Welcome to the forums, all new viewers/posters!

It has been a long time coming, but back in December, I finally caved and took on the challenge of setting up my own forums. Admittedly, it took some pushing from Meeraku (as a result of a random ingame chat no less), but the result is the same. The Vindictus Manual Forums are now live!

In lieu of a standard empty greeting, please accept this infodump in its stead, you may find it interesting:

The Forum Structure

This is a Forumotion board, hosted on Forumotion's servers. What does this mean? Most noticeably, there are advertisements. It is against their forum ToS for me to remove them myself, and it costs a fair bit of money per month to disable them the proper way. Given how fast these forums load, the tradeoff seems more than fair.

This forces limitations on what all I can do with the forums, though. I have access to the majority of the HTML template of the forum, and I can attach whatever JS I want, but I do not have access to the backend of the forums, meaning adding new major forum features such as a reputation system is beyond the means of what is possible here. Again, the page load times made this worth it.

The Community

Players on the NA forums have experienced extreme mismanagement by Nexon and significant power abuse by the Volunteer Forum Moderators. Players on the EU forums have experienced a curious mix of shitposting and overly rigid rule enforcement (from what I understand?)

These forums are intended to welcome any and all English speaking Vindictus players, regardless of which region/server they play on. There are rules to follow on these forums, but they are designed to be as lenient as possible, only the bare minimum to maintain order. It is my hope that these forums will be an actually welcoming place for players, unlike Nexon NA and Nexon EU's best efforts so far.

Only active players of Vindictus will be offered/able to keep the Moderator/Administrator/Forum Manager ranks (with the current exception of Meeraku), so as to ensure that those helping maintain these forums actually understand the game, and understand the issues the players are currently encountering/feeling.

The Future

Right now, the only major features on the forums are the two custom BBCodes, table2 and tree. Eventually, I will be able to merge Vindictus Manual code with the forums, resulting in a series of interesting new features.

Certain primary forum features are missing as well, such as theme switching. These were intended to be available on release, but were delayed due to my desire to finally get this forum online after four full months of poking and prodding at it. This really was a project too big for one person, despite that being exactly what happened (everyone I recruited to help promptly abandoned ship literally within hours of joining).

Like the rest of my site, I intend for these forums to continually evolve incrementally, as new ideas arise and my quality standards go up. Leading nicely to my next and last point for now...

Your feedback is wanted

Unlike Nexon, I will listen to any and all feedback. If you post a thread in the feedback sections, it will be read. Usually, I will even make an effort to reply to all of them. I won't promise to follow every suggestion, as that is insane, but when nice ideas are contributed or issues are pointed out, I will definitely take notice.

In addition, bug reports help me catch issues that are very hard to spot on my own. It's depressing me to discover years old bugs in my code that went unreported for a long time. Help me squash any bugs the moment they appear!

Thanks for reading to this point

Thank you for actually taking the time to read this entire post, I hear that it is unusual for people read through long announcements like this. I've said enough here though: Welcome to the forums, and I hope you enjoy your stay!

...And the forums are actually public now!

Just as an announcement following the recent "events" that have taken placed on the official NA forums.

If you wish to discuss Vindictus without fear of getting banned ingame because Nexon doesn't like you or doesn't like what you are saying, then here is the perfect place for you!

These forums host a community of players from every region of Vindictus/Mabinogi: Heroes in the world, allowing for a more complete picture of what is going on in the game and in the future. Our moderators are unbiased and fair, and will not act against you out of personal spite or jealousy.

There is a weird misconception that these are private forums or that people aren't supposed to post for some reason. I don't know what made people feel this way or think that, but it is not the case.

These forums are open for any rational discussion of Vindictus, unlike the official NA forums. If you want to make a thread here, make one. If you want to post, post. If you want to disagree with something I have posted, and you have an explanation behind why, go for it. That last one goes for any user, by the way, not just me.