From the Meme man himself aaron webber "Hi everyone, The SEGA forums will be shutting down on Vbulletin as of this Friday, February 2nd. This will mark the end of our time using Vbulletin. I know it's sudden, and probably a bit of a shock for many - but please know we do not intend for this to be the ultimate end of the SEGA forums, and hope to migrate the database to a new forum software someday in the future. As plans for the future crystallize, I hope to share more news with you soon via Twitter. I can't give any more details at this point in time, but please be patient as we work behind-the-scenes to set things up. There will be a period of downtime between the current shutdown and our hopeful next evolution of the boards. Thanks in advance for that patience, and thank you all for an amazing eight or so years on the Vbulletin boards. Change is necessary sometimes - and this is one of those times. With any luck, what comes next will be even better! I'm sure you'll have many questions, so please feel free to ask in this thread, and I'll respond to as many as I can today. Yours in all things SEGA, Sonic, and dessert, Aaron" Its the end of a era for many of us here is hoping many new memories will be made soon
Was just copying the topic Aaron made in the Sega Forums. I thought about changing the title but thought id be better to just copy the source so people wouldn't get angry at me for changing it up ect because people can be strange sometimes :/
Place never really stopped being a wretched hive; but it was also how I entered the online Sonic community (back when Sonic 4 was announced) and online forums in general. Hopefully the new forum replacing it also means some new policies and rules so it's not as much as a no man's land. Hope they are going to make a proper archive of the entire old forum and store it somewhere. The Sonic 4 PR era of Ken and company shouldn't be lost to the ether. (But really, it should be archived though.) e: Aaron later said in the thread said they have plans to archive as much of the old forum as they can, so there's that I guess.
Thanks for the heads up dude. Primary thing that strikes me is that the transition to the new forums will be "some day in the future" which is super vague, as is the rest of his explanation and makes it sound like there's going to be an extended period of down time before new forums arise - so technically the thread title is accurate as current plans to launch new forums seem far off. Surely if they're just wanting to upgrade the forum software the forums shouldn't be effectively shutting down for what seems like a seriously long time because of this? His post was super vague and I'm not understanding Sega's directive or intentions here. They shouldn't be shutting down at all - it should just be very temporary down time until a re-launch on more modern software - so this is somewhat confusing. Makes me wonder what's going on behind the scenes. It's interesting nonetheless but I can't say I ever used the Sega forums outside of a thread here and there over the years. Sega needs a dedicated space for fans to talk that's official - so their absence needs to hopefully be very temporary. Hope this "future" Aaron speaks of isn't that too distant.
Aaron stated in a post that post 2015 restructure the forum was more or less left in the hands of fans to keep it from spam bots, Aaron himself says hes the only real Sega employee to check regularly the site. When someone asked him that it feels like Sega does not care he replied that if they did not the site would have been shut down. Instead they are spending time and money to make the software more resilient to spam bots and make the lives of the Fan Admins easier as in the last couple of months the Spams have been hitting the forum hard
I'm not sure what this means. In 2009 when it got changed to vBulletin rules were enacted and forums were removed that in my opinion dealt a killing blow to the forum because it stagnated after it, and well, here we are now.
The whole situation honestly feels like when the PSO servers where taken down in 07, but like PSO it will live on in a new form
Didn't Ken Balough make a lot of posts on that forum that explained about Sonic 4's development. I think AAUK also made posts that gave insight into Sonic Team view on continuity. Has anyone got back ups of these?
If no one does they only have today to back these things up as there is no guarantee that the forum will be archived.
More than likely they'll convert over to Xenforo, as it's the most popular paid forum software. Vbulletin isn't worth the price imo. I rarely ever visit the forums, but that sucks for those who do. I wonder how long it'll be offline...
