Ronin Army Forums Shut Down For Good

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catman123456
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Ronin Army Forums Shut Down For Good

Post by catman123456 »

https://greenronin.com/blog/2020/05/26/ ... od-things/

Hello Green Ronin fans,

Today we have guest post from our stalwart forum moderator Fildrigar, on the status of the Ronin Army forums that have been down for the last week.

Greetings!

I’m Barry Wilson. You might remember me from such internet places as That One Wargaming With Miniatures Forum and Esoteric Prog Rock Fans Online.

I have a long history with, and a deep and abiding love of internet forums. Since I first discovered them in the Nineties, I have whiled away many an hour reading and posting on them. I never had the patience for IRC, far preferring the slower, more thoughtful discourse (and formatting options) forums usually provided. I’ve been moderating Green Ronin’s forums for around eight years now.

Unfortunately, the time has come to shut down the forums. While it wasn’t an easy decision, it was necessary once we discovered a rather serious security vulnerability that made continuing to support the forum software an untenable position. We have reached the tipping point where the security risks involved with maintaining the forums outweigh the benefits. We tried to find a solution that would allow us to maintain the existing forums in read-only mode, but just running the forum software on our servers would pose too great a security risk.

Forums have in the past provided a place for people to discuss our games. Increasingly, those discussions have moved to places like Facebook, Reddit, and Discord (and many, many others.) Places like these are allowing us to reach more fans than our small forums did. Searching Facebook for the names of our games will direct you to groups available there. There is also a very robust and friendly Discord community called the Green Ronin AGE Appropriate Discord. You’ll find some of your favorite Green Ronin staff regularly hanging out there to talk about the latest Green Ronin happenings.

In closing, remember that we love you, keep on gaming, and we’ll see you on the internet.
jmucchiello
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Bye Bye Green Ronin Forums

Post by jmucchiello »

Shock
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Re: Bye Bye Green Ronin Forums

Post by Shock »

It seems to be something of a trend that companies are getting away from managing their own forums and latching on to Facebook/Discord/etc to host their online presence.

I'm old so of course I don't like the change
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Ken
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Re: Ronin Army forums closed for good

Post by Ken »

Yeah Barry. You love us so much that we migrated to a different site to get away from your 'love'.
My Amazing Woman: a super-hero romantic comedy podcast.

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Ken
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Re: Bye Bye Green Ronin Forums

Post by Ken »

1) This place is still open.

2) Other than Ares opening this place, Barry Wilson is a probably the biggest contributor to this place existing.
My Amazing Woman: a super-hero romantic comedy podcast.

When the most powerful super hero on Earth marries an ordinary man, hilarity ensues.
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Ares
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Re: Bye Bye Green Ronin Forums

Post by Ares »

Apologies for any confusion. I decided to Merge both topics into a single one for convenience sake.
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Jabroniville
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Re: Ronin Army Forums Shut Down For Good

Post by Jabroniville »

Wow- I always anticipated the day they'd just axe the forums for good, and now it's finally happened. Probably because they either paid cheaply for garbage forum software or they got a friend of a friend to do it, and they did a shite job.

So now that awful, awful forum is gone and probably forever. They can't even do a READ-ONLY mode? Pathetic.

I have mixed feelings about this. On one hand, RA was trash and I don't have good memories of the moderators there. They killed the forums because one moderator sided with a poster who'd literally just come in from a sabbatical, wrecked the forum by starting a fight, and then left again.

The main thing I'll miss is many of the old conversations, which are some of the most fun to go back and re-read. Honestly, I did that every time I re-posted old stuff, and it was great- a ton of those comments I remember from way back, and it's nice to remember which posters made them. I'm glad I at least saved the Disney-related ones- to a point. I remember being too lazy to go through tons of Beauty & the Beast and Frozen ones, so those are at least lost to time. I guess if I was more obsessive about reading them I'd have actually saved them, so I can't be too upset.

Another shame- RA was probably the way many people discovered Echoes. We'll have to be more aggressive about advertising, probably.
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Doctor Malsyn
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Re: Ronin Army Forums Shut Down For Good

Post by Doctor Malsyn »

If someone hadn't mentioned it on the Mutants and Masterminds subreddit, doing so while highlighting Echoes could be good.
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Davies
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Re: Ronin Army Forums Shut Down For Good

Post by Davies »

I'm done with Green Ronin. I will be buying their most recently released Astonishing Adventure because it came out before this, and because I want to support the author, but that is it.
"I'm sorry. I love you. I'm not sorry I love you."
Jabroniville
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Re: Ronin Army Forums Shut Down For Good

Post by Jabroniville »

Doctor Malsyn wrote: Tue May 26, 2020 9:31 pm If someone hadn't mentioned it on the Mutants and Masterminds subreddit, doing so while highlighting Echoes could be good.
Done
I'm done with Green Ronin. I will be buying their most recently released Astonishing Adventure because it came out before this, and because I want to support the author, but that is it.
What's your key frustration with them? Just the endlessly shitty, buggy forum, the likes of which has never been seen before? Or the willful disregard to their own fanbase.
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Davies
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Re: Ronin Army Forums Shut Down For Good

Post by Davies »

Too much stuff, Jab. The thing with Suleiman, the buggy forums, problems that I've noticed with their most recent M&M products, the way that they're asking me to buy a description of Freeport for the fifth time in the forthcoming revised Fantasy AGE ... but destroying the ATT archives is the last damn straw. It was finally searchable, for God's sake! At least some of the time!
"I'm sorry. I love you. I'm not sorry I love you."
Jabroniville
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Re: Ronin Army Forums Shut Down For Good

Post by Jabroniville »

Davies wrote: Tue May 26, 2020 10:17 pm Too much stuff, Jab. The thing with Suleiman, the buggy forums, problems that I've noticed with their most recent M&M products, the way that they're asking me to buy a description of Freeport for the fifth time in the forthcoming revised Fantasy AGE ... but destroying the ATT archives is the last damn straw. It was finally searchable, for God's sake! At least some of the time!
Wow, it got searchable? I had no idea! I just remember it breaking every time I tried to find something, lol.
greycrusader
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Re: Ronin Army Forums Shut Down For Good

Post by greycrusader »

Hey everyone:

From what I understand, the forums ended up presenting hackers with a backdoor into the commercial GR website...more than once, apparently. And given the participation levels had fallen off since the advent of the various social media pages, the decision was made to shut the forums down. Apparently a read-only fix was attempted, but proved not to solve the problem. Apparently the files ARE being stored.

As to why there was no notice given, I can only make a deduction-the GR site was down/offline at the EXACT time the forums went away, so I think that was when the breach occurred.

I do regret not going back and saving more of my posts, primarily from the ATT pages, where I contributed a LOT to a few settings threads, including pro author Charles Phipps' Halt Evil Doer! and Age of Wonders campaigns, along with some of my Bedlam and Autumn Arbor material,and a few of my OCs. Though honestly, one of the reasons I kept putting it off was simply because of the limitations of the search function-going through multiple pages of each thread to open, edit, then copy/paste would have been time consuming obviously. And I do retain most of the ideas either on paper or in my mind.

And Davies, I completely understand the frustration, and its your right to express your disappointment. I do thank you for being willing to purchase the adventure released today, as a lot of imagination and effort went into it, and I think you'll find it enjoyable.
I'll be posting extra material here in the near future, with suitable spoiler warnings if needed.

All my best.
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Ken
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Re: Ronin Army Forums Shut Down For Good

Post by Ken »

I just hope they can Barry.
My Amazing Woman: a super-hero romantic comedy podcast.

When the most powerful super hero on Earth marries an ordinary man, hilarity ensues.
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Scots Dragon
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Re: Ronin Army Forums Shut Down For Good

Post by Scots Dragon »

The Atomic Think Tank is still mostly archived up at the Wayback Machine.

I'm gonna miss the official forums. They never really recovered from the shift over to being RoninArmy, with the heights of the Atomic Think Tank days being a distant memory for a long time now, but I still have fondness for the old Roll Call stuff.
Formerly known as Narsil on the ATT and Ronin Army forums.
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