We are going multiformat!

The Classicamiga forums will be going multiformat in the next couple of weeks.

We all share the love of the Amiga; it is the reason everyone originally came to this site, and what attracted you to joining. However we also all share a larger passion of all things retro. With this in mind I am going to be working on making these forums less Amiga specific, and more about the whole retro scene. Especially of focus will be retro gaming, emulation and the demoscene, but real hardware will not be forgotten.

New front page areas.

The front page area of the forums will see new sections that members can submit content to.

News, Reviews and Features.

Members will be able to submit news about anything, for any platform, for inclusion in the main front page news feed, which I hope will be very useful for anyone running a project and wishing to announce some launch or update info to the retro world.

In addition members will be allowed to write and submit reviews for anything they like for inclusion in the reviews section, or create a feature specific to any subject they wish (f.ex the demoscene, the latest dreamcast game, something about the PS3... whatever you like). All content will be linked by tags in a way familiar to anyone who uses a blog. That way you can easily categorise your submitted content into platform and subject content.

It will be an ongoing process, evolving over time based on ideas and suggestions by all members, so if you have some ideas please do post a reply and let me know your thoughts. This will also be a chance to try and streamline some parts of the forum structure already in place, and also to move many areas currently within the off topic section of the forums into more prominent sections of the site.

Where does this leave the main classicamiga.com website?

Classicamiga.com will remain as it stands, a directory/archive of all things Amiga. It will continue to focus purely on the Amiga, and its software and hardware. That project will not change, although it is due some updates that are planned for later in the year.

And the Wiki?

The Classicamiga Wiki will however also be going multiformat eventually. Its continuing aim to collect together as much of the useful information about everything retro that is floating around the internet. So much invaluable information and help is posted every day on an expanse of difference communities. The goal of the evolving wiki will be to collect it all together and create a central repository of retro information to help the whole retro community, and to help archive all the information to help prevent the knowledge getting lost over time, especially as communities close or evolve.

More to come..

I also have something else big planned, which will appear alongside the evolution of the forums... More on this coming soon... ;)

Wow, sounds very exciting! I have a question for you. What will happen to the OLD old site? is that still archived somewhere?

Do you mean the original forum? If so, yes it still exists and can be found at http://oldforum.classicamiga.com

Quote:

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Originally Posted by Harrison

Do you mean the original forum? If so, yes it still exists and can be found at http://oldforum.classicamiga.com

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I was thinking of also this forum, what will you do with it? Archive it also?

This forum is evolving into the new one with all content still intact, just rearranged into the new structure, so there won't be anything to archive. I will however add the option for members to select this classicamiga theme if they wish the site to look as it does now.

Ahh right, got it. Much easier than rebuilding a new forum

This will be interesting. Looking forward to see the results!

Hi,
i was away... 6 days in Grand Canaria Island.... vacations.... :)

Great to read this news!

Very nice of you Dave, really very nice. You do a fantastic job with ClassicAmiga site.

...but.... the new forums seems to be quite slow under OWB or classic Amigas. Can we use the old one instead?

I don't think that it's appropriate to post in Amiga forums using a peecee... :lol:

What do you mean by old one? vB3.x? If that is what you meant then no as this is the same forum upgraded to vB4.x. You can post using the mobile version of the site if you wish (link at bottom left of footer bar).

Old one I meant that one that was last year. :)

Mobile forum? Nah... that's for Atari not Amigas... :lol:

Last year we were still running the older vBulletin 3.8 software, but I upgraded everything to vBulletin 4. There is no going back and with vB4 there is a lot still in development by the company so much more still to come. Once I have worked on the site some more and start making the move over to multi format approach I will then look at creating a lighter weight theme/skin for the forums to load faster on slower systems and older browsers. However, the sad truth is that technology continues to move on and older browser compatibility can't be kept at the expense of new stuff. Most software is now already stopping support of IE6, which was already far ahead of any Amiga browsers.

Hehe... who cares 'bout Internet Exploder from Microdoze? :p

Anyway, just posting from latest version of OWB under AmigaOS 4.1 U2. Hmmm... it seems really fast. :cool:

Maybe something fixed in OWB. That's good then. :-)

Don't be upset Dave, I don't want to minimize your great work, you know that. ;)