I know most of you aren't habitual users of the UGO Forums, but today UGO announced they were turning off all the non-HeroMachine boards and that I am taking over the general administration of the site.
My first act as Evil Overlord was, at Kaldath's suggestion, to enable Guests (meaning anyone either not registered at all, or just not signed in at the moment) to see attachments.
That means that even if you're not registered on the forums, you can now see all those contest entries people have been making from their Forum accounts.
Enjoy!
And I for one, welcome our new bald overlord.
Glad I could make a contribution to the forums. If I have any other ideas ( none come to me at this time but you never know) for forum improvements I’ll be sure to pass them along to you Jeff.
Welcome to Jeffdom, all hail the king. Now that I got that out of my system, cool.
Oh thank you Jeff! 😀
Thanks a ton man!!!
Sweet!
hmm, Just noticed that there doesn’t appear to be a link to the forums on this site, unless its there and I am just not seeing it. If I am missing it, let me know otherwise you might want to consider adding one Jeff
It’s at the top of the right tool bar under “Community and Contact”, the orange dialog balloon. I should probably add text to those, but it’s so CLEAN how it is now!
OH MAN THANK YOU SO MUCH!
I have had trouble accessing UGO as well. Now I will be able to see those posts YEA!!
IBeing a worrier I do hope that this shutting down of all non Hero Machine UGO doesn’t mean we may one day see Hero Machine vanishing … (Sorry I worry that way/ When a Mexican restuarant took over my favorite Farmer’s Market BarBQue place, they said they would keep the barBWue and fries as they were … couple of months later, they still have BarBQue and fries but it take 30 minutes now and they totally taste different and instead of 5 for $5 its 1 for $3.95)
Ah, excellent. Well done, Your Hairlessness.
And Cliff, I feel your BBQ pain, and share your UGO concern. Jeff, if UGO goes, will HM continue?
Well having been a member of the UGO forums for a couple years now, I can say that except for the Heromachine sections those forums were rather dead to begin with for a while now, so it made sense to cut the dead weight. You want the Heromachine forums to survive them keep it active!
@Kaldath: Amen
Excellent. Maybe having Jeff in charge will help to avoid further stupidity and insanity similar to what was going on around there this last week or two.
Thanks a lot!!!
I was always worried to be unable to see the pictures posted there for the contests.
And congrats for that excellent use of your uber powers.
@Imp
Ok ok, the issue is over and done with. It was an inside joke gone wrong and abundant overreaction by many parties involved. Let’s move on.
Yes, by all means let’s let that kerfluffle lie dead and move on.
As far as the fate of UGO and / or HM goes, I don’t have any concerns in that regard at all. Well, that’s not true — having been raised Catholic I worry about pretty much everything all the time and feel guilt about it to boot.
But from what I can tell, Hearst is happy with UGO and UGO in turn has told me they’re very happy with HeroMachine and me. So I don’t think they’re going to be shutting anything down any time in the foreseeable future.
Regarding those forums specifically, I honestly don’t know what kind of expense is entailed in keeping them up, and I don’t even know the kind of traffic it’s generating. But there are no ads on it at all and that’s pretty much UGO’s business — selling ads against traffic.
Note that this is pure speculation on my part, no one there has said or even hinted at anything about this.
To finish that thought — Just speaking for me personally, it makes a lot more sense to have the forums integrated into this heromachine.com site, preferably with all the styling (headers, footers, right column, etc.) as any other post. That way ads can be served against visits and the whole HM community is in one place.
But that’s just talking out my … well, making things up as I sit here and type. Certainly neither UGO nor I have any plans to do anything with the current forum setup except keep them going as is for the short and medium term. Long term, I probably lean at this point to trying to migrate everyone over to some kind of (as yet mythical) integrated WordPress solution here on HeroMachine.com, but that’s a long ways off.
And it would mean they had to keep me around for there to BE a long term, so ha!
Oh, and worst case scenario (from my point of view) is that UGO decides to end my contract, but even then I don’t see them shutting down the program, it is still very popular.
The other worst case Cliff brought up is “what if UGO folds”. In that case, ownership of all things HeroMachine would remain with Hearst; I no longer have any ownership or legal rights to it in any way, shape or form. When UGO bought it, they bought it all and own it from now till the cows come home (unless someone else buys it from them, of course).
But relax, neither UGO nor Hearst nor I are going anywhere any time soon.
Okay. Great. Now we have to worry about the cows coming home.
That’s great, Jeff. I never cared for the way the HM forum was just a section of the forum and not the whole thing. I think it would be cool if you tried to promote the forum too. With all of the people we get participating in Contests, I think we could get quite a few of them to join the community.
That is funny because the only reason I made an account was so I could see those.
Same here Oquies (19).
do i make an acc by typing in the same name every time??