Forums Have Returned – Lots to Talk About

I know many of you out there have been panicking and biting your nails over our forum maintenance. As we discovered while fixing the database, it’s actually been corrupt for a year, maybe even dating back to when we returned in March of last year. That only makes the fact we did this now much more important, as we are seeing a lot of growth and that should continue for a long time. For those of you savvy enough to also catch word from Dennis’s post about this earlier in the week, VGRC forums have merged into ours.

Outside of doubling our post count, the reasoning for the merger was pretty clear. The VGRC forums were on life support. Meanwhile many VGRC folk already are staff and post in our boards, to the point that when it came to the community sections of the boards there really wasn’t a whole lot of difference between the two community areas. It just made logical sense. The benefit for the ZI boards? The remaining VGRC folk that didn’t post at ZI most likely will, at least in the community section. So, in short, activity will be raised even more. Unfortunately, all of this didn’t go nearly as smoothly as planned, mostly due to the corrupt database. Here are some things to note:

• Some of you may need to reset your password. Unfortunately, not all of the password hashes were converted over, and we made sure the “I forgot my password” option works.
• Avatars were wiped
• Some of your guys profile info is completely gone, so you may want to go in and make the appropriate updates to it.
• Private messages are still being restored, but the PM function does work
• There may be a very select few accounts that do not have their posts attached. If your account is one of them, just notify us. We made sure to get most anyone who had over 20 posts
• The forums now have Facebook connect, allowing you to connect your ZI account with your facebook one, which is great for keeping your status updated
• All posts will appear as “new”, you can clear that out at the bottom of the forum index by “marking boards as read”.

And thats it. As always, there may be some bugs we have not caught, so we encourage you to submit any and all issues with the forums to our Service Desk, that way we can solve them asap. Welcome back to our community forums, as we are really sitting well for a bright future.