The Administration Team is planning to transition the official forums to a new software called Discourse, a modern open-source forum software that's used by a lot of major websites across the internet. There's no timeline yet. We've set up a demo for everybody to use and become familiar with the software, since it's fairly different from MyBB and other dated forums you might be used to: https://forums.thesouthpacific.org. After registering, please follow the tutorial in your PM inbox and also check out the intro guide!

Why?

The simple answer is that MyBB's development significantly slowed down years ago, and there isn't much promise for the future. While their developers are working on version 1.10, 1.11, and then eventually 2.0, they've been at it for several years with no clear timeline. MyBB is not as feature-rich as modern forum software. As more new players come to NationStates, they see old forums and think they're dated, not user friendly, and would rather just not use them. Discourse, on the other hand, is very advanced and used by a lot of big-name websites and corporations. You can see a small sample of website you might have even used yourself without knowing: https://www.discourse.org/customers. It offers better moderation, is easier to administrate and perform upgrades, has a cleaner and easier UI, better Discord integration, and a plethora of other benefits.

Is it free?

Yes! Discourse is free & open source (FOSS) just like MyBB. Unlike some other forum software that some regions are using, like Xenforo or Invision, Discourse has no annual subscription fees. We pay for a server (and domain name) the same as we do now, but the software itself is completely free.

What's different? What's the same?

We encourage you to read the intro on the demo forums to get an overview of Discourse. For the average player, posting on the forums will work the same as it does with MyBB, just with a better, faster UI with more features. There are still categories, roles, and permissions. Post tagging is a lot more important with Discourse, though.

Most of the difference is in the UI and the post formatting options. (It's unlikely you're going to see a highly stylized theme like on these forums, since those are very difficult to make mobile-friendly!) Behind the scenes for admins and mods, things are very different, but ultimately better. Moderation is easier and has more options. Creating forums and assigning permissions is leagues easier, too.

Discourse still has custom forms, emojis, and BBCodes like you're used to using here. Polls are enhanced, posting specific times automatically includes timezones, and a lot of things you're used to seeing on Discord, Twitter, etc., you'll see on Discourse (like previews when posting a link).

What would happen to these forums?

(Pending testing.) Because the software is so different, and we've used a lot of custom BBCode, posts and accounts likely won't be transferred over. It may be possible to import MyBB data into Discourse, but previous experience with software that uses different rendering for BBCode leads us to believe this wouldn't work well. (Look at when we tried importing the IP.Board forum to MyBB-- posts are nearly unreadable!) In that case, these current forums would be frozen in time and archived like past ones.

Would we switch domains?

Yes, we would stop using the tspforums.xyz domain (or possibly use it to point to the archived forum) and re-adopt thesouthpacific.org. The .xyz domain unfortunately gets flagged as spam sometimes, which is the root of a lot of the complaints about not receiving activation or forgotten password emails. And there's nothing we can do about that. This is something that we should have already done, but it's difficult converting a MyBB forum over to a new domain name.

Will the administration or moderation team change?

No, all existing admins and mods will be the same. This is only a change in software and domain name.