[Metal Man88]

My beef is taking the name 'Sonic 2 Beta' off the forum, and, naturally, I'd want the site to remain.

I would not mind if it was 'Sonic Retro Presents Sonic 2 Beta Forums' or 'Sonic Retro's Sonic 2 Beta Forum' or some combination thereof. The content doesn't offend me, if the static pages remain. The URL is a nice touch, but the name is very important to me, as well as possibly some other forumers. My main beef was the hands off approach on telling us (which, despite the 'not-so-bad' news it carried, annoyed me by its tone) and in turn eliminating the name without either saying "It has been a long time for Sonic 2 Beta, and now the forums are moving on to (name Y)." or "I know some of you may dislike this, but we are changing the name."

Furthermore, should this merger crash, I would sincerely hope it doesn't take Sonic 2 Beta with it.

(Also, in response to another post, I really don't care about my postcount, heh, or my title either. I just don't want it to look like the name Sonic 2 Beta was just randomly erased one day.)

This post has been edited by Metal_Man88: 27 September 2007 - 10:52 PM

[Aurochs]

voice, on Sep 27 2007, 11:48 PM, said:

Well, my other random guess as to why people don't like this idea is that they view it as an attempt to farther the Sonic Retro name by building on other stuff.

I doubt that. It was Tweaker's idea.

[voice]

Chandragupta, on Sep 27 2007, 10:50 PM, said:

voice, on Sep 27 2007, 11:48 PM, said:

Well, my other random guess as to why people don't like this idea is that they view it as an attempt to farther the Sonic Retro name by building on other stuff.

I doubt that. It was Tweaker's idea.

That doesn't exactly help, considering some people think Tweaker is ass-kissing :P

[LocalH]

But, it's not that at all, in fact I just mentioned as much in my previous posts. Retro has a very strong and established wiki, we have a strong and established forum. Plus, as I said, if we keep s2beta.com pretty much as it is now, then should it not end up working after we try it out, it'd be trivial to go back to exactly how things were without much hassle.

Super: The entire FORUM would be identical. I figured it'd be quite obvious that post counts would stay along with that.

[Neo]

The way I understand it, Sonic 2 Beta and Sonic Retro are two different sites, but with basically the same forums, and as such, you want to merge the forums but keep both sites alive.

My opinion is that the site's content should just be merged with the wiki, and the forum should be hosted under the same name, only on the Sonic Retro domain. Something like s2b.sonicretro.org, or such. I can't be the only one who just doesn't care for the site itself anymore.

[LocalH]

Well, the S2B site as it stands now should definitely be preserved - it's historically significat since it's more or less the same format that Simon brought the site back into fame with. And, the forums should also be accessible from both domains - all the publically-accessible threads on this board are basically indexed by Google, and I don't want to break any such links. Since we're essentially hosted on Retro now anyway, it should be too much of a problem to have the forums accessible from both domains - s2beta.com for nostalgia and for those who don't care for the whole Retro side of things, and Retro because of the possible integration with the wiki (for example, requiring that people registering to edit the wiki take the same test that you'd take for forums access). I truly think we can present an experience that is 99.99% identical from s2beta.com while still leveraging the strength of Retro's wiki to make the site better in the future. If for some reason it ends up not working (which I sincerely believe is not the case), we can then always revert back to the traditional way of doing things without losing posts or anything.

Also, the static content wouldn't necessarily be set in stone, never to be changed again - if there is pertinent information to add (for example, say we are somehow able to locate other prototypes) then it could be manually updated so that we don't present out-of-date information to those coming in via Google. The only real Google issue I could foresee would be Googlebot not knowing that s2beta.com/forums and sonicretro.org/forums contain the same content, so in the future you'd end up having people come in on both sites. Seeing as that will only happen after the change has been in place for some time, I think it would be sufficient to put some text on the quiz page that basically says something like "Sonic 2 Beta/Sonic Retro forums", or something else that makes potential members aware that both sites share a forum.

[Nemesis]

I support the concept, I'm just worried about what would happen to this community if it doesn't work out.

[LocalH]

If it doesn't work out, we'll come back to s2beta.com as we're used to. I'm not worried about that in the slightest. If people write us off for good simply because of a failed experiment that is easily reversible, then fuck 'em. They're not the quality members we need anyway. Seriously, the forums won't be changing one bit regardless - same staff, same posts, same EVERYTHING. The only difference would be some integration with Sonic Retro. If that fails, we can always come back to what's comfortable.

[Sith]

I hope you guys know what you're doing. But yeah I'm not leaving.

This post has been edited by Sith: 28 September 2007 - 11:16 AM

[drx]

Myself, the only thing I don't like about this idea is:

LocalH, on Sep 28 2007, 04:12 AM, said:

Wait, who's idea was this? This is the first I've heard of it. And just after I've started spending more time on the forum (I've been here at least once a day for the past two and a half weeks, which is more than the previous six months).

I mean, I'm not necessarily against the idea, but I do wish I had been consulted first. And I'm sort of partial to the S2B name, so if there's a way we could keep that active, it would make me happy.

[ChaotixTails]

Two boards with a noted lack of activity, one moreso than the other, merge. The slightly more active board bitches about the name change because really, everything else is going to be the exact same and it's the job of the oldbies to bitch as much as possible at change.

Get over it. It's just a name. Everything else is going to be the exact same, if not better. I doubt you'll even notice (in fact, I had to check to make sure it hadn't already happened).
Not much will change, life will go on, etc.

[shobiz]

ChaotixTails, on Sep 29 2007, 09:14 PM, said:

Two boards with a noted lack of activity

This board has a "noted lack of activity"? What? Do you expect a new post every second?

[Sith]

This board has a fair number of active members.
I hate overactive boards as much as quiet ones.

[ChaotixTails]

Lots of members, pretty low frequency of posts. You can't tell me this is your idea of a fully active board.

[Guess Who]

ChaotixTails is right. I was going to leave soon anyway since this place has been boring the shit out of me lately, but this gave me a time to actually do it.