some areas, is long overdue. I don't have too many specifics to share, right at the moment, as many things are still being discussed, worked on, or finalized, but we currently have a plan that we've already begun to execute.

We have decided to move away from vBulletin, and will be moving forward with the XenForo forum software. Out of all available options, not only does XenForo look and feel the most modern, but it offers a handful of plug-ins and add-ons that we believe are going to benefit the community, as a whole.

We also want to migrate the full 10+ years of this community’s history to the new forum, leaving nothing behind. We have some custom changes that we've made to our vB back-end, but initial migration tests show that it's likely there won't be any issues with moving everything over.

Once the migration is complete, the dual-boxing.com forum will remain publicly available, but frozen in time in an archived state, and its top-level domain will be pointed at the new multiboxing.com forum.

With all of that said, we have some planned features, changes, and upgrades that we’re hoping to implement—some larger or more impactful than others—as well as looking to expand upon the moderation team, so if you're interested, then let us know. In the coming weeks, as we continue to design, implement, and finalize these new features on our test forum, we'll be ready to share more details.

We're very excited about this announcement, and we wanted to give everyone ample time to see this thread, so that you know what to expect. We don't have an exact date for when this is going live, but if all goes smoothly, we estimate that it should be happening within the next month—ready to start off 2020 with some style.

So, with all of that said, thank you to everyone involved, and thank you to the community for sticking with us and making this a place worth visiting, over all these years!


Update - 2019-12-24

[Peregrine]

Great news! Thanks a bunch to MiRai, Lax, Supernova and all other responsible for this forum and the incredible software that you did.

I can't wait for new forum page and new features! Thumbs up, guys! Keep it up Best wishes for Xmas and New Year!

[Wubsie]

End of an era in a way I suppose.

Looking forward to new site. ^^

[Svpernova09]

End of an era in a way I suppose.

Looking forward to new site. ^^

Not the first, certainly not the last

[Ellay]

Looking forward to it. Thank you guys for the hard work. I'll miss this place - but consolidating under one location sounds great.

[luxlunae]

Will the new platform have the blogging feature?

[Fat Tire]

Nice score on the domain name and full migration is great to hear.

[MiRai]

Will the new platform have the blogging feature?

The quick and dirty answer is... I don't know.

The longer answer is... While we're hoping to implement a better frontpage with articles and content, I don't suspect that we'll re-introduce a blog feature the same way that we have over here. Here on d-b, not only was the blog system heavily underutilized, but it was also very susceptible to spam (and still somewhat is), and because of that we had to practically lock it down and hand out permission to post, by hand, to whomever asked for it.

Knowing that, your next question might be, "So, who's going to be populating that frontpage with content if there aren't any blogs to promote to it?"

Well, we can still promote standard threads to the frontpage, so we hope to be able to fill it with that, but one thing that has been brought up, internally, is that we may create a sub-forum dedicated to creating blog-like threads, which would also include news threads. This would make it easier for people to see these threads in the standard "What's New?" list when they visit the site, as well as more easily monitor (and moderate) any discussion since it'll just be part of the standard forum.

From my perspective, there are two main reasons that fuel the choice to create a dedicated sub-forum:

First, dare I say that most people don't see the blogs posted on this site, nor do they even know that such an area exists (read: heavily underutilized), but if there was a sub-forum for blog-like posts, in plain sight, then others would definitely be interested in reading that, and might even be motivated to start their own.

Second, in the past, people have wanted to create their own threads to more-or-less track their progress as they play, but as mainly a discussion forum, there's no "on topic" area to put that. Unfortunately, as the blog area is somewhat disconnected from the main forum, I hate to shuffle people away in that direction because I know that whatever they post, over there, probably won't be seen by too many others.

So, that's why I'm leaning in the direction of a dedicated sub-forum—not to mention, everyone should be able to find things by prefix and/or username (author) a whole helluva lot easier on this new forum.

However, I'm open to feedback for anything someone may want to see on the new site.

[WOWBOX40]

To avoid spam in a blog:

1. Get verified ingame to make sure you are a multiboxer.. get permission to start a blog thread.
2. In order to post within the spesific blog thread, you need to type another unique password.

Eh.... or.... just make it so that the person who gets allowed to start the blog, is the only one allowed to make posts within it.


Maybe something like this could work.

[Malixk]

Marry christmas and what a present!