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- #1
Those of you who've been around for a while may remember the test forums, which we opened to the public for a short time during the upgrade of this forum to vBulletin 4. The database used by the test forum is built off a backup taken while we were still on vBulletin 3, many years ago, and a lot of things have changed since then. The forums have continued to grow and change, and the old backup simply doesn't work as a decent approximation of this forum for testing purposes any more.
As a result, we will soon be decommissioning the old test forums, and replacing them with a test forum based on a much more recent backup of these forums (from late last week, in fact). Before we do that however, we'd like to take an effort to preserve some of the special history of Bulbagarden from that short time in which the test forums were opened to the public.
Sadly, it's not going to be plausible for us to actually make those forums accessible to everyone without violating our vBulletin license. We also can't hold off too long in deleting it, since we need to get started with testing of the upgrade to vBulletin 4.2, which is a fairly significant upgrade. I can't give an ETA on exactly when things will be deleted at this point, but for now I'd like to invite all regular members who have been granted access to the old test forum to visit them, and to archive anything that's particularly special to you. Later this week, I'm going to try and setup an addon there which should allow you to download whole threads, which we'll be using to archive everything we can. Sadly however, that addon only allows for downloads as text files, and I'm sure plenty of people will want to preserve the proper thread feeling by saving the actual thread pages as web page documents. So if you don't have access to the old test forum, and you want something saved in that kind of format, please post in here and we'll see if someone (either staff or a kind volunteer) might be able to help you.
As a result, we will soon be decommissioning the old test forums, and replacing them with a test forum based on a much more recent backup of these forums (from late last week, in fact). Before we do that however, we'd like to take an effort to preserve some of the special history of Bulbagarden from that short time in which the test forums were opened to the public.
Sadly, it's not going to be plausible for us to actually make those forums accessible to everyone without violating our vBulletin license. We also can't hold off too long in deleting it, since we need to get started with testing of the upgrade to vBulletin 4.2, which is a fairly significant upgrade. I can't give an ETA on exactly when things will be deleted at this point, but for now I'd like to invite all regular members who have been granted access to the old test forum to visit them, and to archive anything that's particularly special to you. Later this week, I'm going to try and setup an addon there which should allow you to download whole threads, which we'll be using to archive everything we can. Sadly however, that addon only allows for downloads as text files, and I'm sure plenty of people will want to preserve the proper thread feeling by saving the actual thread pages as web page documents. So if you don't have access to the old test forum, and you want something saved in that kind of format, please post in here and we'll see if someone (either staff or a kind volunteer) might be able to help you.
