Welcome to the new forums!

TwistedTwigleg

Welcome to the new Godot forums!

With lots of planning and work, the Godot Developers forums have officially changed hosts and moved to a new domain! We're now running the latest version of Vanilla, have cool new themes, and loads of other changes!

Existing users: Login information should be exactly the same as it was with the old forums! If you had an account on the old form, the same login credentials will work with this forum. If for some reason you cannot log in, please let us know!
- You can email me at the following email address: TwistedTwigleg@RandomMomentania.com if you need.
New users: Feel free to make account! Now that these forums are the official, your accounts will be saved.
Please read the rules. If you are unfamiliar with the rules, please take a look at them.
All new posts, topics, profile pictures, accounts, etc, will be saved like normal. We have officially moved and these forums are no longer for testing! The forums here are now the real deal!

We'd love to hear what you think of the new forums! :smile:

Thanks

This wouldn't have been possible without the hard work of everyone on the forum staff! Huge thanks to everyone involved!

I want to especially thank @Megalomaniak and @ram4nd for their help. Without their help, the forums wouldn't have been around a year ago and wouldn't be around now! Their help has been invaluable and I am truly thankful for all of the help and support they have provided!

TwistedTwigleg

What's new?

Themes

Probably the most noticeable change is the new forum themes! Currently there are two new themes to choose from: Godot Lightly and Godot Darkly

<center></center> <center><small>NOTE: The picture above is from a prototype!</small></center>

The Godot Lightly theme tries to mimic the visuals and feel of GodotEngine.org as much as possible with some extra touches thrown in.

This gives the forums a fresh face and is intended to mirror the style of the main Godot website while aiming to be as functional and pleasant to use as possible.
Following the color and style choices of the main Godot website gives a more consistent look and feel from one website to another, making transitioning back and forth comfortable.
By using a nice very light gray as the background with colorful pops of color, the theme is ideally easy on the eyes while still maintaining good contrast.

Moving forward, the Godot Lightly theme is the new default theme for the forum. Please let us know what you think!

<center></center> <center><small>NOTE: The picture above is from a prototype!</small></center>

We know that not everyone likes brightly colored themes. Bright colors can be jarring in low light environments. Because of this, we added another theme: Godot Darkly.

Godot Darkly is a dark colored version of the Godot Lightly theme and is ideal if you want a darker viewing experience that is easier on the eyes while still looking great.

Godot Darkly is much closer to the old Godot Developers forum theme. If you like the old theme, we hope you'll like Godot Darkly too!
In Godot Darkly, bright colors are kept to a minimum while still maintaining good contrast for reading. This makes Godot Darkly ideal for low light situations or just when you want to use something a little more subdued.
Right now Godot Lightly is the main focus since it is the new default theme, which means that right now Godot Darkly hasn't had as much work done with it. We plan to work more on Godot Darkly once we're finished with Godot Lightly!

Contributing

If you want to help contribute to the development of the new forum themes, you can find the theme source code here on GitHub! Please read through the Wiki first, and then feel free to help contribute to the development of the new forum themes if you want!

Customization

The new forums have several customization options that can be changed on a per user basis. As of when this was written, there are the following options:

You can change which theme your profile uses by editing your profile. There should be a new drop down called Theme that will allow you to change the theme you will see when visiting the forums with your profile.
You can also enable a Discord widget that will show the Godot Discord by checking the Add Discord widget checkbox when editing your profile.
You can change how discussions are shown, so it looks like the pictures above, by checking the Use Discussion Category Style Extended checkbox when editing your profile.

Please note that you may need to refresh the browser several times before all of the changes will be active. You may even need to restart your browser. This is due to how browsers cache a website and its CSS.

Other additions:

Along with the new themes and customization options, there is also a bunch of other additions and changes! Including:

At the top of the forums there is now links to the various Godot pages, just like on the official Godot website.
When you scroll down, a small button with an up arrow will appear to take you to the top of the site.
The plugin the old forum used for reactions, Yaga, is back! This means you can now add reactions along with earning points and badges. All old reactions on posts prior to disabling the plugin are visible again as well.
The new themes should work on both desktop and mobile browsers!
And more! There are loads of small changes here and there! We also have a bunch of cool additions and changes planed for the future!

TwistedTwigleg

Lost Features and Functionality

Unfortunately, some things that were present in the old forums have gone away. Many times this is because a plugin used is no longer compatible with the latest versions of Vanilla, or the plugins were custom plugins that we no longer maintain.

Features missing includes:

Project images are no longer displayed in the categories list. Instead, the profile picture of the topic creator is shown instead.
The "Skip to Answer" button is no longer available. The QnA plugin still works though, you just cannot skip to an answer.
Links to the Godot documentation, the IRC, chat, and home are gone. They can easily be found through GodotEngine.org which should be easy enough to access through the new header.
The Imgur plugin sometimes uploads twice when dragging and dropping images. This will likely be fixed in the future. For now, just keep the Imgur upload and delete the duplicate when uploading images.
Some of these might return in the future should we have enough time to refactor them. Check out our GitHub page if you want to help!

TwistedTwigleg

What happened

Put simply:

The domain was going to expire. Knowing this, I offered to renew the domain.
I also offered to host the forums, as the previous forum host has generously hosted the forums for for free over a year now on what was supposed to be a temporary solution. We (both me and @Megalomaniak ) feel bad for having had to rely on his hosting for so long, and now I am in a position where I can host the forums.
The domain expired and entered a grace period, making it impossible to obtain unless you are the domain owner. Unfortunately, even though the previous domain owner is cool with transferring the domain, the account linked to the domain has been terminated, making transferring the domain impossible.
The previous forum host, ram4nd, moved the forums to a subdomain of theirs, so we had time to figure everything out, update things, and move the forums smoothly to a new host.
These forums will became the official forums on the weekend of April 27th - 28th!

Here’s the full rundown of what happened, more or less:

I knew that the domain was going to expire several weeks before it did. However, I got the flu for three weeks, effectively cutting the time down to handle the situation to a mere few days.

I talked to the domain owner and asked if he could transfer the domain, as due to complications on his side he wouldn’t be renewing the domain himself. Unfortunately, the service he used to purchase the domain terminated his account, making the transfer impossible.

Not wanting to see the forums go down, I talked to the others in the forum staff. I offered to both grab the domain, and host the forums as well.

ram4nd generously offered to temporarily host the forums a year ago so we could find a host. I feel bad to admit that we have relied on his hosting despite the initial plan of it being a temporary solution.

However, since I am in a position where I can host the forums, I offered to host the forums. That way we would free up ram4nd’s server that he generously allow us to use freely.

So the plan was for me to snag the domain once it expired, point it to ram4nd’s servers, and then transition the forums smoothly to the same host RandomMometania is using.

We also decided that since the forums is changing hosts, that it would be best to update and upgrade the forums while we have the opportunity. That is why we changed to the latest version of Vanilla and have made new themes.

However, complications arose. Unaware that domains go into grace period, where a domain goes down but cannot be purchased by anyone but the original owner, I was unable to grab the domain.

The domain entered its grace period and the forums(though technically just the domain) went down with no prior warning. If things went to plan, then the domain expiring would have been a non-event and we would have announced the plans to move hosts after we ensure the domain was pointing in the right direction.

Because the domain was/is unobtainable, ram4nd moved the forums to a subdomain of his so the forums would still be accessible. This allowed us to plan, have the time to work on updating everything, and allowed us to migrate everything over efficiently.

From there we ran a test server on a subdomain of RandomMomentania so we could test, update everything, and do our best to ensure as smooth as a transition as possible. Over several weeks, we worked hard on getting everything updated, making the new themes and plugins, and generally trying to ensure everything would transition smoothly.

We planned to move the forums to a subdomain of GodotEngine.org and got permission to use a subdomain, but complications arose and in an effort to move forward, I bought the GodotForums.org domain that we are using now.

In the future, we may use a subdomain of GodotEngine.org. If we do, we'll announce it in advance. At least in the short term, we will be using GodotForums.org.

Once we had the domain, we did a test migration and announced the change on the old forums. Then on the weekend of April 27th - 28th, we migrated everything and the forums here on GodotForums.org became the official forums.

Thanks for reading! And thanks to everyone for their patience while we figured everything out! These forums are now the official forums for the foreseeable future.

Ace_Dragon

Great, the less reliant the Godot community is on Reddit and Facebook, the better.

The only thing is that I can't seem to change the theme to Godot Darkly on the Win10 64 bit version of Google Chrome.

Also, another thing, we can't edit the original post in project threads, how else are we supposed to do updates or fix the images?

Megalomaniak

After you click the drop-down and select darkly you need to hit save, after that step you may be asked to enter your password depending on if you had just recently logged in or not.

I just tested with @testUser and since I had to login first I didn't have to enter the password for the change, but I know that I've had to enter it a couple of times before when I had been logged in with an account for a while.

Ace_Dragon

@Megalomaniak said: After you click the drop-down and select darkly you need to hit save, after that step you may be asked to enter your password depending on if you had just recently logged in or not.

I just tested with @testUser and since I had to login first I didn't have to enter the password for the change, but I know that I've had to enter it a couple of times before when I had been logged in with an account for a while.

I get this error when I try to change it.

Usernames must be 3-20 characters and consist of letters, numbers, and underscores.

My username uses a space when the software in question allows it, at least the old site did. It is not possible to update my username to 'fix' the problem.

Megalomaniak

I could probably change your username to confirm, if you don't mind. The plugin that enables user changeable themes was not developed by us, and might be fairly old so it might be that the plugin is older than vanillas support for usernames with spaces in them. Doesn't mean we can't look into trying to update it ourselves though.

edit: after looking more into it I don't think vanilla allows users to register with spaces or periods in user names so your case is probably fairly special since you are one of the users from pre-vanilla days. I'll just edit the username then.

TwistedTwigleg

It seems the most recent versions of Vanilla restrict usernames to 20 characters without special characters like spaces by default.

According to this topic on the Vanilla forums, it might be possible to fix it. Apparently the fix can cause problems with plugins and stuff though, so I’m not sure how viable it will be. Will need to test before applying it to the live forums.

Worse case, we’ll need to convert everyone with a space in their username to use underscores instead.

I’ll look into finding a solution.

Ace_Dragon

@Megalomaniak said:

edit: after looking more into it I don't think vanilla allows users to register with spaces or periods in user names so your case is probably fairly special since you are one of the users from pre-vanilla days. I'll just edit the username then.

Yes, I was one of the first members of this forum when it was developed (before the Vanilla days).

Godot Darkly works as it should now.

TwistedTwigleg

Okay, I implemented the change and now usernames should allow for spaces and - characters.

I had to edit the config file for the forums to allow it. Please let me know if you encounter any issues with usernames with spaces (or -).

If it turns out to be problematic, we'll have to remove the change. I tested on locally before applying the change to the live forums and everything seems to be okay. Turns out the old forums had a special rule for allowing - characters, so given that worked on the old forums, I'm hopeful everything will work fine here.

@Ace_Dragon, do you want your profile changed back to use a space instead of a underscore?

Ace_Dragon

@TwistedTwigleg said:

@Ace_Dragon, do you want your profile changed back to use a space instead of a underscore?

It's fine, my username received an underscore at Blenderartists when they moved to Discourse, spaces in usernames appear to be on their way out anyway.

TwistedTwigleg

@Ace_Dragon said:

@TwistedTwigleg said:

@Ace_Dragon, do you want your profile changed back to use a space instead of a underscore?

It's fine, my username received an underscore at Blenderartists when they moved to Discourse, spaces in usernames appear to be on their way out anyway.

Alrighty! If you change your mind, let one of us know :smile:

Perhaps it would be a good idea to enforce no spaces then? If it is being phased out, I'm sure it is for a good reason. @Megalomaniak, what do you think?

Ace_Dragon

Just to note, I mentioned the new and improved Godot forums on Reddit and the Godot thread on Blenderartists.

The Reddit thread has 15 upvotes so far, I think we'll start seeing more activity shortly.

TwistedTwigleg

@Ace_Dragon said: Just to note, I mentioned the new and improved Godot forums on Reddit and the Godot thread on Blenderartists.

The Reddit thread has 15 upvotes so far, I think we'll start seeing more activity shortly.

Thanks for sharing! I appreciate it!

wombatstampede

Thank you guys for the effort to port the new forum! Now just the godotegine.org community homepage needs to be updated to let people know the forum isn't down anymore.

Personally I also often prefer the forum because the posts are more "persistent". Also, less people post here screenshots taken with their smartphone camera. ;-)

TwistedTwigleg

@wombatstampede said: Thank you guys for the effort to port the new forum!

Thanks!

I can definitely say that it was a team effort. We still have some work left to do, but I'm super impressed and grateful for all of the hard work everyone has done to get everything to this point!

TwistedTwigleg

Hey guys!

I just made a chance that is supposed to convert godotdevelopers.org links to point to godotforums.org. This way old posts should still work without any edits or alterations needed.

This is all done automatically on the client side, so in theory everything should be working. I tested on a local copy and didn't see any issues. That said, if you find any issues, please let me know!

TwistedTwigleg

I'm going to quickly update the forums to the latest version of Vanilla. If things are a little strange, it might be because of the updating process. I'll edit this post once the update is done!

Edit: Update complete! Everything should be working like normal :+1:

keltwookie

Great job guys ! Many thanks.

~~Just one thing: I just changed my email. The forum is supposed to send me a notification to confirm but I still have nothing in my mailbox.~~

Edit: Sorry, the mail has been treatened as a spam