Difference between revisions of "Doomworld"

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== Forums ==
 
== Forums ==
  
Doomworld provides a set of forums. Discussion areas are provided for [[Classic Doom]], [[Doom 3]], and [[Doom (2016)]], as well as the “Everything Else” general discussion forum and areas for discussion of news and hosted sites. The forum software used is {{wp|vBulletin}}.
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Doomworld provides a set of forums. Discussion areas are provided for [[Classic Doom]], [[Doom 3]], and [[Doom (2016)]], as well as the “Everything Else” general discussion forum and areas for discussion of news and hosted sites.
  
 
=== Trivia ===
 
=== Trivia ===

Revision as of 18:13, 22 July 2017

Doomworld in 2016, using the design implemented in early 2002

Doomworld is the oldest unofficial news website dedicated to the Doom games. The site was founded on March 13, 1998 by Andrew Stine (Linguica), Gaston Lahaut (Mordeth), and Javier Heredia (Dukrous); the site began as part of the AtomicGamer network of TeleFragged, LLC. It became an independent website following the shutdown of Atomic Gamer on July 25, 2015. Of the original founders, only Stine and Lahaut remain, but the amount of total members on the staff has grown almost three-fold.[1]

In addition to Doom related news, Doomworld also hosts the weekly /newstuff Chronicles reviews of new WADs uploaded to the idgames archive and a database of the archive with search, user comment, and mirror access capabilities. The site also provides informational resources about Doom and associated games, hosting of Doom websites, and a forum with over 10,000 registered users and 816,000 posts as of December 2009.

Doomworld received some mention in mainstream media in 1999 due to the controversy surrounding the Columbine High School Massacre and shooters Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold's obsession with the Doom games. It gained some additional renown in the same year after Andrew Stine convinced John Carmack to allow the site to redistribute the Doom source code under the terms of the GNU General Public License.

Forums

Doomworld provides a set of forums. Discussion areas are provided for Classic Doom, Doom 3, and Doom (2016), as well as the “Everything Else” general discussion forum and areas for discussion of news and hosted sites.

Trivia

  • Instead of threads and posts being deleted, they are sent to "Post Hell". In contrast to the rest of the forums, Post Hell features a bright orange theme, flashing imitation banner ad, obnoxious background music, and an animated flame effect at the bottom of the window. Fredrik Johansson is featured at the top of Post Hell.
  • Troublemakers are generally not banned outright from the site, but instead temporarily “losered”. Losered people can only post in a single forum, “Losers”, which is invisible to normal users.
  • The pink fish first appeared on Doomworld. It is common for people to have fish as their avatars.
  • It is not possible for a normal user to set a custom title. Instead, titles are given out by administrators in randomly timed “title giveaways”, or set in response to behaviour on the forums.
  • The Doomworld forums inspired a series of joke WADs. An anonymous mapper created dwforums.wad as a parody of the forums. The mapper later followed up with dwforums2.wad and dwforums3.wad.

Notable articles and features

2015 hosting change

It was announced by Andrew Stine in early July of 2015 that AtomicGamer would close down by the end of the month and that plans were in place to backup and transfer all of the site's content to a new hosting arrangement in the hands of community members. As of July 25, the doomworld.com domain became intermittently unavailable due to a change made to AtomicGamer's DNS records. It was afterward fully re-established under Stine's control as an independent website. The site was temporarily available at an alternate doom.world domain name until transfer of the doomworld.com domain from Telefragged and sufficient DNS propagation were complete.

2017 software change

On March 13, 2017, to coincide with the 19th birthday of the site, Doomworld changed its backend codebase, moving from a heavily customized vBulletin 2.2.5 along with a collection of custom-written scripts to the IPS Community Suite. The move was driven by the looming security issues in the old software, which was over 15 years old at that point, and it was decided that the amount of effort that would be required to fix the hundreds of potential vulnerabilities would be better used to configure a more modern backend software. The new software has support for social media features such as username tagging, notifications, a more robust private messaging system, status updates (to replace the semi-hidden "Blogs" subforum), integrated file uploading and sharing, and the ability to give "like"s to content.

The /idgames Database was also fully integrated into the new software; however, users protested that the new incarnation did not include all of the same features as the old version, most notably in its search functionality and a lack of full backwards compatibility with existing URLs. Within days of the change, the "old" /idgames Database was revived and the new version was demoted to "beta" status.

The move was met with mixed reactions, with many users appreciating the new features and functionality, including the "responsive" design that reformats the site for use on mobile devices. Others bemoaned the increased file bloat, the large amount of Javascript now required for full functionality, and the increased page load times.

External links

Sources

  • This article incorporates text from the open-content Wikipedia online encyclopedia article Doomworld.