So what exactly happened with the site here?

Hey guys,

So I guess long time no see. The site makes it seem even longer. I haven't seen any kind of thread that went over exactly what has happened in these past few years, maybe I could be filled in?

Is Z completely out of the picture? I remember Frag/Nvincible taking over a few years back and we changed the moderating team, but what is with the new forum engine, and more importantly, what happened with our forum history? Hard to see hundreds of thousands of posts just gone to thin air, didn't know what the reasoning behind it was, or the reasoning to leave vbulletin.

I bet this kind of thread has been made a million times, I apologize for being late to the party and playing catchup.

http://www.halo2forum.com/ is a backup of the old forum.

A very long story short, I bought the site from Z and Mark last summer (damn, almost a year ago now) and in February of this year we relaunched the site on a brand new platform. One of the unfortunate realities of migrating to the new site was that the content was not migrated. There were a couple reasons for this. One, we had a significant amount of content on the old site that did not adhere to Google's Adsense policies. In fact, I have only just recently gotten the THF domain re-instated, as it had been banned since last fall because of the policy-breaking content on the old site. Second, we wanted to transition to the new site at the same time that the final round of our last montage competition was going on, as to capitalize on the traffic and hype surrounding that event, which in turn limited the amount of time I would have had to program the migration that would have needed to be written in order to bring the content over.

We did bring over post count and join date. Unfortunately, a feature of the new software that does regular maintenance-focused operations recalculated posts counts based on the new site values for each user, and reset that number for everyone. However, I still have plans to bring post counts back, it's just that working with databases of this size is a tricky thing (especially for me, as I am not a database/mysql expert).

As @Renzy mentioned, the old site still exists at the original halo2forum.com domain. It has been put into what I would refer to as an archive mode, which means new threads and posts are disabled. You can still log in, read old pm's, search the forums, and a few other things, but that's about it. The intent for that site is to leave it up as a living archive of our community.