Live Forums
Overview
The Official Forums is where most communication between players, developers, and community managers happen, supplemented by live meetups, in-game events, and social networks. The forums, with software provided by vBulletin, come in two color styles: blue for heroes and red for villains. Maintained by NCsoft rather than Paragon Studios, the forum hardware is located in Austin, Texas, along with the servers, and the development team responsible for maintenance is in Seattle, Washington.
Purging
Most forums on the official forums are subject to automatic "purges", where all threads over two weeks old without a redname post in it are deleted. This frees database space, and makes the forums and forum searches, etc., run faster. Some forums are 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 is that the deleted threads were "eaten" by the "purge monster" or "forum monster".
NOTE: This purging effect was part of the UBB.threads pruning process. It is not confirmed that this function was carried over to the vBulletin software.
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.