As far as I understand, the leaked information was limited to the hacked support center a few years ago. The leaked info did not cover every player in the Graal Online DB, just those who had used the support center (basically every active player - my account information was leaked).

No. They got leaked because the crappy third-party support center had major security issues.

I personally would love to see the forums cleaned up so it is update with information, that's kind of a big deal, especially since the community is evolving. i also agree with another super moderator, or 2, and I also think moderators should have the role of keeping discussion up, meaning new threads so players have more to discuss. Right now I can see only a few 'hot topics'.

The registration process can be considered difficult nowadays. People aren't used to having to go through all that trouble just to register a forum account when practically every other game creates a forum account automatically for you along with your game account. As Chris said, it would take minimal effort to set that up for Stefan/Unixmad if they'd want too.

Chris is actually right Darlene. Although we don't view registration as being that complicated, I too was slightly confused when I started and have seen many players ingame also tell me they have no idea "how to signup" to these forums.

Graal has always been slightly backwards in how it runs things but I think the forums are one of the most off-putting + particularly confusing things for newcommers and those who have never used a forum before (a surprisingly large amount of people!). Graalians doesn't require you to sign up with any kind of ingame information and there's still no problem with identity theft or anything of the sort. Perhaps if Graal's main website was simplified and shared its login with the forums (I've seen some games do this...unless I'm hallucinating) it would be a much easier process.

I don't know the mechanics (or anything really) behind vBulletin so perhaps someone with more knowledge could explain a few things.

I don't have much experience with vBulletin, but have done similar things with other forum software in the past (e.g. when you log on Era for the first time, a forum account is created for you; PM the NPC-server "forums" for a link to the forums that signs you in automatically, no password needed). This should be fairly simple with vBulletin as well.

What I was thinking was the entire login process for the forums and the mainsite are combined, so if you're signed into the graal site you're signed into the forums and maybe the otherway around. This way players won't have to register and can comfortably use their normal login/passes for Graal on the forums.

Let players set their own passwords (perhaps force complex passwords, etc) and all is well imo.

Would be nice to see this as well, although I think it's pretty clear at this point that they don't care how terrible their website is.

:(...:cry:

There's an addon that makes that all possible, but I doubt Stefan is for addons.

Are you talking about that time when the fields were wrong on the sign-up page and it for some reason thought the "Username" field was actually your password entry field and vice-versa for the "Retype your Username/Password" section? I had that exact same thing happen to me, but I think they fixed that a long time ago. It was mostly a case of mislabelling in the form code. If it's still not fixed, then I shake my head.

When was that? I saw nothing like it when I registered my other accounts on the forums like two years ago.

they have graal on facebook and iphone. all other aspects of graal are obsolete because for once money is being made. (Cash Shops)

wish i would have thought of it first >:|

At the very least July 2006 because I know it took a while but I had to have Darlene manually allow my account access to the forums because of it. It locked me out for 24 hours many times when I figured out that the fields were probably in the wrong spot before I gave up and contacted Darlene. I know it persisted for a little while then and heard that it wasn't the first time, later being told by a PWA at the time during a discussion that it was mismatches in the "Please Retype" fields. That leads me to believe it was likely fixed since then, but I shake my head if it's not fixed mostly for the fact that we know there are bugs in heaps of Graal related mediums and they've gone ignored.

In my experience on GK the forums aren't used by much of the playerbase. Important updates are listed on the forums but they spread better by word of mouth and server based news.

I don't really see much use for the forums besides casual conversation and some development stuff (sharing scripts, showing off graphics / levels). I think they're too strictly moderated to allow for most conversations; as a result it seems that the forums simply go unused by most developers and players.