Good day Terrarians,
When Terraria Community Forums (TCF) launched in September of 2014, we debuted a feature called Social Groups.
In the 4 1/2 years since then, Social Groups have been a mixture of success and confusion. Some social groups have been very successful: T-MEC, Adult Swim, and several non-trivial roleplay groups are examples. In other cases, people have seemed to not understand how to use them, the feature has complex privacy/membership rules, and some people just treated them as ordinary threads without making any use of the special features. There is also the annoying quirk that threads cannot be reliably moved into and out of Social Groups.
There are other reasons why we will not be supporting Social Groups moving forward, but before we get into those, we want to make a few things clear.
Why are we doing this, and why now?
Our primary reason for moving away from this feature is to ensure the continued stability and security of this forum and its users.
TCF is built on the Xenforo platform, enhanced with custom graphics (the Terraria styles) and a few third-party add-ons, one of which is for the Social Groups. Re-Logic purchases the licenses for these packages, and relies on official updates to them from the providers to keep the forum running smoothly.
In March 2016, we attempted to perform a fairly routine, recommended upgrade to the base Xenforo package. After several hours of work, we discovered that the Social Group feature no longer functioned at all, the author of the Social Group add-on had sold his "business" to another add-on provider, and the new owners had promptly put the add-on into "Unmaintained" status with no indication that they would ever work on it again. In the interest of getting the forum back up after an already extended outage, we rolled back to the previous version. Social Groups were the only feature that would not update properly.
Fast forward nearly three years later to now, and we are still running on a very outdated version of the forum software, and unable to update because of Social Groups still not being maintained by the provider. It has become crucial that we find a way to move forward with essential upgrades. Failure to do so means that basic features may start to malfunction and break (and some have recently begun to), and that known security holes cannot be patched and may well be exploited. We feel that we must "bite the bullet" now and remove our dependence on this particular feature as soon as possible.
We will have details of the transition plan very soon in the next posts.
When Terraria Community Forums (TCF) launched in September of 2014, we debuted a feature called Social Groups.
Introduction to Social Groups
The Terraria Community includes a Social Group/Forum feature that allows groups of like-minded members to connect in their very own private section of the Community. Whether a group is a gaming clan, a roleplaying community, or about another topic that requires more space than a single thread allows, Social Groups will allow you the opportunity to carve out your own “clubhouse” within the forums. This, in essence, gives groups their own private forum, this helps to keep the main forums/threads clean, and greatly assists in group discussion/management – which has typically been conducted via massively long mega-threads. So, how does this all work? This section will help you get started!
In the 4 1/2 years since then, Social Groups have been a mixture of success and confusion. Some social groups have been very successful: T-MEC, Adult Swim, and several non-trivial roleplay groups are examples. In other cases, people have seemed to not understand how to use them, the feature has complex privacy/membership rules, and some people just treated them as ordinary threads without making any use of the special features. There is also the annoying quirk that threads cannot be reliably moved into and out of Social Groups.
There are other reasons why we will not be supporting Social Groups moving forward, but before we get into those, we want to make a few things clear.
- Social Groups that are active as of today will continue to work normally for the time being. The date of this post will be the determining date for SG activity.
- The forum staff will be working to transition existing Social Groups to existing sections of the forum, and will create new sections as needed.
- Effective immediately, creation of new Social Groups in all four existing SG sections is suspended.
Our primary reason for moving away from this feature is to ensure the continued stability and security of this forum and its users.
TCF is built on the Xenforo platform, enhanced with custom graphics (the Terraria styles) and a few third-party add-ons, one of which is for the Social Groups. Re-Logic purchases the licenses for these packages, and relies on official updates to them from the providers to keep the forum running smoothly.
In March 2016, we attempted to perform a fairly routine, recommended upgrade to the base Xenforo package. After several hours of work, we discovered that the Social Group feature no longer functioned at all, the author of the Social Group add-on had sold his "business" to another add-on provider, and the new owners had promptly put the add-on into "Unmaintained" status with no indication that they would ever work on it again. In the interest of getting the forum back up after an already extended outage, we rolled back to the previous version. Social Groups were the only feature that would not update properly.
Fast forward nearly three years later to now, and we are still running on a very outdated version of the forum software, and unable to update because of Social Groups still not being maintained by the provider. It has become crucial that we find a way to move forward with essential upgrades. Failure to do so means that basic features may start to malfunction and break (and some have recently begun to), and that known security holes cannot be patched and may well be exploited. We feel that we must "bite the bullet" now and remove our dependence on this particular feature as soon as possible.
We will have details of the transition plan very soon in the next posts.