Stinger's future + forum poll

Hey guys,

Figured I'd make a post about this, but with my regular life being very stable both in terms of job, financial, relationship and just downright enjoyment, I've decided to take Stinger a little step further. I've dabbled a bit in writing for major publications who were apparently very aware of the site and liked the content, but I just don't like doing that - writing for them that is. Every thing I wrote or pitched made me think "but I want to write something about that for Stinger".

So I am putting my money and mouth where my thoughts are. I've bought a new site location via Wordpress and am going to start setting this up over the course of the next year . It will still host the articles, but I'll also aim to do news-posts, short opinion blurps, video compilations of the week of cool action-game footage, maybe a little challenge-run contest or something cool. Maybe a 'forum post of the week', who knows! I'm still working out the finer details. I'll also work on making the advertisments relevant to the target-audience, so mostly ads about Chaos Legion mousepads and Itagaki body-pillows

That said, this will take a while haha! Deadline for me is having it live around July.

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There is one big problem though, which is the forum - currently hosted on Forumotion. I chose Forumotion because it was cheap and offered a lot of features at zero cost, but they've since changed their policy by removing a lot of core features and hiding them behind a (huge) paywall. Things like SSL, a custom domainname etc are now suddenly 36,- a month which is a bit steep. So I'm considering two options. Either we stay here, and keep it as it is. Or we move to the new site I'm building. The downside is that Forumotion are hacks and we'll have to start from scratch. I'm open to either. But I was curious to hear the take of you guys.

Enfin, let me know!

If you started from scratch does that mean all our posts would be deleted?

36 what a month? What's your currency again?

> scratch
It would mean that this 'forum' would be like an archive and the new forum would be completely empty, yes.

> 36 a month
Euro. At this time that's around 61.4904726 New Zealand dollars per month, which just isn't worth it imo and far too expensive for such basic features.

I don't mind staying here and just keeping it as is for free.

Seems like you've got big projects for Stinger! It's nice to hear you've got everything going so well and can think about an expansion like this!

Regarding the forum issue, I have no particular opinion on the matter given that I'm both a recent member and not the most active one, so whatever suits you will work for me.

Either works, not really a fan of fluffy mechanics on boards so whatever ends up being more practical to everyone just works for me as well.

Made my choice, so far we'll stay here. I agree the less bells&whistles the better. It is always what I loved about Gamefaqs - no avatars, no signatures including tons of gifs and pornography etc. Granted, I sinned with Avatars (Sam is too damn attractive).

Sorry I'm late on this topic. Happy to hear that life is going well for you! Very excited to see the new and improved Stinger.

I may have opted to start a new forum just to have everything on one site, but it really it's probably better just to keep this one going now that I think about it. You can easily just provide a link on the new Stinger that directs people here.

I'll let you guys all know when the site swap is happening, could be that the url might not work for a few days. The regular url, stinger.actieforum.com, will still work then. But I'll keep you guys posted, probably going to finish it next week (have a week off from work).

Good luck!

The new site is live and running, still having a few issues with the domain-name that should be resolved within the month (takes time). In terms of the forum I have found tools to convert it to a BBforum using some...shady tools. Going to run a test after the domains are arranged. We'll lose all attachment pictures (all zero of them), avatars (not a disaster) and passwords (a slight annoyance) if it works.

The advantages are pretty big. It will get an SSL so the forum will be safer, and a custom URL (no more ".actieforum") and other little tweaks like having your account also be linked to a general Stingermagazine account that you can use to post comments on articles etc.

Going to be looking into this over the coming months.

Not sure what you just said, but good job.

So video links aren't affected?

Haha, yeah they won't be affected. Again, this won't happen for a while.

Might just copy paste the whole thing to be safe.

This forum will stay regardless as an 'archive', it won't be deleted.

In case people were wondering, yes I broke everything today, and then I fixed it all again ! :D
Took a while...

Eh? I must have slept through it lol.

No worries about the data btw, it is just the urls.