Live Forums

Overview

The old Official Forums (commonly referred to as the old blue boards), was where most communication between players, developers, and NCsoft community managers happened, supplemented by live meetups, in-game events, and social networks. The forums, with software provided by vBulletin, came in two color styles: blue for heroes and red for villains. Maintained by NCsoft rather than Paragon Studios, the forum hardware was located in Austin, Texas, along with the servers, and the development team responsible for maintenance was in Seattle, Washington.

Purging

Most forums on the old official forums were subject to automatic "purges" between April 2004 and July 2009 (when it used the UBB.threads forum software), where all threads over two weeks old without a redname post in it were deleted. This freed up database space, and made the forums and forum searches, etc., run faster. Some forums were set to never be automatically purged (for example, Announcements, Player Guides, and the Fan Art sections); old threads there must be manually deleted, if at all.

A common reference to this purging was that the deleted threads were "eaten" by the "purge monster" or "forum monster".

Historical

• On July 27, 2009, the forums went down to migrate from UBB.threads to vBulletin. On July 31, 2009, the forums came back up with the new software installed. In addition to the new software, the European and North American forums were merged into one forum, allowing cross-client communication even before the NA and EU server lists were merged.
• On September 27, 2011, with the launch of City of Heroes Freedom, Free Players were restricted from posting on the forums at all, and Premium Players could only post in the Technical Help subforum.
• On December 16, 2011, three more forums were opened up to Premium Players, labeled "ALL ACCESS": Player Questions, City Life/General Discussion, and Suggestions. Free Players are still restricted from posting.
• On December 1, 2012, the old Official Forums went offline, with the rest of City of Heroes.
• On September 10, 2022, an archive of the vBulletin version of the Official Forums as it was on November 30th, 2012 was made publicly available as a SQLite database.
• On September 19, 2022, a public archive using the SQLite database was put up on the world wide web.

External Links

• Official Forums (Latest Archived Version)
• Announcement of the SQLite database archive
• UBB.threads
• vBulletin
• Welcome to the New Official Forums
• Official Web Site Redesigned (October 27, 2008}