If you didn’t know, SEGA has official forums that have been open since the late 90s. I know a lot of people that have grown up chatting about SEGA via these forums, even me, your humble SEGA news writer started out the site by meeting people on this very forum. I’m not lying when I say that these forums mean’t a lot to many people. According to Sonic Community Manager Aaron Webber, the forums will be coming to a close as they plan a move from Vbulletin software to a new database. Aaron didn’t give a ETA on when you can expect them back.
Hit the jump to read his comments:
“The SEGA forums will be shutting down on Vbulletin as of this Friday, February 2nd. This will mark the end of our time using Vbulletin.
I know it’s sudden, and probably a bit of a shock for many – but please know we do not intend for this to be the ultimate end of the SEGA forums, and hope to migrate the database to a new forum software someday in the future.
As plans for the future crystallize, I hope to share more news with you soon via Twitter. I can’t give any more details at this point in time, but please be patient as we work behind-the-scenes to set things up. There will be a period of downtime between the current shutdown and our hopeful next evolution of the boards.
Thanks in advance for that patience, and thank you all for an amazing eight or so years on the Vbulletin boards. Change is necessary sometimes – and this is one of those times. With any luck, what comes next will be even better!
I’m sure you’ll have many questions, so please feel free to ask in this thread, and I’ll respond to as many as I can today. “
He went more into detail replying to another concerned forum user:
“Yes, I’d have liked to share it earlier too. Provided we’re able to migrate and save the boards with a new platform, a lot will change for the better. I can’t promise that migration just yet, but we have people working very hard behind the scenes right now to try and make it happen.”
It seems that this will be much like the change back in 2009 when they migrated to Vbulletin. Personally, I can’t see myself returning to the forums considering that for a long time it was filled with mods that abused their powers due to personal grudges. I hope this is something that changes in the future but the past was just a ton of abuse of power and bending of the rules to fit what moderators wanted. This is coming from someone that is friends with a few of the SEGA forum admins, one of them even hosted this very site for the first year it launched, so I’m not saying they are all bad. But if you where apart of the community, I don’t think I have to say who I’m talking about, you already know.
I guess we shall see how open they are in the future. But you know, we do have forums and a discord to talk about SEGA.
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Yay im immortalized with asking the question!
Yes, but they have permanently closed forums before.
I signed up with my Dreamcast to those forums and had to re-register to the new forums around 2006. When they moved to phpBB.
Damn…I still talk to someone on there too. Hope they will still be there when I return.
Funny how Mods have been mentioned in the article although I have been some abuse on SEGAbits forums as well (not providing who provided the news first and using someone else’s fanbased work without permission), so I’m going to ignore the personal problems the writer has with the main forums as SEGAbits isn’t exactly perfect either.
It’ll probably change for the better, since the stupid rep system was gone that a few ex-SEGAbits members abused in the early days (can’t ignore certain members who used it as influence), and most of the Sonic fanbase will migrate to Sonic Stadium.
……dots………dots……….dots………
So.. About it being “temporary”…
lmao right