The Energon Pub

I noticed that since some years, there's less and less users on Siebertron. Topics get just a fraction of the views and replies they used to get. There's so much going on in Transformers out there, but not much news are featured.

Is it just the discutions forums format losing it's popularity on the internet as a whole, or something deeper?

One thing is sure. That infamous BLM thread of 2020 certainly didn't help. The damages that thread did on the forum as a whole is undeniable. It only attracted parasites users who never went outside that thread and we lost so many moderators and veteran users because of this.
"Sides" be damned.

The redesign of the forum seems to help, but the road to recovery will be arduous. I love Siebertron and I don't want to migrate on some other site.
Let's hope things will go for the better, maybe with some new volunteers and staff along the way.

I get news quicker from Twitter (or "X" as some people insist on calling it).

And despite a reputation for being a cesspool, the community is much more open to differing opinions, as long as you avoid the current younger generation.

Seibertron has definitely been going through some growing pains over the past year and change, but a lot more has been happening behind the scenes than most people probably realize.

While the visual redesign has been the most obvious thing users see, a huge amount of the work during the past 14 months has actually involved rebuilding and modernizing the foundation of the site itself. We've been rewriting and updating code from the past 26 years, dealing with security issues, optimizing massive database tables, fixing long-standing bugs, reducing or eliminating Kremzeek/error pages, upgrading Energon Pub and HMW, moving servers, modernizing the backend infrastructure, and migrating away from an outdated version of PHP 5.6 that had vulnerabilities and was no longer supported to a more modern version of PHP.

At the same time, we've also been working on larger long-term projects involving the upcoming Seibertron Store, modernizing galleries and community features, improving how different sections of the site connect together, and building a future participation/rewards system that ties site activity, collecting, and community interaction together in more fun and meaningful ways.

A lot of that work isn't flashy and most users will never directly see it, but it has been laying the groundwork for where Seibertron goes from here.

One area where we could definitely use more help right now is news posting. We still have some active news staff members, but it's been quite a while since we've brought new people onboard to help cover everything happening in the Transformers world. If anyone has interest in helping post news about reveals, comics, games, movies, TV series, conventions, or anything else related to the fandom, we'd absolutely welcome the help.

I'm also curious what everyone else's experience has been lately. Have the forums felt faster than they used to? Have you noticed fewer Kremzeek pages or outages compared to a year or two ago? Are there areas of the site that feel noticeably better or worse? Features you'd still like to see improved or modernized?

There's still a lot more work ahead, but Seibertron is very much still evolving and actively being worked on every single day.

Some examples of projects and features I've been actively working on recently:

• The upcoming Seibertron Store and integration with eBay and Amazon.
• Continued improvements and maintenance for Heavy Metal War.
• Modernizing and improving the Energon Pub forums
• Developing a future rewards/participation system tied to site activity, collecting, community interaction, and the upcoming store.
• Working on more interactive community features and game concepts such as Transformers-themed matching/memory-style games and other engagement ideas.
• Improving how the forums, galleries, news system, and other parts of the site connect together.
• More changes to the layout/design of the site to better improve user experiences
• Continuing to clean-up 2.5 decades of legacy code and backend systems so future features are easier to build and maintain.

Dem thread title is click bait (intended or not). Lol.

Always value Quality over Quantity. Always.

Sure, other sites have many, many more members. But it suffers from daily infighting/cockfighting or whatever you wanna call it. Any they tend to be much less tolerant to difference of opinions.

Quite happy to be a member on this site.

megatran wrote:Dem thread title is click bait (intended or not). Lol.

Always value Quality over Quantity. Always.

Sure, other sites have many, many more members. But it suffers from daily infighting/cockfighting or whatever you wanna call it. Any they tend to be much less tolerant to difference of opinions.

Quite happy to be a member on this site.

Yeah, that's the main reason why I still haven't migrated to TFW2005 yet and I may never will. I don't want to go to a Reddit cultured site. Ever.

I see that the forums view post page is jacked up when on mobile. One of the things that would really help me out is if any of you are active and willing can help put together a list of issues that need to be addressed. And are impacting your experience here.

Weird. I can't get it to to do it again, but if I went back in my browser history I can still see the issue.


The form options at the bottom of this page sometimes dont stick to the page layout and blows out the right side of the website which creates a horizontal scroll bar on mobile. Sometimes only it seems.

On mobile, EVERYTHING is stacked on top of each other.

Meaning there's the banner, then the forum and thread title, the posts, then the long list of all the news and then, the forums lists.

On the threads list page, it's the WHOLE thread list before the news, and then, the forums list.

I have to scroll down like I'm spinning the wheel at The Price is Right!

I don't know if it's only on my Android, but at home one the computer, the layout is normal.

Im aware of issues with mobile. It was a big leap going from the old design to the new one and some things (like the right sidebar with news headlines and ads) didnt translate to this new layout. Im already working on a different layout for the store and might possibly just use what im creating for that for the rest of the sites design.

Please feel free to share screenshot of things that are annoying you guys.

Burn wrote:I get news quicker from Twitter (or "X" as some people insist on calling it).

I get a little laugh that after all these years, peeps including News media still have to say X, formely Twitter.

I updated the "jump to" dropdown menu at the bottom of a forum topic so that it no longer "blows out" the page on mobile devices.

I thought I'd give the site a go on my tablet (I still refuse to try on my phone) using Brave and honestly...it's running good. Fast, navigation is roughly the same (needed to go to landscape for HMW) but otherwise, no issues.