It's kinda difficult to use 99% of the historical threads, because the Smurfy links are now broken. I understand that whatever is done to fix this (either updating links or just cleaning up the Smurfy posts) would be a massive undertaking. But I do feel that it's almost necessary for the build forums to be fully functional again.
In order to update links, we'd have to rebuild every mech in MechDB which just isn't feasible, especially since the details of the Smurfy builds are gone. I don't think deleting the posts is a good idea because a lot of information is still there, including discussion. A lot of it isn't relevant to the current game environment but I like that the history is still there
I agree, but maybe we could add an archive section or something. Simply moving all posts that were made before MechDB went live to the archive would clean up 90% of it.
Thanks for the suggestion. As you and Shock pointed out, porting builds isn't feasible. As for an archived section, that would probably empty out many of the classic mechs, so at least having a record (by the page title, even if the discussion/smurfy link are deprecated) would be preferable over clearing it out I think. I agree that the old results are difficult to use and we could use better functionality. The past years have been 'maintenance mode', but I've already been looking into some ways to restore mech cards that do not rely on embeds from Smurfy or MechDB (2 is not supporting them). Maybe we can make some other improvements too.
I've been trying to use this site recently, but there's just not enough information in 99% of the builds. There's lots of detail that was in the link that is missing from the title, and usually not referenced. Things such as: Armor quantity and placement Ammo quantity and placement Heat sink quantity and placement Placement of weapons (i.e. all torso, all arm, all left, all right, more balanced) What's worse, variants and other suggestions are not part of the thread title. Also, many builds are not as optimized with updates to ammo quirks and skills, so often the discussion from a few years ago of, "4 tons of ammo isn't enough, you need at least 5" is not great advice. Quite often I'll have an idea for a build, not really be able to make it work. I'll come here and see a 4- or 5-star rated build that has the same weapon layout as I was planning, but I can't see what they did to make it fit. Just makes me not want to use the site.
All you can do is try to sus it out. It's sad that Smurfy's gone, but there's not much the folks running the site can do. It'd be a labour of love, I think, to recreate the mechs that have solid info on how the build was set up, as well as to do 'best guesses' for the ones where skill and quirk changes make is difficult to recreate the build perfectly.
