Just to give a proper notice, we just ran our final test export before migrating the forums this coming Monday. This export took a bit longer than past ones, but still completed without issue. We expect the “production” export to take the forum down anywhere from 24-48 hours.
Will the 24 to 48 hours begin on Monday, or end on Monday?
It will begin on Monday morning. We expect the Forums to be back up on Tuesday, or Wednesday (2/13) at the latest.
Yes, the VEX IQ and VEX EDR forums will be merged into one forum. While this may cause some confusion at first, we believe that it will eventually be able to sort itself out and become a non-issue.
This should go without saying, but I’ll be monitoring the Forum regularly for the first few weeks to ensure a smooth transition, and will pass any and all bugs / concerns on to our IT team.
Aren’t there COPPA rules that make putting them together difficult? It also seems like mixing 11 year olds with 18 year olds is bound to make one of those groups uncomfortable enough they leave.
I lament the loss of signal to noise ratio on the VIQ site. I understand that this is a free service and a labor of love by VEX/IFI. I’m not worried about the bugs since the Chief Delphi forum went well (and we all know how much they can whine). I’m worried about the posting collision.
Thanks for all that you do.
@DRow why not make a discord and get sponsored from discord. think about it vex gets more money and the users have a more reliable way of logging in, searching topics, and vex could pin certain things and all users get a notification about it.
thank you for hearing me
James Chase 7422C BHS Robotics
You’re correct. However, it’s really no different than 11 year olds already having the ability to interact with 30+ year old mentors on the existing VEX IQ Forum.
The existing VEX IQ Forum has measures in place for COPPA in the event that an underage user tries to create an account. If they are underage, their account is automatically prohibited from posting until a parent / guardian emails or faxes us a signed form saying that the child has permission to post on the forum*. Once we receive it, I give normal posting permissions to the account.
This is actually one of the few “downsides” against Discourse. As our best preventative measure will be to enable an “I agree to terms & conditions” button on sign-up. Age requirements will clearly be spelled out in these terms.
*Note: We actually only receive a handful of these each year. This means that:
A.) Not that many underage users want to / care about posting on the forums to begin with. Or
B.) Underage users are giving false information when entering their age, which unfortunately we really can’t do much about.
I also just wanted to point out that links to old images/attachments will be broken when the Forum first comes back online. There’s unfortunately nothing that we can do to prevent this.
It took a script we ran on Chief Delphi about ~12(!) full days to recover most its broken links. As the VEX Forum is significantly smaller than CD, we anticipate this problem to be fixed much faster this time around.
@DRow
Will there be an easy way to hide all VRC channels or VEX IQ channels at once?
Please!
Pretty please?
It won’t be a “one click and done” solution, but it’s still a pretty straightforward process. I’ve attached a screenshot from Chief Delphi below as an example. (I already have channels muted there, so I used the “watching” box instead)
After clicking on the “mute” section, you’ll see a complete list of all the Forum’s categories, which you can then just quickly click through and set each one to “muted”. Each category will be clearly labeled, so you shouldn’t have to worry about accidentally hiding / missing one.
I see some of the links and images on CD came back to life, while others are still broken. I assume the script is still running and will recover remaining links as well.
It would be great if you could do several passes of the script on this forum, not only to migrate the current links, but also to recover the links that got broken during the previous migration. Sometimes it is an open quotation mark, and sometimes it is an extra http keyword in front of the link…
@DRow why not make a discord and get sponsored from discord. think about it vex gets more money and the users have a more reliable way of logging in, searching topics, and vex could pin certain things and all users get a notification about it.
thank you for hearing me
James Chase 7422C BHS Robotics
Discord is not a viable replacement for a forum, for a couple reasons. One major reason is the whole “you have to be 13 or older” part of Discord’s Terms of Service (and they’ve already mentioned there’s going to be a merger of the VEX IQ forum with this one). Another is that it doesn’t really lend itself to a Q/A format, or even to a format where people discuss one specific topic (this I know from experience). Forum threads can easily be used for both.
There is an unofficial VEX-related discord that is managed by members of the community though, if you really want that (you can search around to find an invite link- they’re all over the place).
Let me know where you’re seeing these issues and I’ll take a look. One thing that may be causing confusion is this: https://www.chiefdelphi.com/t/old-threads-with-links-to-other-threads-broken/335036/9?u=brandon_martus. The links work, but you unfortunately have to open them in a new tab.
The thread you linked originally was from a very old (~2004) whitepaper from before CD-Media existed in its last state, and may not have been covered by the mass import into Discourse. VEX Forum doesn’t have these custom add-ons, so that shouldn’t be as much of an issue.
Brandon, I understand that this is very old content, but every time new students get excited about building two input planetary transmissions (1) (2) I try to show them one of vf threads explaining planetary transmissions as well as the Thunder Chickens CCT as one of the few working examples.
In the CD-51506 thread most of the links now work, except for “64’s 2003 CVT”. Also on the Thunder Chicken CCT thread the white paper is now downloadable again (Thanks!) but the link in the post body is still broken.
And staying on the topic of CVTs, in this thread the link in the first post is also broken, and the picture in the second post is missing, while the link behind it would go to the correct image on howstuffworks.com site.
I am not trying to be extra nitpicky, but I believe that a lot of value of the sites like vexforum.com and chiefdelphi.com is contained in the links to the related topics, which take the information and opinions in the separate threads to the next level in the knowledge hierarchy when they are properly interlinked.
If you already have a script that could detect broken links and recover most of them, that would be a great and relatively easy way to preserve the value of the site that was accumulating over the years.
There already are multiple unofficial VEX discords
And none of them are worth the electrons they slaughter putting pixels up on the page. The advantage here is the heavy mod fingers on slowing the nonsense down.
The problem I have is these dis-discords get all balled up in some hot topic (B05!!). I’m hoping that this keeps the VIQ feel.
I disagree. I’ve learned way more from the unofficial vex discord than here. It has quicker responses and from people who are generally more involved in the program. It’s quicker, more personal interactions than here. That just the benefit of a live text chatting platform. It’s less professional, but not really in bad way. Nobody really talks about BO3 on there anymore.
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