The Energon Pub

I don't know if it's been mentioned, but I would love a dark mode for this site, if it's at all possible

To be perfectly honest forum/message boards are becoming less and less popular everyday it seems to me for a variety reasons.

1) Competition from social media sites from the usual suspects that allow for a "faster way to build a community."

2) Gatekeeping this is very true in long running fandoms like Transformers, Star Wars, Star Trek, Dr. Who, and so on. We're close to the 20th anniversary of Transformers: Armada love it, hate it, or indifferent to it was the first TF toy line/series/comic book for a generation of fans and for many of them they would see this as a site of old farts who hate any TF series that isn't G1 so they will go to sites like Facebook, Reddit, Twitter, Discord, YouTube and try to create their online communities. Now I know some people here will think: "good we don't need any fans for Armada here." Guess what genius? WE NEED THEM TO KEEP THIS PLACE GOING! This site and especially this forum needs some young new blood fans who want to express their love The Unicron Trilogy or the LAM, Animated, Prime, and so on who don't want to talk about G1 and Beast Wars all the damn time a place where they can be accepted without being ran off because they aren't true TF fans because they don't care about G1. Also certain posters here need to leave for a while and come back in a year or two. Familiarity breeds competent and one poster who's been here so long I have nothing but competent for and that is why I spend my time as far from here as I can because sooner or later we clash and that won't end well.

3) Lack of mods and admins for the forum. Simply put the GD forum here as been under moderated for a long time and it needs more than Ryan (aka Seibertron) to run this whole forum and maybe it's time for new people to take the helm other than the ones who cycle around every couple of years.

Have the clickable page link numbers on threads appear in bolded text if the user viewing the thread posted on that particular page. Or have a single-click link that lists all the posts on the currently-viewed thread made by the current user, instead of having to do an explicit search-for-manually-typed-in-username in the thread.

I don't think the "submit news" option is working.

A faster premoderation would do.

Or remove it alltogether, cause as is it`s murder.

People would communicate more, if it`s were any kind of possible.

Bazillatron wrote:A faster premoderation would do.

Or remove it alltogether, cause as is it`s murder.

People would communicate more, if it`s were any kind of possible.

We try to approve new users as efficiently as possible.

you would be amazed at the number of bots which try to post on here. Lately, for every 1 user that is legit, I have to decline 5 bots that post multiple times

D-Maximal_Primal wrote:

Bazillatron wrote:A faster premoderation would do.

Or remove it alltogether, cause as is it`s murder.

People would communicate more, if it`s were any kind of possible.

We try to approve new users as efficiently as possible.

you would be amazed at the number of bots which try to post on here. Lately, for every 1 user that is legit, I have to decline 5 bots that post multiple times

Its really gotten that bad?

Psycho Warrior wrote:

D-Maximal_Primal wrote:

Bazillatron wrote:A faster premoderation would do.

Or remove it alltogether, cause as is it`s murder.

People would communicate more, if it`s were any kind of possible.

We try to approve new users as efficiently as possible.

you would be amazed at the number of bots which try to post on here. Lately, for every 1 user that is legit, I have to decline 5 bots that post multiple times

Its really gotten that bad?

Yes, I was catching up on the Legacy thread last week, and on one 25 post page, there were 6 bot posts I had to decline

Psycho Warrior wrote:

D-Maximal_Primal wrote:

Bazillatron wrote:A faster premoderation would do.

Or remove it alltogether, cause as is it`s murder.

People would communicate more, if it`s were any kind of possible.

We try to approve new users as efficiently as possible.

you would be amazed at the number of bots which try to post on here. Lately, for every 1 user that is legit, I have to decline 5 bots that post multiple times

Its really gotten that bad?

It was that bad when I used to admin here.

Seibertron, could you please do something to fix the issues HMW currently has? It’s slowly disintegrating, the poor old thing, and I’m worried that one day it’ll no longer be playable.

When quoting a post, is it absolutely necessary to have nested replies included in the post? It takes up a chunk of real estate when there is a chain of previous posts. Perhaps just quoting the post in question is adequate? If members want to include past conversations they can use the multi-quote, perhaps.

Logged on today on my mobile phone and got a new layout. It's starting!
Excitement levels rising.

Oh man I am loving the retro look. Really takes me back to happy early internet memories.

Oooph! Been gone for a couple of days. This site is now an eyesore.

Drop Bear wrote:Seibertron, could you please do something to fix the issues HMW currently has? It’s slowly disintegrating, the poor old thing, and I’m worried that one day it’ll no longer be playable.

HMW is a key component to SEIBERTRON. It will always be here. I have big plans for it.

I'm currently in a debugging phase right now and working on fixing one feature at a time. I spent the past week working on the launch of the new "news" section which I'm calling Transmissions.

The sightings section is probably what I'm going to work on next as it has a lot of problems also after the site update and people are still using it to report new sightings as poorly working as that section is, but HMW is also high on my list. At a minimum, a lot of the display code just needs to be updated to take advantage of all of the new "toys" we have available now thanks to the new site redesign. The gaming part of HWM as well needs some love as well.

Nothing is getting left behind now that we have a new platform to work with at long last.

Even the return of screen caps is on the table (I just finished screen captures for seasons 1 and 2 of TFA, Season 3 is next and then I have to figure out how best to process through all of the raw screen captures to de-dupe).

Solrac333 wrote:Oooph! Been gone for a couple of days. This site is now an eyesore.

Hi Solrac333,

Thanks for checking back in and for being honest about your first impression of the redesign. I know change can take some getting used to, especially on a site that has been familiar for so long.

If you don’t mind sharing, could you let me know what about the new look feels like an "eyesore" to you? Is it the colors, the layout, the navigation, or something else? I’d really appreciate any specific feedback you can give so we can take it into account as we continue refining the site.

Also, just so you know, you can always switch back to the classic layout by clicking the "Convert" button at the top right of the site to view the "Golden Age of SEIBERTRON" version if that feels more comfortable.

Looking forward to hearing your thoughts!

JazZeke wrote:Oh man I am loving the retro look. Really takes me back to happy early internet memories.

Thanks for the feedback, JazZeke. I appreciate it and it makes me happy to see you are still here after all of these years.

This site design from 20 years ago is still on my mind. I still feel like there has to be a way to do something more like this with a modern website. I miss the old "magazine" layout style of sites that involved a ton of Photoshop work from 20 years ago. It can still be done, they're just very different.

Cyber Bishop wrote:

Psycho Warrior wrote:

D-Maximal_Primal wrote:

Bazillatron wrote:A faster premoderation would do.

Or remove it alltogether, cause as is it`s murder.

People would communicate more, if it`s were any kind of possible.

We try to approve new users as efficiently as possible.

you would be amazed at the number of bots which try to post on here. Lately, for every 1 user that is legit, I have to decline 5 bots that post multiple times

Its really gotten that bad?

It was that bad when I used to admin here.

I changed up the logic for the spam bots a couple of months ago. I tried implementing the checkbox for if you're a human, but something was wrong with the code so it didn't work properly. It's on my list of things to address again in the future, though the changes I did implement seemed to have slowed them down a bit.