Upcoming Forum Changes (Patreon)

Today we don't have many updates for you, work on FTL continues, new models are being released, there is not much of note right now. As soon as we have more stuff done that we can show off we'll make sure to let you know.

In the meantime we wanted to inform you of upcoming changes to our forum.

Around 3 months ago we switched our forum hosting from Proboards to Discourse, because on Proboards we had to manually provide patrons with additional forum access, which was becoming impossible as the number of supporters increased. Discourse being the only forum with a Patreon integration seemed like a dream, as it would allow us to automate the whole process, so we made the switch.

Looking at how things turned out, it's clear to us that switching to Discourse was a mistake.

Whilst it's true that it allowed for some automation, it also came with a number of other problems (from a bad interface to not sending out confirmation e-mails), which have lead to a decrease in forum members and forum usage. We tried getting some help from the Discourse developers, but they demand $100/month to give us support, and honestly we believe that money is better spent elsewhere (like art, miniatures, etc.).

So, what does this all mean?

Basically, we're going to be shutting down the current Discourse forum at the end of the month, and switch back to Proboards. This means everyone's old accounts, threads and posts will be restored, and hopefully we can go back to having a healthy forum again.

Switching back to Proboards means that we won't have the Patreon integration anymore, and so it means that we will not have a patrons-only forum section anymore. Seeing how we haven't had an active thread on there in a month, we hope this won't be too big of a loss, and any patrons-only content can still be shared via our Discord server.

That's it, we hope this helps shed some light on why we're doing this. :)