A Renewed Focus on Panzer and the Future of the Forums

A Renewed Focus on Panzer and the Future of the Forums
By Solo Wing

Happy New Year, everyone. There’s no new Panzer Dragoon/Crimson Dragon content in this post (although if you’re looking for new dragon-related material to read, check out this amusing article I shared earlier on the social networks). Rather, this post is a discussion of a couple of aspects of the site going forward.

Most of the updates to The Will of the Ancients last year were focused on Crimson Dragon. We’ll keep posting updates about the Crimson Dragon franchise as they come in (here’s hoping that a higher budget RPG sequel is revealed within the next few years). When it comes to new content for the coming year, I plan to focus more on the Panzer Dragoon series as that is where my interest primarily lies. While coverage of the Panzer Dragoon series is already relatively high compared to Crimson Dragon, there are plenty of new articles which could be written about Panzer Dragoon. I’ll say no more about these plans for now as I find it better to get on with writing rather than writing about writing (a classic procrastination technique). However, if the community wishes to contribute new Crimson Dragon content, for example fan art, theories, or encyclopaedia entries, these contributions would still be most welcome.

This brings me to my second point: the future of the forums. It is no secret that the forums on this website are powered by very old phpBB2 software, software that I’d like to replace. The question is: replace with what? It’s also no secret that the forums have been decreasing in activity. Even with the advent of Crimson Dragon, the amount of discussion has not significantly risen. I’m not convinced that the replacing the forum software with something more modern will increase activity. The rise of social networks, particularly Facebook, has diverted much of the Internet’s discussion away from forums. However, I still believe there is value in keeping some kind of separate discussion area around on The Will of the Ancients, even if activity is low. As Craymen might say, no social network should wield such power.

There are at least a couple of options for a modern replacement of the current phpBB2 forums. One option is Discourse, a progressive discussion platform from the creator of the popular Q&A website, Stack Overflow. It is excepted that Discourse will reach version 1.0 in the next few months, which might be an ideal time to make the switch. Alternatively, the current Dragoon profile system, which currently just shows information about contributions to this website, could be expanded to allow people to log in to custom forums that could be tightly integrated with other parts of The Will of the Ancients. Because it will be members of the Panzer Dragoon community who will use whatever forum system is chosen, I’d like to gather feedback from the community about the kind of discussion forums you would like to use. To do this, I have started an open discussion called The Future of the Forums.