MMO-Champion: The Cataclysm

MMO-Champion: The Cataclysm
Something is happening to MMO-Champion... Something catalysmic.

Very soon, we will be migrating the forums from SMF to vBulletin. This is going to be a very big update to the website and will require at minimum 10 hours of downtime to prepare for it. We're all working very hard on our end to get everything in place and ready for use, but there's some things that you can all do to pitch in and help us with the transition.

Avatars
As I'm sure you have all previously read our rules regarding avatar filesizes, you will be happy to know we are now enforcing these rules in a manner that cannot be accidentally broken. After the migration avatars will be uploaded to MMO-Champions webserver, where it will verify the filesize and type. What this means is that if your avatar is too big, you can't use it. No more angry PMs from moderators telling you that you've broken a rule that you probably didn't know about.

The good aspect of this avatar change is that avatars will probably be a lot faster to load now than some random picture dump site you grabbed it from. You also won't run into your bandwidth limit on photobucket or the like within minutes now.

The bad thing, however, is that this requires a total wipe of all avatars. They will not be copied with the transfer. We're really sorry that we're unable to do this, but it would require incredible amounts of bandwidth, will slow down the transition process to a matter of days and will probably have us receive a lot of angry emails from webmasters all over the world wondering why we're downloading hundreds of images from them. We just can't do that. On this note, we ask you all to make sure you have a copy of your avatar URL saved somewhere so that you can reapply it later.

Signatures
Nothing too drastic to report here, you'll be pleased to know. However, there's a slight tweak in how BBCode works in signatures so that people with custom font sizes will need to readjust their signatures post-migration. We'd recommend removing any custom size text before we migrate to save some time.

With the tweaks to the site design coming, quotes and blizzquotes may change in size. This can inadvertently cause your signature to go oversize and break the signature guidelines. We will not go crazy over any minor violations for breaking these guidelines so soon after the migration, however, so you will have a few days to readjust your signature as required.

Private Messages
We have hundreds of thousands of private messages stored in the database, most of which are not needed and stored only for archiving purposes by you guys (and girls). They take up a lot of time processing them for importing to vBulletin, so we have a request for all of you.

We really do not want to totally wipe private messages or not import them at all, but we do ask that anyone who has private messages that they do not need, please delete them from your inbox (don't forget to check your sent PMs too). There's a handy tool to delete old PMs but for some people we understand there may be one or two messages you just want to keep so it may not be advisable for all.

Please also note we are experiencing a little trouble perfectly importing all private messages and they may look slightly different or BBCode will not work for old messages. We're really sorry, but this can't be helped.

Custom Titles
Some users have custom titles. Just fun things given to them by admins that don't mean anything special other than just for giggles. These will not be imported to vBulletin and will be lost. Sorry!

Site Layout
We're not totally revamping the layout, but it's a close call! Unfortunately we have had a little difficulty with the site design on vBulletin and there may be a few quirks as we sort everything out post-migration, but please bear with us as we try our hardest to get it all fixed

Site Permalinks
Any links to topics, forums or users on the website might break. We're trying our hardest to make sure this won't happen and this is a very big priority for us, but we cannot guarantee everything will still link up fine. This is only a warning, unfortunately there is nothing you can do to help this.

Cookies
Are available on demand. Please see your local witchdoctor for more information.