Stephen and I would like to announce that ownership and upkeep of the RCNC forum is transferring to Nick Myers. Nick has the time and technical expertise to give the site the attention that it needs, and help to make sure that it continues to support and grow the model warship combat community. The existing moderators will all continue their service with the site. Nick will be talking soon about site upgrades and changes. Many thanks to Nick for taking this on, and for his assistance these past four years. Keri and Stephen
Greetings all. As some of you know I have been a mostly behind the scenes system admin and moderator here for a few years, working to keep the site as operational as possible. Obviously I will be now taking a more visible role, but other than that I would like to assure all of you that the nature and goal of the community here are not something I intend to change. Our goal shall continue to be the premier resource and online community for all flavors of model warship combat. Now before I get too far into discussion of the future, I would like to note the tremendous impact Stephen and Keri have had on our community. Since Strike Models has opened its doors it embraced the RCNC community. For the past nearly 4 years, they have directly supported us by keeping alive our digital home here. Even as that financial commitment ends Stephen and Keri continue to plan to be involved as community members here, and Keri has agreed to continue donating her time as a moderator and SEO knowledge source going forward (though we will try not to burden her with our troubles too often, she has a new crew member to train). With that said, there will be a very major change coming. On November 19th, rcnavalcombat.com as you know it shall close down, and a new site shall open in its place. The new forum, running new software, on a new server will end our dark days of inaccessible forums, strange error messages and odd glitches. I am sure there will be new hiccups, but they shall be fewer and further between. The new forum software we will be switching to is called XenForo. It is one of the premium forum solutions available, with continually growing market share. Our new server will be hosted with Linode. The initial license cost for XenForo is 140$, and there are roughly 160$ worth of add-on licenses that I plan to acquire for added pieces. If anyone would like to contribute on the costs you can paypal me at nwmyers at gmail dot com. With the migration, ALL forums threads, posts and user accounts will be preserved and replicated on the new site. Any files that you have uploaded will still be there. XenForo is a really awesome upgrade for us. It has great image attachment and automatic resizing, a responsive design that means it is actually usable on mobile, fantastic moderator tools, alerts, user tagging, and more. Overall it is a very solid platform to work from and I am very excited to be able to bring RCNC to it. few items to note: We will be leaving behind the ship registry. It was a great idea initially, but it is honestly fairly cluttered with unfinished and never-will be items, items without photos, etc. Perhaps we shall revisit it in the future, but for now, its time has passed. Signatures - May be transferred, but may have some issues on the other end. XenForo uses bbcode rather than html tagging in post bodies and signatures, and some entities will not translate. You should plan to recreate your signatures. Avatars - I will not be moving these. Xenforo supports much higher resolution avatars, and moving the ones here would just result in lousy image quality when they stretch. Plan to upload new avatars. Your passwords - your passwords WILL NOT carry over. You will have to reset them on the new site. You will receive an email once the new site is up with reset instructions. Please ensure your email address here is correct before the 19th. Username vs DisplayName - Here you can change a displayname that is not your username and your displayname shows with your posts. XenForo does not natively support this. Your username will be used with your posts. If you wish to change your username, we will have a mechanism to do so. Files uploaded via the FileManager and linked to with links that look liked 'linkclick.aspx' -- these links will likely not get redirected properly. I think this will afflict Mark more than most, sorry Mark. Links to threads and subforums - these WILL be redirected properly, though links referencing a specific page may drop you at the first page of the thread Subforums - Some of the subforums will probably get collapsed into eachother. This isn't any sort of limitation with XenForo, but a case of us asking 'Do we really need two electrical subforums?'. Post content - XenForo only allows use of bbcode in post content. That means no more fussing with HTML tags, it also introduces some initial limitations. Out of the box there is no bbcode implementation of tables for instance. So if your post body here had a table in it, the formatting may be gone. I will work on trying to get a more extensive set of bbcode options in place over the nearer future. Lots of words there. If you have any questions or want to offer suggestions / feature requests please feel free to share. You can post publicly here or PM me if you wish. -Nick
Is the $300 a one time fee, or are there maintenance fees that also need to be covered? And thanks for taking this on, I know it is a lot of work.
XenForo itself has a renewal of $40 annually if you wish to continue receiving updates and support. I intend to pay that, it is quite reasonable and their support is pretty spot-on from what I have seen via their forums. Some of the other add-ons available have minor support renewal costs as well. Chase - will do what I can. It isn't something that can directly cross, being a DNN module and no analogue available. I like the concept of the registry though and it can be a value adding feature. It just won't be an immediate one.
How much is the add-on that makes it so whenever someone says or types 'Tugboat', little angels appear and sing arias and sprinkle glitter on the keyboard?
Well, the glitter dispensing device (complete with USB hookup) is still in early development. If you'd like though I can have the forum automatically substitute (using the profanity filter) a cheesy geocities quality gif of an angel and a looping low quality .wav file containing 5seconds of music for your name for the low price of free.
Important notes for those of you who filter your email: The sender email for RCNC during the next week or so will become noreply@rcnavalcombat.com (rather than Keri's email) and the sending server will be via mandrill.com (formerly 1and1). The post-migration email you receive on the 19th may come from admin@rcwarshipcombat.com or noreply@rcwarshipcombat.com
A big thank-you to Greg and Mark (RCENGR) for your contributions to the fiscal cause. Also, apparently this archaic forum is going to stubbornly refuse to send email the way I want it to, so expect to see them start coming from admin@rcwarshipcombat.com and not noreply....
A bump and a reminder to everyone that in 2 days, on the 19th, we will be shutdown for a few hours during the transition. Important: You will have to reset your password after the transition. To do this you MUST have a valid email address in your user profile. Also, thank you Keith for joining the Supporter's Club!
I have to give a big shout out to nick. I have been playing around with the new site (currently in closed beta) and it is much more user friendly, particularly with images. Should be much more stable and enable us to have a solid foundation for more growth of the hobby.
