Forum cleaning, Wiki changes, and Discovery Issue 14/4.86 development

[Igiss]

As our board grows larger and nears 700,000 post mark, we have to change: as you probably noticed, the structure of our main forums was overhauled recently, and it looks like the change was an overall positive one. Unfortunately, due to hosting restrictions for the database and size of the stored files, our growth is not limitless: we will have to clean out the database to get rid of some of the dated threads and posts, PMs, attachments, avatars, and photos.

The moderators will begin removing old threads manually in one week. You may still back up some of the older (2005-2007) threads that you find especially valuable until then, and they will not remove important announcements or anything of historical importance for Discovery Gaming Community. However, it will be different with PMs, attachments and other stuff which is no longer used. Beginning 5 days from now, we will remove all PMs stored by the board from the beginning of its existence, which count up to 55,000. We encourage everyone who has important conversations, texts and other stuff stored as PMs to back it up elsewhere, otherwise it will be irreversibly lost.

We will also be removing all attachments present on the board beginning 2 weeks from now, so please back up all your stuff stored as attachments on the forum, and track your important posts that rely on attached images or other files. Maximum allowed size of size of attachment and avatar uploads will be reduced to 75 Kb. You can still use avatars of any size stored elsewhere. Photos and avatars that are in use will not be deleted, regardless of their size. Reducing the size of individual uploads will allow an increase in the total number of allowed uploads, and hopefully we won't need to remove the attachments again for a long time.

Some good news is that the board will opearate faster after pruning posts and attachments and changing some of the outdated configuration settings. We will also allow members to change their display name once in 180 days: currently, changing the name requires addressing the administrator, and we are aware that many members are no longer pleased with the names they chose during registration. This is your chance to change the name. In case of abuses, however, we will have to increase the time limit or remove the feature altogether.

There were also changes related to the Discovery Wiki, which by now contains over 1,300 articles. The look of the wiki was changed to look more Freelancer-ish, and the board now has a special forum to discuss Wiki-related questions. Your contributions into expanding and better organizing the wiki are always welcome.

Despite the Discovery Development Team being silent for quite some time now, we are working on future updates of the mod, and have started to collect information on building the new version, which will be named Discovery Freelancer Issue 14/4.86, and will have 14.00 version number for its final version (if no unexpected changes occur). We cannot share any plans on the expected release time period; like before, the mod will be released when it's ready, but we do aim for much a shorter development cycle than Discovery 4.85 took us to complete. Meanwhile, the first pieces of information that we are going to publish about the new version are the outlines of the storyline. We will start in about a month's time. Before that, faction leaders and general members interested in sharing storyline plans for their factions can contact me as described in this thread, and contribute to the story development.

This thread is open for comments, and you are welcome to post your feedback; in future, we are going to open most of the News posts for user comments. Stay with Discovery!