Important We are phasing out the Social Group feature on TCF

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Oh, then that's why the Social Forums are broken.
Beside I guess It were way broken before, based on the thread...
 
I have to say it feels a little weird having the Social subforum be between Cross-Platform Discussion and PC discussion, but I understand wanting to have it fairly high up on the index (due to the Introductions subforum) while still having a Terraria-related subforum be near the top.

Would it be within reason to maybe re-purpose News, Announcements & Resources to be a "Meta" forum, slap Introductions into there at the bottom, then go with something like

Terraria - Social
Terraria on PC
... etc?

That retains introductions being near the top, keeps the news and other resources near the top, then allows for a steady non-stop flow of Terraria resources.


E: Admittedly just moving Terraria - Social above Cross-Platform Discussion will have a similar effect; it'll also allow the quick player hookup subforum to effectively be featured near the top of the forum so that may be a better thing to even consider first. My sleep-deprived 7am brain is having a very difficult time making up efficient battle strategies, you see.
 
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We can revisit those once we get the Social Groups moved, the plugin removed, and on with the crucial updates.

There are admin tools that let us rearrange and move regular forum sections around fairly easily. Unfortunately, those same tools don't work on Social Groups because the plugin creator didn't integrate them.
 
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.
If it's the Social Groups plug-in I think it is, it was the worst version to ever be made. The implementation of it created the very problem of moving threads between social groups, so when I had to move threads from one group to another because two groups served the same purpose and I wanted to merge them, the social forums were grayed out. I have no reservations in saying I'm glad that garbage is being dumped if it doesn't get along with a XenForo update, especially when the current "rights holder" of the source code of the social groups add-on refuses to update it anytime soon so those communities running the add-on can still keep their forum secure.

NON-TERRARIA DISCUSSION GROUPS

Adult Swim - will likely reappear as a sub-forum under Off-Topic, and may be named differently. We will be judicious about what is moved, since there is a significant portion of threads dealing with current events that have since passed. It will remain restricted to serious, possibly volatile topics, and the rules of discussion there will remain pretty much the same. We will investigate an opt in/out system for it, but it likely won't happen right from the start.
This is where XenForo itself has really failed miserably. Back in the day before XenForo, forums used to have password protection that administrators could use as a quick and simple solution to "opt-in" into viewing content not meant for some people.

The next best idea I can offer (which you may have already thought of) is Usergroup permissions. This too is something XenForo has failed administrators on in 1.x. In the forum software "MyBB," you could set up a group that users can freely join ("public group"), new requests be moderated (but must be a public group), and/or users must be invited (but must be a public group). I believe Woltlab Burning Board 1 and 2 both had this similar feature, I'd have to install them on a private web server and check to make sure. I believe vBulletin 3.x had this feature (haven't checked 4.x or 5.x yet to see if the feature carried over). One of them actually had a team leader, which could handle the "moderation" part of accepting/rejecting users that joined the group.

Everything that gets 'moved' out of Social Groups will involve a lot of manual, thread-by-thread work by forum staff. There will be some hard choices to be made as to how much gets moved and what gets left behind. Those choices would still have been hard a year ago, fwiw.
I had to manipulate the database to move a hefty amount of threads from one social group to another because on the front-end, it was impossible because of the horrible way the author(s) coded the social groups add-on.

As a forum administrator myself, I can relate to the nightmare of trying to find replacement solutions and getting it implemented for your community as painless as possible. It's no easy feat and I wish the entire forum team good luck in the transition of this monstrous task.
 
If it's the Social Groups plug-in I think it is, it was the worst version to ever be made. The implementation of it created the very problem of moving threads between social groups, so when I had to move threads from one group to another because two groups served the same purpose and I wanted to merge them, the social forums were grayed out. I have no reservations in saying I'm glad that garbage is being dumped if it doesn't get along with a XenForo update, especially when the current "rights holder" of the source code of the social groups add-on refuses to update it anytime soon so those communities running the add-on can still keep their forum secure.


This is where XenForo itself has really failed miserably. Back in the day before XenForo, forums used to have password protection that administrators could use as a quick and simple solution to "opt-in" into viewing content not meant for some people.

The next best idea I can offer (which you may have already thought of) is Usergroup permissions. This too is something XenForo has failed administrators on in 1.x. In the forum software "MyBB," you could set up a group that users can freely join ("public group"), new requests be moderated (but must be a public group), and/or users must be invited (but must be a public group). I believe Woltlab Burning Board 1 and 2 both had this similar feature, I'd have to install them on a private web server and check to make sure. I believe vBulletin 3.x had this feature (haven't checked 4.x or 5.x yet to see if the feature carried over). One of them actually had a team leader, which could handle the "moderation" part of accepting/rejecting users that joined the group.


I had to manipulate the database to move a hefty amount of threads from one social group to another because on the front-end, it was impossible because of the horrible way the author(s) coded the social groups add-on.

As a forum administrator myself, I can relate to the nightmare of trying to find replacement solutions and getting it implemented for your community as painless as possible. It's no easy feat and I wish the entire forum team good luck in the transition of this monstrous task.

TL : DR Social groups was coded terribly (likely by some unprofessional who likely only did it for money) and stopped caring about updating it to work on modern systems. And this effected more than the Terraria forums as this admin from a different forum is telling us. On top of giving his own advice to help with this case.

This is where you use a TL : DR; not in a less than 1 paragraph block of text.
 
*sniff* Press F to pay respects F

*does best mates with social groups
GlisteningDifficultAntelope-max-1mb.gif
 
hey i wanna join this fourm even tho im on mobile can u plz let me in or tell me how to join my newest project prehard mode goblin invasion farm‍‍‍‍‍‍‍‍‍‍‍‍‍
 
um would it be considered advertising if i put a link to a vid on my YouTube chanal
Hi there @Oofeee, welcome to the forums.
We try to keep the discussion within a thread about the topic of the thread. This thread you’re posting in is for discussing the phasing out of the social group feature. Please keep posts in this thread about that topic.

If you’ve got questions about other things, you can ask them on your profile, send a private message to a forum staff member, or ask them in the Forum Help & Feedback section. Before doing so, please take a moment to look around the forums first to get acquainted with the layout and where things would go.
 
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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.

  • 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.

kdcROYP.png


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.
rip
 
I'd imagine so yes. Most likely once all the threads have been moved to a different section the category for the social group is probably hidden from regular user permissions since deleting the social group caused an issue where the threads that were moved would get soft-locked and neither user nor staff could do anything other than view them.

All speculation on my part (except for the issue caused by deleting a social group category, that actually happened.), take it with a grain of salt. This is just what I seemed to have observe. I could be horrendously wrong, for all I know goblins could be secretly stealing parts of our forums and selling them to the black market.

If you were looking for a specific social group that is no longer there check the second post TK made in the thread, it talks about where things are being moved to.
 
Progress update:

T-MEC has been moved to its new home. This completes the processing of the Terraria Topics groups.

For Non-Terraria Discussion Groups: we are in the process of moving Adult Swim topics to Mature Discussions; the Yu-Gi-Oh group is awaiting archival to the wayback machine (if they wish to do so).

For the remaining Roleplay groups - each has been notified of their options: to consolidate to 1-2 threads and be moved to the new Roleplay section; to archive their group to the wayback machine; or simply be removed. We really haven't heard plans from any of them as of yet. We hope they will not wait until the last minute to make a decision.

We still anticipate ending all Social Group access after February 28, which is two weeks from today.
 
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