Jcink Era

Once IGNO had switched from Invisionfree to Zetaboards, there was never any intention for the community to move hosts again. However, it was early 2014, and the landscape of the internet had changed greatly since 2008. Zetaboards' lack of reliable modern features (such as mobile device support) was starting to hold the community back, as more and more users moved to doing almost all of their internet browsing from mobile devices. Forums - once the dominant form of social communication on the internet - had fallen by the wayside compared to social media, and Zetaboards simply couldn't keep up with the needs and expectations of modern users.

I remember I spent a while searching around for alternatives - we had been on Zetaboards since 2008, after all, and perhaps it was time for another change. I experimented with private social networks and self-hosted forum software like Vanilla and NodeBB - even thought about using Buddypress since we already had a WordPress installation for IGNOpedia. In the end, everything I tried either felt lacking in some way, or just 'off' somehow - they just weren't the right fit for what I felt IGNO had to be (actually I was pretty sold on NodeBB but the software was still young and lacking documentation so we had ran into some technical difficulties with the install).

After several months of indecision on my part as to whether a move was the right decision, I ended up discovering Jcink - ironically enough, an Invisionfree derivative. We had originally moved to Zetaboards because it was like a more 'advanced' version of Invisionfree at the time - but now, Zetaboards was lagging behind on necessary web features like mobile support, which Jcink had built-in. In the end, despite all my attempts at 'upgrading' IGNO to a more modern social platform, we simply wound up switching from one forum service to another - but under its archaic-looking hood, Jcink offered enough flexibility to meet the needs that Zetaboards couldn't, and the decision was made. We officially moved to Jcink in the spring of 2014.

However, there was a secondary reason that it felt like a good time to move - the realization that the several-years-old history was only holding the community back. There was simply too much content, ill-organized after dozens of attempted layout revisions, and it was difficult to give things the complete overhaul it really needed. Moving to a new host, retconning out the convoluted old history, and basically wiping the slate clean was a change that IGNO needed in order to refocus, and a fresh start on a new forum would help with that as well. Though IGNO was approaching 10 years of life as a community, this was a new beginning - a new chapter in the saga that is IGNOLand.

The Jcink Era is, at the time of this writing, the current era - and hopefully the last as far as forums go. It's young, content-wise, so this section may not have a whole lot worth archiving for a while. However, it's not really necessary to do so, since the Jcink forum is still extant, and its topics can still be browsed directly.