What do you miss about the old forums?

[pdkoester]

My picture of a train instead of mono color circle with my first letter capitalized. My signature with a list of products I use displayed in it. I can handle all the other modern advances, just don't take away some of the basic stuff.
I am sure not everyone loves being a mono color circle with their first letter capitalized.

 

[Forester1]

I liked the avatars and the timelines of others, but they did not have the avatar I would have liked, and they only had two of the products I had purchased and not several others. Some of the.people I miss are sadly gone to the great yard in the sky, so their camaraderie is sorely missed either way. I look forward in hopes that some great new talent with a great sense of humor and immunity to trolls is going to come along and fill in the gaps.

 

[8686]

I just want to hear what everyone misses about the old VBulletin forums. For me it is the avatars and the "timeline" that showed what versions of Trainz you had registered to you. And the general look of the forum with the rail-related theming like the unread topic indicators being semaphore signals and let's not forget the default user titles that the forum gave.

Mhmm, I do agree with the points you've made.
While they didn't have every kind of locomotive before for avatars, I do think they had a great selection, and they definitely had a lot more characters than these new unchangeable default avatars. Same thing with the semaphore icons – I feel like the forum just had a lot more character before.

Hopefully some form of avatar system will return to the forum one day.

 

[ricomon35]

To be honest I don't remember the old forum anymore. Maybe due my age, who knows...
The only thing I really miss are those who took 'The Spanish Train' already.

This is one reeeeeeally weird song @mick1960 !

Rico

 

[rick1958]

The old forums were abandoned because the software had become old, and as you said was creaky with lot of leaks requiring more patches than the duct tape could cover.

If you noticed, us older users have a start-date of November 9 2006. The reason for that is an older forum prior to that had completely crashed and the forums had to be recreated from that date on. Given that the old forums dated back to November 2006, it was time to retire them and go to something new and shiny.

There isn't a whole lot that I miss from the old forums. Having the timeline and registered versions on it helped a lot with support but the rest of it was old.

What I miss is the forum prior to November 2006. There was a sense of community that disappeared when the forum died. Gone with that forum were many people with historic product knowledge and a sense of humor that has been lacking here since.

"What I miss is the forum prior to November 2006. There was a sense of community that disappeared when the forum died. Gone with that forum were many people with historic product knowledge and a sense of humor that has been lacking here since."
Definitely... It's never been the same. I doubt we can blame a change in forum software for that though. The camaraderie is gone. It seems the freindships and fellowship has been replaced by the struggle for realism and rivet counting. For me that's sad. A lot of the "fun" is gone.

 

[rick1958]

This is one reeeeeeally weird so9ng @mick1960 !

Rico

What the.... was that??!!... LOL

 

[ricomon35]

What the.... was that??!!... LOL

@rick1958

 

[rick1958]

@rick1958

 

[mick1960]

It's never been the same.

Sometimes, lately more often, to thoughts like this a song from the past pops up, which seems to fit quite good...

 

[JimDep]

Wow, I almost forgot that Saturday Night Live was funny at one time. It's been decades.

 

[martinvk]

"What I miss is the forum prior to November 2006. There was a sense of community that disappeared when the forum died. Gone with that forum were many people with historic product knowledge and a sense of humor that has been lacking here since."
Definitely... It's never been the same. I doubt we can blame a change in forum software for that though. The camaraderie is gone. It seems the freindships and fellowship has been replaced by the struggle for realism and rivet counting. For me that's sad. A lot of the "fun" is gone.

Where did it go? The same place all things go - into history, to be replaced by the next new thing which will then also slowly but inevitably slide into history too.

 

[pcas1986]

Where did it go? The same place all things go - into history, to be replaced by the next new thing which will then also slowly but inevitably slide into history too.

Just like us.

 

[JimDep]

Sliding into obscurity........is that what's called "progress" ?
For some reason, I want to pick up a guitar and playing nothing but descending diminished scales

 

[FootplatePhil]

I miss the ability to copy an image in the Trainz Gallery and paste it straight into a Forum post. No mucking around with links.

 

[Paulsw2]

The camaraderie and humour of the 'old' forum did carry over into the 'new' one post-2006 for a long time and it was a mine of useful information and advice. A real community. Also, there was a lot of activity - I'm a very habitual user of these forums (pretty much every Wednesday and Sunday for the last 18 years!) and it used to be the case that there would be c.10-20 pages of new posts when I came back to check. And lots of messages to engage with.

Sadly, that's no longer really the case. There's a lot less activity and not so much to engage with. Though I do wonder how much traffic has gone over to the Discord servers - maybe this forum is becoming a backwater?

 

[boleyd]

I miss discussions about running a railroad. Details on yard work. How to schedule mixed load freight runs, any tips on passenger scheduling. Just plain tips on running a railroad. Thanks to the Artists for the base. Now, how do we run a railroad? Then later, begin to pay attention to cost elements. At that point it is not just a bunch of pixels moving on a baseboard. There are fees to be paid and customer charges levied. Just like a real railroad. Maybe N3V might even toss in a Timetable.

 

[JimDep]

I miss discussions about running a railroad. Details on yard work. How to schedule mixed load freight runs, any tips on passenger scheduling. Just plain tips on running a railroad. Thanks to the Artists for the base. Now, how do we run a railroad? Then later, begin to pay attention to cost elements. At that point it is not just a bunch of pixels moving on a baseboard. There are fees to be paid and customer charges levied. Just like a real railroad. Maybe N3V might even toss in a Timetable.

Yeah, for the last 20 years, I've been hoping for a timetable we could fill in ourselves, exclusive to the passengers or freight being moved on the routes. That would be huge.

 

[big_b]

I'm only on the forum about once a month if that at the moment if that where as in the old forum I just about lived on it. I used to enjoy the random chat about anything and everything just to get a story going to see where it would lead. Plus a lot of the old faces are no longer around and if I remember correctly the waffle train was the main reason for posting most of the time. These days a lot of members take thing too serious instead of just enjoying the company on this forum as it used to be.

 

[pware]

Now, how do we run a railroad? Then later, begin to pay attention to cost elements. At that point it is not just a bunch of pixels moving on a baseboard. There are fees to be paid and customer charges levied.

Many years ago, when it was Auran not N3V, they put out feelers for a possible new direction for Trainz that would include the economics and maintenance side of running a railroad. Whether the user response was not encouraging or the demise of Auran, caused by their venture into role playing games (a long sad story), that direction never eventuated.

It was not a direction that would have interested me as I spend nearly all my time developing routes and sessions and comparatively very little time driving.

 

[JCitron]

Many years ago, when it was Auran not N3V, they put out feelers for a possible new direction for Trainz that would include the economics and maintenance side of running a railroad. Whether the user response was not encouraging or the demise of Auran, caused by their venture into role playing games (a long sad story), that direction never eventuated.

It was not a direction that would have interested me as I spend nearly all my time developing routes and sessions and comparatively very little time driving.

I believe this was in development when Auran met its demise. There was quite an article on this and it was met with lots of enthusiasm at the time. This was part of a realism push with better graphics, real tides, and other neat things including financial modeling. There was also going to be a professional product for railroads to use for training purposes.