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Legacy GMC Profile Restore?

dialgpalkia

Member
Hi everyone,

Just wondering if anyone knows of a way to restore your legacy GMC profile/combine it with your new GMC profile? I joined the GMC a long time ago and I was sad to see that I couldn't log in and had to recreate my profile in the new GMC.

Any ideas?
 

TsukaYuriko

☄️
Forum Staff
Moderator
The old GMC is still accessible in read-only mode: http://gmc.yoyogames.com

Manual copy + paste aside, profile transfers or linking are not and have never been available, but all publicly accessible content from the old GMC is archived.
 

dialgpalkia

Member
Hi Tsuka,

Thanks for the comment, may I ask why they aren't available? It's a bit frustrating to have work you put into building rep, for example, disappear. It's a small thing, but I'm just curious.
 

Ninety

Member
They're technically different forums. As I understand it, the mechanism to transfer data between them doesn't really exist.
 

TsukaYuriko

☄️
Forum Staff
Moderator
If it helps in any way at all, your user name sounds familiar, so not everything disappeared. :p

Anyway, the plausibility of transfers was certainly being discussed - for reference, there was a public poll regarding this subject, located here: http://gmc.yoyogames.com/index.php?showtopic=687124

Despite originally having shared your mind set about old content essentially fading into relative obscurity, I can imagine multiple reasons why transfers were not carried out based on the information in that topic and all other public information. (I am of course not allowed to reveal that the real reason was that Mike is evil and wanted to have another reason to work us all to the bone by wiping everything we had worked for so far.)


For the sake of not having fingers pointed at me: I'm in no position to make official statements, so all of this is just my personal opinion on the matter.

For one, the iteration of the GMC you are currently browsing runs on a different forum software than the old, now archived one. This already leads to one major problem: Compatibility, or rather the lack of it. While there may be converters, some of them official, some less so, all of which may or may not have been available at the time the GMC migrated, the chance of successful conversion is not guaranteed. With a community as big as the old GMC, converting the underlying database from one format to the other would likely have taken ages (and the maintenance was already taking long enough by itself), not to mention the outrage that would have ensued if promises had been made to keep all old content only for some technical issues to arise during conversion, potentially making it impossible to carry out after all. It would be a bit like your doctor telling you that you still have a while to live, and when asked for a rough estimate, they would start counting down from 10 to 0.

Another compatibility issue is between the forum organization itself rather than the underlying format - this GMC's forum structure is quite different from the previous one. While some forums were theoretically just merged (Programming Q&A and all sub-forums into Programming, to name an example), some others are not around anymore at all (Teachers Area, Resources...) - now where to put all of those topics? Delete them? Move them to another, less appropriate, if appropriate at all, forum? A lot of topics from the old GMC would also not conform to the updated sub-forum specific guidelines, so there's another dilemma here - remove the topics and people will be mad that they're gone, keep them around and other people will be mad that their topics aren't exempt from the updated rules.

Compatibility issues in whatever form aside, another concern was relevance. The old GMC is stuffed to the brink with questions reaching as far back as Game Maker 6 or even 5.3, with 7/8/8.1 and Studio 1.x being the most common. Given the release of GMS 2 and the heaps of underlying changes, those topics would be partially or entirely irrelevant or, in the worst case, even misleading for users of GMS 2, especially if said users have no prior experience with GM at all.

It would have been one of my personal worst GMC nightmares to have the post-reopening influx of new users exposed to old topics mentioning ancient constructs such as execute_string and end up having to spend half of my time on the GMC telling people that they can't do that anymore - so, quite frankly, I'm glad we had the wipe.
 

dialgpalkia

Member
They're technically different forums. As I understand it, the mechanism to transfer data between them doesn't really exist.
I hadn't really considered how much data would have been there on the old GMC so I see what you mean!

If it helps in any way at all, your user name sounds familiar, so not everything disappeared. :p

Anyway, the plausibility of transfers was certainly being discussed - for reference, there was a public poll regarding this subject, located here: http://gmc.yoyogames.com/index.php?showtopic=687124

Despite originally having shared your mind set about old content essentially fading into relative obscurity, I can imagine multiple reasons why transfers were not carried out based on the information in that topic and all other public information. (I am of course not allowed to reveal that the real reason was that Mike is evil and wanted to have another reason to work us all to the bone by wiping everything we had worked for so far.)


For the sake of not having fingers pointed at me: I'm in no position to make official statements, so all of this is just my personal opinion on the matter.

For one, the iteration of the GMC you are currently browsing runs on a different forum software than the old, now archived one. This already leads to one major problem: Compatibility, or rather the lack of it. While there may be converters, some of them official, some less so, all of which may or may not have been available at the time the GMC migrated, the chance of successful conversion is not guaranteed. With a community as big as the old GMC, converting the underlying database from one format to the other would likely have taken ages (and the maintenance was already taking long enough by itself), not to mention the outrage that would have ensued if promises had been made to keep all old content only for some technical issues to arise during conversion, potentially making it impossible to carry out after all. It would be a bit like your doctor telling you that you still have a while to live, and when asked for a rough estimate, they would start counting down from 10 to 0.

Another compatibility issue is between the forum organization itself rather than the underlying format - this GMC's forum structure is quite different from the previous one. While some forums were theoretically just merged (Programming Q&A and all sub-forums into Programming, to name an example), some others are not around anymore at all (Teachers Area, Resources...) - now where to put all of those topics? Delete them? Move them to another, less appropriate, if appropriate at all, forum? A lot of topics from the old GMC would also not conform to the updated sub-forum specific guidelines, so there's another dilemma here - remove the topics and people will be mad that they're gone, keep them around and other people will be mad that their topics aren't exempt from the updated rules.

Compatibility issues in whatever form aside, another concern was relevance. The old GMC is stuffed to the brink with questions reaching as far back as Game Maker 6 or even 5.3, with 7/8/8.1 and Studio 1.x being the most common. Given the release of GMS 2 and the heaps of underlying changes, those topics would be partially or entirely irrelevant or, in the worst case, even misleading for users of GMS 2, especially if said users have no prior experience with GM at all.

It would have been one of my personal worst GMC nightmares to have the post-reopening influx of new users exposed to old topics mentioning ancient constructs such as execute_string and end up having to spend half of my time on the GMC telling people that they can't do that anymore - so, quite frankly, I'm glad we had the wipe.
I appreciate you saying that the name is familiar!
I can certainly see the issues there would be with the compatibility. It's been so long I forgot how many different sub-forums there were on the old GMC, and even though some of them were good fun to read I agree it would be too much of an issue to moderate.

Thanks for all the help guys, I really appreciate your time! :)
 
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