Guild Wars 2

Just wondering if they will be removed as i think I remember that being mentioned during the forum reorganisation.

And if so, when will that happen?
Will the posts that we had in those archived subforums also be wiped from our personal post history?

I think that is a very bad idea. There is a lot of knowledge in those archived forums that will be hidden from players. There are a lot of links on Google that will be unavailable if you do so.

Thanks for the quick reply Mark.

But I also fail to understand, why they will be hidden, if you dont delete them.
If Players want to apply for the Forum Specialist Position, they need to link 3 of their own forum posts as reference. If their area of expertise was one of the archived subforums, most of their posting history will be unavailable for them.

And how are we supposed to save them? Can someone make a thread where people can put old posts for future reference? Or are we supposed to copy the posts we want and put them in a file somewhere?

If someone has a question and an answer was on a inaccessible thread, do we put the answer from it that we previously saved even though no one can verify if what we say is true or if we are making it up?

I understand that leaving them visible the way they are now totally defeats the purpose of restructuring the forums in the first place, but how about you make them all subforums to an archives forum? That way they won’t clutter up the front page but are still accessible.

Astral Projections.7320:

And how are we supposed to save them? Can someone make a thread where people can put old posts for future reference? Or are we supposed to copy the posts we want and put them in a file somewhere?

Save as .pdf is one option.

It sounds like a pretty awful idea to stop players viewing them entirely. Especially since you are going to keep them anyway.

+1 to the idea of making them all subsections in an Archive section. They contain a lot of very useful stuff. That also allows you to continue using that system, if any other forum sections get deleted later on.

Smells of an attempt to hide the “dirty laundry,” but hey, it’s their forums. We only post here as (barely tolerated) guests and must abide by their (increasingly draconian) rules:

1. ArenaNet can do no wrong.
2. See rule #1.

Wow… hidding archived posts is very silly.

Amazing. The forum software gets more updates than WvW.

Valento.9852:

Wow… hidding archived posts is very silly.

Another way to sweep things under the table.

Liz.1497:

I understand that leaving them visible the way they are now totally defeats the purpose of restructuring the forums in the first place, but how about you make them all subforums to an archives forum? That way they won’t clutter up the front page but are still accessible.

Cannot this be done instead? It cleans up the forum while keeping 2 years (!) of Guild Wars 2 posting history intact and accessible. It’s never good to wipe clean the archives. Ask any researcher.

Luna.9640:

This forum restructure is actually same as BURNING DOWN A LIBRARY.

Those topics and all the post in there are part of the 2 YEAR Guild wars 2 history and you will hide them from public ?

I maybe little bit of dramatic but this is against freedom of speech and leave the impressions that you’re trying to hide your past – your past which you’re ashamed of.

Instead of changing this rotten peace of no feature forum platform you’re trying to build an ICE castle in the middle of desert.

#SafeTheForums

Freedom of speech doesn’t apply to a privately owned forum that requires agreement to a terms of service to use. Just saying.

I’d like to add: I do a lot of google searches that link to these forums. A lot of the links I come across are already mangled from the maintenance. It’s really frustrating to be so close to an answer, and then find that the link is broken or now private. Please reconsider.

There is a lot of significant or treasured information in forums such as the BL Auction House forum or the racial forums.

It was heartbreaking enough when megaservers mangled the RP community, but now all the race stuff will vanish utterly. This is ripping the soul from the game and I am not understanding why moves like this continue to be made.

Is “past the point of no return” actually meaning – destroying all evidence of guildwars 2 up to this point and making a new start?

Luna.9640:

This forum restructure is actually same as BURNING DOWN A LIBRARY.

^^ Very much this

Could you elaborate on the reasoning behind this decision? Additional information wont hurt anyone. While i understand that the archives can contain partly outdated information, i do not see why players (new & experienced) should not be able to view earlier discussions on topics and content, which enriched the forums.

Moderating lots of forums takes up a lot of time. Time = salary. Salary = spent money.

Less forums to moderate means less time/employees. Less salary. Less expense.

Making a reduction in services provided sound like an improvement of customer service is about the oldest PR trick in the book.

The game isn’t dying, it’s just less alive.

If you’re going to wipe out the data from the important forums anyway (because, let’s be honest, most of the archived areas were better than the ones that are left), why not roll out a WHOLE NEW FORUM? That way you can fix the paging issue and the lack of searching all at once. Your current forum software is probably the least professional I’ve ever used, so it would improve your image to dump it.

What a terrible idea.

I can’t believe we are losing the race forums. Every MMO should have that :c

I seriously do not understand this….

I’d prefer A-Net’s Moderators rethink this, I do not mind all topics being placed under a group header called Historical threads so te forum looks ‘clean’, But please don’t throw or lock it all away…

Would you keep it, Please?

#SafeTheForums

Well they are going to put it in a safe, I’d Rather SaveTheForums…

msalakka.4653:

Moderating lots of forums takes up a lot of time. Time = salary. Salary = spent money.

Less forums to moderate means less time/employees. Less salary. Less expense.

Making a reduction in services provided sound like an improvement of customer service is about the oldest PR trick in the book.

The game isn’t dying, it’s just less alive.

Doubt the employees now are the problem… Problem is developers having stated certain features which are still hunting them. Problem is not they have to mod: as you cannot post there…

msalakka.4653:

Moderating lots of forums takes up a lot of time. Time = salary. Salary = spent money.

Less forums to moderate means less time/employees. Less salary. Less expense.

Making a reduction in services provided sound like an improvement of customer service is about the oldest PR trick in the book.

How much time does it take to moderate an archived forum?

I agree this is a bad move.

I understand that they don’t all need to be visible on the front page, but hiding them completely isn’t a good solution. It would be much better if they could be moved into a sub-forum or something so they’re still accessible but not part of the main list of forums.

msalakka.4653:

Moderating lots of forums takes up a lot of time. Time = salary. Salary = spent money.

Less forums to moderate means less time/employees. Less salary. Less expense.

Making a reduction in services provided sound like an improvement of customer service is about the oldest PR trick in the book.

The game isn’t dying, it’s just less alive.

They don’t need to be moderated because no one can post there.

Hmmm…. They said that the software changes “will improve [their] ability to respond to any reported (flagged) posts and threads.”

Maybe the change in terms of how that’s implemented is the reason for it. Anything that’s visible in the archives could also be quoted. I doubt they’ve actually read all of those posts or anywhere near it. Keeping them quotable/linkable would mean they also need to be actionable later on if need be.

Let’s say that to automate things in the new system, new posts will include variables (warning level or w/e, triggers when flagged). Since some of those old posts (not visible anymore, but still there) are deleted/infracted, they cannot be all assigned with the same variable.

My only frame of reference is dealing with the backends of a few web stores I help manage. On one of them, all products initially had the same flat shipping rate. Years later, it was necessary to add additional shipping charges to a subsection of those products based on weight. However, weight variables were never part of the product data to begin with. This meant that all products had to be given a default value, and then the aforementioned subsection had to be dug up by hand (since they were spread out and not in one category) and assigned the new variable by which they would get the increased shipping.

If the system through which posts are flagged and infracted has changed dramatically, wiping the slate clean might be the least headache-inducing way to go. For them, anyway…

msalakka.4653:

Hmmm…. They said that the software changes “will improve [their] ability to respond to any reported (flagged) posts and threads.”

Maybe the change in terms of how that’s implemented is the reason for it. Anything that’s visible in the archives could also be quoted. I doubt they’ve actually read all of those posts or anywhere near it. Keeping them quotable/linkable would mean they also need to be actionable later on if need be.

Let’s say that to automate things in the new system, new posts will include variables (warning level or w/e, triggers when flagged). Since some of those old posts (not visible anymore, but still there) are deleted/infracted, they cannot be all assigned with the same variable.

My only frame of reference is dealing with the backends of a few web stores I help manage. On one of them, all products initially had the same flat shipping rate. Years later, it was necessary to add additional shipping charges to a subsection of those products based on weight. However, weight variables were never part of the product data to begin with. This meant that all products had to be given a default value, and then the aforementioned subsection had to be dug up by hand (since they were spread out and not in one category) and assigned the new variable by which they would get the increased shipping.

If the system through which posts are flagged and infracted has changed dramatically, wiping the slate clean might be the least headache-inducing way to go. For them, anyway…

There are 1426 pages of threads in this particular subforum going back more than 2 years, but they’ve said nothing about deleting those. They just seem to be hiding the no-longer-used subforums, to make the forum page look tidier.

If there were programming issues like you mentioned, they would apply to all posts, no matter what subforum they’re in.

I’d be inclined to say at this point, get a whole new forum that functions properly and have this forum be archived but accessible for quotes.

It really seems that ANet is tinkering around with a poorly built forum, trying to get it to work. Seeing you dump various specialty forums into the general forum so that forum is now a pile of badly mixed parts and closing off other parts of it so no outsiders can access it doesn’t inspire confidence in the forum structure,

Olvendred.3027:

There are 1426 pages of threads in this particular subforum going back more than 2 years, but they’ve said nothing about deleting those. They just seem to be hiding the no-longer-used subforums, to make the forum page look tidier.

If there were programming issues like you mentioned, they would apply to all posts, no matter what subforum they’re in.

I guess I keep hoping that there’d be some pressing need for this action, rather than something so arbitrary as “tidier look”, that would make them willing to throw away years of people’s thoughts and ideas…

Wiping out Archives?

Ogden wouldnt stand for this.

msalakka.4653:

Moderating lots of forums takes up a lot of time. Time = salary. Salary = spent money.

Less forums to moderate means less time/employees. Less salary. Less expense.

Making a reduction in services provided sound like an improvement of customer service is about the oldest PR trick in the book.

The game isn’t dying, it’s just less alive.

what’s to moderate? the archives can’t be posted in.

Can we at least post some links to threads that got devs responses, so you just move them out of the archives and we can still read them ? Some are still useful. :/

We’ve known for a while that Anet has some strange priorities, but this is just a bit bizarre.

If we remove the evidence of negativity, it’s like it was never there!

Except it’s spread to every other subforum now…

Luna.9640:

This forum restructure is actually same as BURNING DOWN A LIBRARY.

I’d say it’s more like making the library invisible.

KyreneZA.8617:

Smells of an attempt to hide the “dirty laundry,” but hey, it’s their forums. We only post here as (barely tolerated) guests and must abide by their (increasingly draconian) rules:

1. ArenaNet can do no wrong.
2. See rule #1.

Yep. This sums it up for me.

Mark that is a much better idea if you insist on removing the links from the front page. That solution should also avoid having a bunch of broken links on search engines.

I would think a better solution would be to do that, but also allow 1 single link from the front page to archived forums instead of showing every subforum under ‘Archive’

but at the very least that would allow searching from
say google via site:forum-en.guildwars2.com

Why is a list of archived subforums such a terrible thing? The game has aged and undergone some revamps — it makes sense that there would be a number of locked forums from past episodes, etc.

I don’t really believe that trashing old posts or making them difficult to find purely for the sake of aesthetics is a good move. Might want to rethink you folks’ priorities on this one.

Mark Katzbach.9084:

A have an alternative that we are considering.

A little background first. We are only looking at making this change to tidy up the front page of the forum, not hide all old posts. While the archived forums are in their own ‘Archive’ category, they still take up a significant amount of space, and we’re looking to give the front page a cleaner look.

So, let me know what you all think of this alternative plan:
Instead of making the archived subforums unavailable to read, we can ‘unpublish’ the subforums from the front page. These subforums would still be accessible (read-only) via a direct link to the page, but would not show up as links in the forum index.

Each of the forum categories has a little arrow that can be clicked to hide the sub-forums that live in the category.

e.g.

https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/collapse_category/44

Would it not be simpler to just default the archive category to be collapsed? That way players could still reference the archive without needing to know the links by clicking to un-collapse the archive.

Mark Katzbach.9084:

A have an alternative that we are considering.

A little background first. We are only looking at making this change to tidy up the front page of the forum, not hide all old posts. While the archived forums are in their own ‘Archive’ category, they still take up a significant amount of space, and we’re looking to give the front page a cleaner look.

So, let me know what you all think of this alternative plan:
Instead of making the archived subforums unavailable to read, we can ‘unpublish’ the subforums from the front page. These subforums would still be accessible (read-only) via a direct link to the page, but would not show up as links in the forum index.

Sounds much better to me.
I understand the reasoning behind wanting to clean up the front page, however, the list of archived subforums never seemed to distract me from the active forums as they were down the list anyways.

Giving players the option to show/hide the list is a good solution while still being able to reference from the archived forums.

I would still prefer having a link to the archives. Right now you are asking us to either save a pdf copy of every archived forum we may ever want to read or save a link to every archived forum we may ever want to read. What if next month I want to look up the lore associated with Topic X that was referenced in a future LS episode or festival? I am going to have to hope some who did read and post in that forum is willing to recreated it or saved the link so when I am forced to make a new post asking such information someone can link to the old or re-parse it from memory.

TL;DR: This is going to create a lot of new posts that ask a question to be replied to by the hero who happened to save that post or is willing to re-write it from memory. If there were still available we could simply search for them.

Lunacy Solacio.6514:

but at the very least that would allow searching from
say google via site:forum-en.guildwars2.com

While I was archiving them, I found that a lot of them could only be accessed when logged in, meaning Google/etc can’t even see them. There’s ~92k archived threads and so far I’ve gone through maybe 1/3 of it, totaling ~300k posts and ~60k unique users.

KyreneZA.8617:

Smells of an attempt to hide the “dirty laundry,” but hey, it’s their forums. We only post here as (barely tolerated) guests and must abide by their (increasingly draconian) rules:

1. ArenaNet can do no wrong.
2. See rule #1.

Like a broom to their footprints.

Mark Katzbach.9084:

A have an alternative that we are considering.

A little background first. We are only looking at making this change to tidy up the front page of the forum, not hide all old posts. While the archived forums are in their own ‘Archive’ category, they still take up a significant amount of space, and we’re looking to give the front page a cleaner look.

So, let me know what you all think of this alternative plan:
Instead of making the archived subforums unavailable to read, we can ‘unpublish’ the subforums from the front page. These subforums would still be accessible (read-only) via a direct link to the page, but would not show up as links in the forum index.

Deal. I also think it’s a bit ugly there, but making them unavailable is just not fair. I agree with this plan, and make it accessible through a quaggan icon. #kthxbai

Mark Katzbach.9084:

A have an alternative that we are considering.

A little background first. We are only looking at making this change to tidy up the front page of the forum, not hide all old posts. While the archived forums are in their own ‘Archive’ category, they still take up a significant amount of space, and we’re looking to give the front page a cleaner look.

So, let me know what you all think of this alternative plan:
Instead of making the archived subforums unavailable to read, we can ‘unpublish’ the subforums from the front page. These subforums would still be accessible (read-only) via a direct link to the page, but would not show up as links in the forum index.

How about you FINALLY move to 2015 and move to better forum platform that supports grid-view or folder-view ?

If you had Folder-View option you can simply create “Archive Folder” and move all the archived sub-forums there and on the front page pf the forums there would be only – “<Folder Icon> [Archives]”.

Once you move to modern forum platforms that support actually useful stuff – this crap will finally be called – GUILD WARS 2 FORUMS till than nothing can help you – anything you do will simply make things worst.

Edit: Added screenshot how can it look like.

Neural.1824:

KyreneZA.8617:

Smells of an attempt to hide the “dirty laundry,” but hey, it’s their forums. We only post here as (barely tolerated) guests and must abide by their (increasingly draconian) rules:

1. ArenaNet can do no wrong.
2. See rule #1.

Yep. This sums it up for me.

Agree—-they continue with this type of strong behaviour(and I agree on the hidden agenda too) , instead of investing their time/energy and money on getting new and fully functional forum software that would better serve the interests of their clientele, the game and the Anet staff.

P.S. just saw the updated post—now if that was presented first—-this would be a dead issue. But again,it seems, a ‘alternative plan’ was presented after negative feedback.
And also a +1 Luna!!! The ONLY reasonable thing to do is to get new fully functional forums and software.

Mark Katzbach.9084:

So, let me know what you all think of this alternative plan:
Instead of making the archived subforums unavailable to read, we can ‘unpublish’ the subforums from the front page. These subforums would still be accessible (read-only) via a direct link to the page, but would not show up as links in the forum index.

This is a way better solution, thumbs up for that. Please allow me quote your very own John Smith on that topic:

John Smith.4610:

Archiving is one thing. Deleting data is a crime against humanity.

While thinking of it, the sections on the front page can be folded/unfolded on click, can’t they? Wouldn’t it be an even more simple solution to just have the Archive section minimized by default? This should take approximately one line of JavaScript code to realize.

~MRA

Luna.9640:

How about you FINALLY move to 2015 and move to better forum platform that supports grid-view or folder-view ?

I fear it would take a little bit more than just cleaning up some folder view to bring this forum to 2015. First of all, it would mean to finally get rid of the stone-age message board forum concept and instead use a system that utilizes the modern techniques that have come up in the past 10 years, like Q&Aing, up-voting, threading, and notifying. After all, this forum site was already conceptually and technologically way behind its time when it was first released.

However, such a technological and conceptual upgrade cannot be done lightly, as it will at least require a completely different software (plus time and money). And frankly I no longer assume an upgrade to happen at all, now that Anet has been rolling with this message board system for such a long time. I would already be happy if a simple 1995’s concept like a “thread last updated time-stamp on thread overview” technology would be possible.

Just my 2 cents.

~MRA