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We’ve spent months preparing and tonight (Wednesday around 1AM EST) we flipped the switch for a major upgrade to our community platform, which supports both article comments and the OpenForum. We don’t lose any data and you don’t need to create a new account or change your password. However, you will have to wait a few hours, and we are sorry!
We expect both systems to remain offline until about Wednesday afternoon as we process our massive 22 years of responses (that’s 1 million topics and over 28 million posts). All login and user registration features will not be available during this time. That means no commenting on articles, no browsing the forum and unfortunately it also means that subscribers will not be able to access their sub-benefits for a short period of time. We keep it as short as possible. When it’s done, just log in again with your old credentials and you’re done.
Read on to learn more about what we do and why.
Community is essential to Ars Technica
When long-reading Ars readers talk about how long they’ve been around, they often point to their forum registration date (mine is June 8, 2001). It can be a sign of pride! The oldest of the old-schoolers have 1999 reg dates on their profiles, which is as far back as our records go (Ars was founded in 1998, but the WWWThreads data from the very first forum has been lost).
There are not many communities on the internet that can lay claim to active users that have been around for more than two decades. It is something we consider our own pride. Thank you for staying with us for so long! That said, even if you measure your tenure here in years or months rather than decades, we’re still very happy to have you, and many of our best contestants are our most recent recruits, if you will.
In an era where many sites are closing their comment sections and social media increasingly treating people like commodities, we’ve chosen to refocus on how we can amplify the great contributions readers make here. To do that, we needed a brand new forum and comment system, and we found it in XenForo, a modern forum system with a familiar feel.
Everything you expect from the Ars forums, such as flat, no threading discussions and normal reverse chronological reading order is there. Your post count and registration date will remain intact, as will all forum content dating all the way back to 1999.
The same BBCode you are used to will still work. But you don’t have to type any tags if you choose to use the handy interface of the editor tools. Just about every aspect of our forum gets a similar “still works, but it’s better” touch.
No more running into quotes or trying to edit a bunch of nested tags. Quotes are now one level by default (you can edit the tags to add more if you really want to). We have full mobile support and the forum is now easy to read and use on your phones. You can easily see when someone is responding to you.
There will be a dark mode.
We break with the old tradition of the Ars forum in one way: there will be avatars. Pretty much every social platform uses them now, and they’re hugely helpful with a user base as large as ours for visually identifying posters. (No animation, and anyone who abuses the system can find out that we chose an avatar for them.) Have fun choosing something to further express your forum personality.
As with any major transition like this, we expect some hiccups. We tested everything in a beta forum with our moderation team, but nothing beats a live environment with thousands upon thousands of users to find the edge cases. We have a thread to report issues and a developer team to help us manage bugs and issues. Please be patient with us when we fix something.
XenForo offers a modern architecture that is easily extensible, so in addition to bug fixes, you can expect a future with more features, both for all users and upgrades for our subscribers. We have our own plans, but we are happy to take comments and suggestions to improve your experience.
We hope you enjoy the new forum and comment system. Our commitment to our community remains strong. We have new tools for our moderation team, which we will expand in the future. Ars continues to be a place for open and respectful discussions, as well as a place to share and enjoy your geeky passions.
Whether you’re a 1999er or think now is the time to sign up for a new account, we look forward to your contributions.
