Hey all!
Welcome to the new forum!
We’ve recently switched from using Invision Power Services (IPS) to Discourse. I know this change may be overwhelming to some - l will explain the reasons for this switch below.
I also want to provide plans on the future of this community and talk about work done in the last two years in TMC.
Recent Inactivity
Firstly, I just wanted to address recent inactivity on my behalf. In the last few months, a close family member was diagnosed with multiple cancers which has been a lot to deal with on my end. This has led to me becoming very inactive on the previous forums and community as a whole. I don’t want to go into more details, but I’m hoping and planning to become more active in the future. There may just be a few bumps along the way if the condition becomes worse, though.
Data Loss
While there haven’t been any recent issues related to hardware failure, etc. there is some data loss associated with this move due to not migrating a few old users, forum categories, topics, and posts over. This means that there will be users from the old forum who will need to re-register and will need to recreate any threads/posts from the old forum.
I did try migrating as many modding-related topics and posts over as I could. However, this was all done manually. If you experience any issues on your end or with an account, please let me know! Since the migration process was manual, the creation and modification dates of the topics that were migrated are completely inaccurate. Please keep in mind some topics and posts date back to 2022 even while showing creation and modification dates of 2024!
If your topics and/or posts were recovered, a user was manually created for you with the email and username you had set from the previous forum and a random password. This means you’ll need to use the Forgot Password functionality in the forum to reset your user’s password so that you can access the new forum.
There are a few reasons I didn’t migrate all previous forum data over.
- All known migration/import scripts I could find related to moving an IPS 4 forum to Discourse all were broken. I’ve spent hours trying to get them to work, but I didn’t have any luck. This means automatically migrating all data wasn’t going to be easy.
- The old forum had a lot of irrelevant topics and posts. So I felt this was a good time to clean them out, specifically from me.
- There wasn’t that much crucial data on the old forum so manually migrating data over wouldn’t take that long compared to creating an automatic script, which would most likely take more time than it was worth.
With that said, topic URLs from the old forum should redirect to the new ones on here to ensure we aren’t losing much on SEO traffic.
With that said, the old forum will be available for a short period of time here in the case any users want to look at anything from the old forum.
New URL
The new forum uses a sub-domain instead of the primary domain due to how the website structure will look in the future (read below for more details). The new (sub) domain is forum.moddingcommunity.com.
In the meantime, moddingcommunity.com will be redirecting to this forum until the new website is launched. With that said, migrated topics from the old forum should automatically redirect to the new forum. This is to ensure our SEO traffic is not impacted and links from the Search Engines still work.
Reasons For Change
There are many reasons I wanted to move on from Invision Power Services (IPS) and switch to Discourse.
I first want to mention that I’ve been a fan of IPS for over ten years now. I’ve ran IPS 3 and 4 forums in other communities in the past and it worked out well for our needs at the time. However, as times have changed and new software has developed along with the cost of IPS 4 renewals increasing, I felt it was time to change forum software. Since Discourse is the most popular forum software and is also free/open-source, I believed that was the best forum software to move to. I also had some experience with Discourse from another community I ran a couple of years ago.
Cost & Closed-Source
The cost of renewals for IPS became too much for a website that wasn’t active enough or generating any revenue.
The new forum software we’re using, Discourse, is free and open source!
Since Discourse is open source, it also has more custom extensions and mods which allows us to extend our forum!
Performance & SEO
Discourse generally performs better than IPS from the benchmarks I’ve concluded. Now, this is definitely subjective because I setup both forums differently and so on. However, I’ve also seen benchmarks online where Discourse performed better than IPS overall.
This helps with SEO (Search Engine Optimization), reducing server load, and user-experience.
Markdown Syntax Support
This was a big one for me personally as I often create guides with the Markdown syntax on my GitHub account and like copying over the contents to the forum. I absolutely hated having to re-format the topic on IPS due to no Markdown support.
With that said, Markdown syntax is more simple than others and easy to understand and use.
One thing I might look into at some point is Github integration where you can keep a thread’s content up-to-date from a GitHub repository.
Popularity & Appearance
Discourse is a lot more popular than IPS nowadays, especially due to it being free and open source. This means users are more likely to be familiar with the forum software since other popular communities use it. With that said, I feel like Discourse’s general design is more fluid and simple. Though, appearance is very subjective and I personally really liked how the old forums looked personally.
What’s Ahead?
Previous Work & Failures
For a while, I was working on side projects related to this community, specifically, Best Mods and Best Servers. I would also try to learn more about game development when I had the time.
While Best Mods started to have success earlier this year, it was short-lived due to the type of content served on the website and search engines de-prioritizing the content. This resulted in the website going from receiving 600 - 700 clicks a day through search engines down to 5 - 10 max. The main reason for this is because the website acts as an index for mods where each mod is linked back to where it originates from (this is where the mod files are stored). In order for the website to become useful to a user, it required web scraping other websites where mods originated from and receiving details of the mod such as the title, screenshots, author, description, download links, and more. This resulted in some reports from mod owners who understandably didn’t like their mod listed on the website without their permission and search engines also didn’t like the content since it’s often times considered duplicate. There were a few people who liked the website and its functionality since it helped finding mods from multiple sources all in one place.
Anyways, I was also very close to releasing Best Servers back in the Summer (of 2024), but the stretch of inactivity I’ve mentioned above hit before I could release the website. When I started becoming more active recently, I decided it’d be best to merge the future server browser made for TMC specifically with Best Servers and scratch Best Servers completely. I will go into more detail on this in the next section.
Building A New Website
A friend of mine and I have started working on building a new website for TMC that’ll include a homepage, community page, mod workshop, server browser, and more! It will not replace this forum, but once active, this forum won’t act as the homepage (moddingcommunity.com).
Mod Workshop
The mod workshop will focus on free & open source mods to start. Users will be able to post mods which includes details on the mod such as a title, installation guide, screenshots/videos, files and releases, and more! There are also plans to introduce paid mods at a later date. Lastly, I want to put a focus on Git integration through GitHub, GitLab, and others.
Server Browser
The server browser will act as what Best Servers was supposed to be, but with a complete redesign of the front-end.
Users will be able to find servers in applications and games such as Minecraft, Rust, Garry’s Mod, Team Fortress 2, Discord, and more!
More details on the website will be released later on!
Focusing On Guides & Content On The Forum
With the new forum, I have plans to put a focus on creating helpful content for modders such as guides, knowledgebases, and more along with more creative content. This helps users and brings traffic to the website via SEO.
Most of the traffic we receive currently come from guides. Here are a few examples of guides that receive traffic on our forum.
Here are stats from Google’s Search Engine which displays the top most visited and viewed topics on our old forum from the last three months on Google for those interested.
Guides
Topics I want to cover include the following.
- How to download and install mods.
- How to make a server and download and install mods (if game is multiplayer).
- How to create mods.
Each game and platform (e.g. Steam Deck) is going to have different topics we can cover as well. Speaking of games and platforms, we currently support a lot which can be a good or bad thing to future users depending on how you look at it. I know the list of games and platforms we have is overwhelming to some new users, but I personally feel it’s okay to support this many since the plan is to be inclusive and try to create a community that any modder can join and download or submit mods for the game or platform they’re interested in. However, there is a selection of games I have a priority on personally because they are generally more popular such as Minecraft, GTA V, and more.
I also wanted to look into rewarding users who create helpful content on our website. This is something I’ll look into the future and provide updates on separately.
Top Mods
Something fun I started working on recently is finding the top mods from within a certain period of time on a game, playing said mods if possible, and posting the top mods as a topic while writing my own summaries on the mods listed.
I have plans to keep this up and start doing it for other games. It’d be cool if we did this weekly, monthly, and yearly for games!
Becoming A “Game Developer”
This plan is still long ways out, but I did want to mention it since I often refer to TMC being a future game developer and will address why below.
The reason I want TMC to become a game developer in the future is because I feel a lot of games lack modding support nowadays. However, I don’t plan on TMC publishing games directly. Instead, I want to create open source assets and tools for game engines such as Godot, Unity, and others that will help game developers implement modding support into their game or help build their game in general. I’m not sure if there is a better term to use than “game developer”, but I know it may be confusing because game developers usually refer to creating games and not creating open source assets to help game developers.
Anyways, in regards to the assets and tools I want to create, I just wanted to provide an example of something we’ve started working on already. This is an open source FPS Controller in Godot that game developers can implement into their game(s). This is a TMC project.
A while back, I started outlining more assets and tools in a GitHub organization called NextGen Modding, but I’m most likely going to merge these tools into our primary organization on GitHub here later along with scratch some tools from the list.
I also personally have a big interest in game development and wanted to create a few open source games in the future that utilize the assets and tools TMC creates and be show-cased on the website. I want to put a focus on cross-platform support between the web, Windows, Linux, MacOS, and maybe even consoles. The server browser will also allow users to play games through the website itself if the server’s app/game supports HTML5 (web).
Conclusion
All in all, I believe this is a big change! There are a lot of things I still need to do including customizing the main theme and more. I will be working on these things in the next couple of weeks.
If you have any issues with the new forum, please report them to me or reply to this topic!
Thank you for reading.