Forum Arcades

[Cedric]

A fun and interactive aspect of forums: arcade plugins! Arcade plugins can add a new dimension of entertainment and engagement to your forum by providing members with games and activities to enjoy.

So, what are some of the best practices for using arcade plugins in your forum? Sadly XenForo does not have an arcade available.

 

[Strawberry]

I have never been a fan of the arcade plugins, I am surprised they are still around!

 

[Arantor]

Part of the problem is the death of Flash - a lot of games weren't rewritten in the post-Flash era (though there are Flash emulators coming along that can help), but also a lot of the games were trivially easy to fake-submit scores, making any scoring meaningless.

Plus, I suppose, the mobile phone app stores all being so easy to reach that the ubiquity of gaming is easier than ever to have at hand.

I suspect though that the reason XF does not have an arcade is simply its timing: it came along when Flash was already on the downturn after the Jobs letter to Adobe and with the perceived lack of demand, no arcade came along - so no market to keep it going.

 

[Cory]

I never really played many arcade games on forums, I've always enjoyed core gaming systems a lot more. I used to play arcade games all the time when they first started coming into action back in my teenage days, but as time went on, better systems and higher-quality games came along.

 

[Aaron]

phpBB & MyBB don't have up to date arcades that work anymore

 

[Kale]

I used them but wasn't something I had expected on a forum back then.

 

[Shortie]

I remember back when my older general discussion forum was around, I used to have an arcade on there when it was available and my members loved to be able to try and beat each other's scores. We would do weekly tournaments for small incentives with the arcade. It was a lot of fun. It's a shame I don't think it's available anymore or if it is then the games are not as easy to come by now.

 

[Altair]

I liked forums that had a forum arcade, and I played a lot of arcade games on the forums. A flashback to the past. Sadly with the death of flash forums software don't arcades plugin anymore .

 

[otis booard]

webs.com used to have arcade widgets too, I really enjoyed them

 

[Moonface]

I've never used an arcade on my boards, and rarely used it on boards that did have it. It was okay, but generally felt limiting compared to just freely putting up a thread challenging people to get a high score on a chosen game from anywhere on the internet.

 

[Heatman]

I liked forums that had a forum arcade, and I played a lot of arcade games on the forums. A flashback to the past. Sadly with the death of flash forums software don't arcades plugin anymore .

It used to make a lot of sense back in the days with some forums. I really had a good time with playing some of the games available on it. Unfortunately, with Xenforo leading the path in forum softwares used mostly by all forums now, those arcades plugin doesn't have much value to it. I wouldn't mind playing some of those forum games again today.

 

[Oblivion Knight]

Those who used v3arcade will no doubt be familiar with my name, though I suspect the majority will have used ibProArcade - because it had a far greater feature list out of the box, as well as a lot more compatible games.

Unfortunately a lot of damage was done in the early days of such scripts, where games would be decompiled and often a far inferior and buggy version would be produced and uploaded to several forums, not too dissimilar to the behaviour of a virus. Such tools were eventually developed much further and you often couldn't tell an edited version apart from the original, but by then it was too late..

I'm kinda glad they're now a dying breed.

 

[Reverie]

I used them on some forums where it was embedded and it became more of a competition as well within a topic. "Post your score in xyz game" it was fun! Interactive entertainment also within the forum!

 

[Ravenfreak]

I never really used arcades on forums. I think there was one forum I used it for just a little bit, but I mainly just spent my time posting on the forums. I can see that it was a good feature when forums were still brand new and many people used them, but as time went on I just didn't see them being as popular.