Hi everybody!

Our hosting provider has gotten steadily more expensive while not being particular helpful, so we're going to move to a different one that's dramatically less expensive and offers much more flexibility.

As a result, the site will be down for a few hours on this Thursday, Feb 15, from 9am-12pm EST so I can move us over.

I've done two test migrations and everything seems to be good, so I don't anticipate any issues. That said, if something does go badly wrong, it'll be trivial to revert back to our current setup until that problem is resolved.

Both the forums and the wiki will be moved over. The front page has been dead for about a year, so I don't intend to migrate that as well, but the content will be archived.

Sorry about the inconvenience, and thanks for continuing to support the site!

Thanks Welder!

Thanks for the heads up. Sorry about the front page. That's partly on me :embarrassed:. There are probably enough "articles" for NGA constructed and CotW that we could set them up to show up in random order and users wouldn't ever see duplicates.

You do great work guys, so thanks for the heads up, and glad you guys will save some dollars!

I blame lack of automation for front page inactivity. That, and it seems like 2017 was a pretty bad year for a lot of people. Most of us down in the M:EM had a pretty busy and/or horrible year.

Not a particularly great year for the Duels guys either, with WOTC having nuked our game and whatever haha

Yeah but that was only one front page article. None of them saw much traffic

I thought the main problem with the front page was that people dramatically overestimated the amount of time they were willing to give away on a scheduled basis, and then the front page was designed around those promises. A good front page would be just one or two articles a week, with the option to throttle up or down based on content creation rates. Ideally, it would avoid promises of specific regular content; both explicit promises and promises implied by the page formatting.

yeah I think that's roughly right. we also overestimated the amount of interest most people would have in looking at it in the first place, which meant that even if an article went up, it was likely to be ignored, so there was even less incentive for people to give it their time.

I think the front page was a mistake... but having a system to highlight content was not. Let's say we had 3 perma-announcements, that like this thread would show up on top of everything

One that would link to the latest Card of the Week (and Card of the Month/Card of the Year when they're up)
One that would be "Latest works entered into the M:EM"
One that would be a highlight of the latest and greatest from the DotP/Online community (I don't honestly know what they'd want to put up there)

Whenever a new entry in one of those categories comes into being, the previous announcement thread is de-announced and a new one put up with the new stuff

If there's something that a sub community wants to highlight, a fourth announcement could be spawned for a time.

In that way, we would have something of a "community bulletin" without the baggage of a Front Page.

Aaaand we're back.

If anything appears to be broken, please let me know!

My "view your posts" link isn't working, I get a message:

General Error
SQL ERROR [ mysqli ]

Expression #1 of SELECT list is not in GROUP BY clause and contains nonaggregated column 'nga_forums.p.post_id' which is not functionally dependent on columns in GROUP BY clause; this is incompatible with sql_mode=only_full_group_by [1055]

An SQL error occurred while fetching this page. Please contact the Board Administrator if this problem persists

Well that's bizarre. I'll take a look.

Thanks for letting me know!

[edit] OK, should be fixed.

Just a quick shout out on something dumb as hell but it's been tight to have a post at the top of the forum that every sub-forum sees. Cheers to everyone who doesn't live in my personal browsing loop of YMtC/Spoiler Room/AF&S: I see you, I feel you, your struggle is valid

forums.nogoblinsallowed.com/index.html doesn't work, but the subcategories are still available, so it took me some time to realize we were done

good job, as an aside

Thanks!

Did forums.nogoblinsallowed.com/index.html ever work? It's always been index.php.

I might've been glossing over the extension, it was whatever Board Index was linked to, so probably .php.

Hey, I'm running into some really weird issues. On some devices I can log in and see the forum normally. On others I'm getting this weird version of the site where many of the past several hours of posts aren't showing up (see attached image). I tried clearing my cache all over the place but no dice. Any ideas? Trying to wrap my mind around the problem and its scrambling my brain

For what it's worth, there are also a few posts missing in the AF&S subforum that were still there a few hours ago, namely in the 'Uncharted Realms' thread and the 'Dominaria Flavor Thread'. I guess that's tough luck and they're gone for good? Or are they still floating around in limbo somewhere?

Either way, thanks for keeping this site running!

I think I've found the issue. Some other, older version of the site exists at the old IP address pointed to in the DNS cache. Zombie posts made there don't show up on the main forum, and if your machine has the old address stored in cache, it'll automatically navigate to that zombie site.

If you're seeing this problem, simply flush the cache on any devices where you're seeing weird, older versions of the forum. On iPhone you can do this by turning airplane mode on for about 20s, then turning airplane mode off again. Cheers~!