maikrowsoft Posted August 9, 2017 Share Posted August 9, 2017 If you haven't heard, Adobe will be ending support for Flash in 2020. This means at that that point, your browser will cease to support Flash for security reasons (similar to Windows XP). Editorial 791 writes: Quote FLASH ANNOUNCEMENT: Okay saying I got an overwhelming amount of comments about the Flash update is an understatement. SO, understand I say this is the nicest possible way, but guys...CHILL! It's all good in the Neopian hood! That's all I'm gonna say! With love, Scrappy How do you think TNT will handle the phasing out of Flash? Do you think they'll successfully be able to migrate all their Flash games into HTML5 or other standard, or make new refreshed content all-together? A lot of Neopets is based on Flash, and this will be a massive undertaking with a 3 year deadline. I'm not confident they can pull it off, to be honest. Delshnya and acmerasta 2 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
hrtbrk Posted August 9, 2017 Share Posted August 9, 2017 Adobe has been warning of phasing out Flash for a long time just as Jumpstaff have been letting us know they are working on doing the same for years as well. Scrappy seemed confident in her reply to us so I think they've got everything covered more than we know! Scoobert_Doo and Mouseykins 2 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
bluetemplar187 Posted August 9, 2017 Share Posted August 9, 2017 Yeah I was initially VERY disturbed by this news but there's a few important factors to keep in mind. 1. They have approximately 3 years to do so; I get the impression based on cursory Googling that support will end December 31, 2020. 2. Apparently programmers have known about this for a LONG time, especially since Apple hasn't supported Flash in forever. They've probably converted more stuff to say, HTML5 which will seemingly be the new standard than we realize without us even knowing about it. 3. There ARE still things Flash does better/more efficiently than other protocols at this time, but given that Google, Mozilla, Apple, etc. are apparently all aware of this and all on the "team" involved in the transition, I'd imagine tons of people will be hard at work creating protocols that do what Flash did and more this whole time, They probably have been for years. It is an end of an era but the things we need to be concerned about are things that don't have active support/updating (Homestar Runner, the gigantic repository of old Newgrounds content that uses .swf, etc.) That said, there are people hard at work on a lot of that stuff too, and if Adobe is smart, they'll open source the code, and I guarantee you people will have worked out Flash emulation within like, weeks if they do that. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
balloongal247 Posted August 9, 2017 Share Posted August 9, 2017 Yes, I think it's likely that part of the reason there's been so little new content or fixing of non-critical bugs is that 90% of their programming staff is probably dedicated to completely rewriting everything in HTML5 or something. I would hope Adobe doesn't allow imitation flash as the reason it's being discontinued is because it is and always has been horribly insecure and an opening for viruses and exploitation. A less professional attempt at it would be even worse. Delshnya 1 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
acmerasta Posted August 9, 2017 Share Posted August 9, 2017 So... time to make sure and get those flash game avatars down . I still haven't done the others as yet so time to get a move on! I'm glad you guys have so much confidence in TNT and hopefully your confidence will be rewarded. Me, not so much. Too often in the past we've seen them drop the ball so I don't expect a smooth and incident free transition but I do fervently hope that I'm wrong. Of course, if by the reinstatement of the neo-friends thingy on the bottom left of our game screens is any indication, then they've been working on stuff and I'm happy about that. Hopefully when Key Quest returns it's not the buggy mess it was before. Scoobert_Doo 1 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
kayahtik Posted August 9, 2017 Share Posted August 9, 2017 14 minutes ago, acmerasta said: So... time to make sure and get those flash game avatars down . I still haven't done the others as yet so time to get a move on! I was just thinking about this...do we think all flash games will be converted to HTML5, or will they discontinue flash games and replace them with new games originally designed for use with HTML5? i.e.; are all of those flash game avatars about to become retired within the next few years? If so...yikes, I have a lot of work to do! Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
jellysundae Posted August 9, 2017 Share Posted August 9, 2017 8 minutes ago, kayahtik said: are all of those flash game avatars about to become retired within the next few years? I'd really hope they'd be converted to HTML5 solely because of the amount of them, it's too much of a huge chunk of the site/reason that people to play to just lose. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Delshnya Posted August 9, 2017 Share Posted August 9, 2017 As Balloongal said, perhaps they have been working on that and that is why we have not seen so much improvement. I hope they convert all the games... it could be an improvement, there are games that cannot be played, or only a few people can. Other games that I think use shockwave or something like that... exclude people like me that use Linux instead of Windows or Mac, I would like to be able to play those games, and try for some avatars that are out of my reach right now. Also, I lost my hope on KeyQuest being back, but perhaps they have been taking so long because they are already trying to convert it or something (I do not understand about those things). Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
acmerasta Posted August 9, 2017 Share Posted August 9, 2017 I think they'll convert or create new versions of the flash games... and relegate the older ones to the games graveyard. I mean we have Destructo-Match 2 so it might become Destructo-Match 3 right? Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
balloongal247 Posted August 9, 2017 Share Posted August 9, 2017 I'd think that because this is such a huge project, and yes, everyone has known that flash is dying for years, that they've probably already had a team on it for years, which is why Scrappy seemed confident that it was happening. The plots from now on may even be redesign plots that push some of the new parts of the site, as they do have some html5 integrated into the current site. I'm not saying it'll be bug free by any means, they are going to have to completely rewrite the site, and decide whether to just try to make it as similar as possible, or to do things better since they are starting from scratch. If they do push it out piecemeal, they have to have it backwards compatible. There will be bugs. Any time you fix anything in programming, you expose several other bugs. As for the games, I'd think they'll probably copy the popular ones, and do some new ones. I'd think avatar ones would be copied, or that they'd give a good amount of warning, or they'd have a lot of very angry players. KeyQuest probably won't return on the flash-based Neopets, if at all. From what they've said, it was difficult code to port, so they'd want to make it as simple as possible and not have to add layers and complications for dual compatibility which just leaves more places to get buggy. They may well change some of the games a bit to improve them, like Destructo-Match. If they do, some of the avatar requirements might be adjusted as well, as they did for one that was upgraded. I highly doubt they'd get rid of all the games and try to start from scratch. They'd want at least the theme of a lot of them, because that'd be a lot of new things to invent. And a lot of them are common game styles, again like Destructo-Match. I would hope that they would throw a few brand new games in there too though. I'm not sure they'd do the old versions in the games graveyard though. Again, Flash is unsafe and basically won't be allowed to exist. So, anything that currently is in Flash will need to be wiped from existence. Also, that would be a lot of extra stuff to host if they had all the games up in two different formats. They have to pay for the amount of space they use to store the website. Having everything in the games graveyard would be that much less stuff they could have elsewhere. They can do games graveyard now because they haven't updated games a lot, so there aren't many of them. We are talking about a completely new neopets website. jellysundae and hrtbrk 2 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
bluetemplar187 Posted August 10, 2017 Share Posted August 10, 2017 13 hours ago, balloongal247 said: Yes, I think it's likely that part of the reason there's been so little new content or fixing of non-critical bugs is that 90% of their programming staff is probably dedicated to completely rewriting everything in HTML5 or something. I would hope Adobe doesn't allow imitation flash as the reason it's being discontinued is because it is and always has been horribly insecure and an opening for viruses and exploitation. A less professional attempt at it would be even worse. Not to be entirely a contrarian but this is one of those half-truths that gets repeated and repeated until people believe it when it's...mostly not. To be clear, Flash has been an issue a lot, yes. But that's down to the fact that Adobe doesn't care about it and has never cared about it. Adobe got their hands on it in the first place because they bought Macromedia to eliminate competition, not because they wanted to possess Flash and do things with the technology. Flash as a protocol has literally nothing more inherently wrong with it. The problem has been that Adobe doesn't care and only addresses security problems when they're made apparent to the company by other people. So in short yes, Flash has been a problem. But that's largely because Adobe has wanted to wash their hands of it for a LONG time, not as much because there's anything inherently wrong with Flash itself. Furthermore, any Flash emulation would only need to do just that...emulate what Flash did while not actually being Flash. There's literally nothing preventing people from being able to do an efficient, bare-bones Flash emulator add-on that's fully secure other than the fact that the code isn't open source. Sorry, it's just a gigantic pet peeve of mine when people say "Flash is bad" when that's not a truism. What is true is that Flash has essentially been in bad hands for a long time. Those are two extremely different things. jellysundae and acmerasta 2 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
jellysundae Posted August 10, 2017 Share Posted August 10, 2017 4 hours ago, bluetemplar187 said: Sorry, it's just a gigantic pet peeve of mine when people say "Flash is bad" when that's not a truism. What is true is that Flash has essentially been in bad hands for a long time. Those are two extremely different things. So what you're basically saying is, this upheaval Adobe is forcing on the entire world isn't actually necessary and is solely because they've been poor caretakers to poor much-maligned Flash? Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
bluetemplar187 Posted August 11, 2017 Share Posted August 11, 2017 23 hours ago, jellysundae said: So what you're basically saying is, this upheaval Adobe is forcing on the entire world isn't actually necessary and is solely because they've been poor caretakers to poor much-maligned Flash? Might be a bit overly simplistic on my part but largely, yes. You don't have to take my word for it. If you look into the history of Macromedia (the original creators of both Flash and Shockwave), Adobe, Flash, etc. it starts to all fall into place. Adobe never wanted Flash and ACTUALLY, Steve Jobs' oft-cited hatred of Flash wasn't of Flash itself. He said he would allow Apple devices to support Flash if Adobe put in the work to secure it to his satisfaction in a 6 month span, and Adobe basically came back and said "Oops this is hard" and that was that. I'd draw a parallel to American healthcare reform but I don't wanna risk getting a derail going. ^_- The bottom lines are: 1. Flash is often a source of exploits, hacks, and security problems. 2. Flash is not universally but largely being made obsolete by other newer protocols/systems, namely HTML5. For the most part, no one will notice because a lot of current//updated/new content will either have been converted by then or not been made in Flash to begin with. 3. That doesn't change the fact that "Flash is bad" is only a half-truth that became accepted by the tech community because of how often it was parroted, people like Steve Jobs saying so, and Adobe not putting in the effort to prove otherwise. 4. Adobe is largely (potentially anyway) absolutely gutting large sections of an era of the internet by doing this, but there's not really enough reason for most people to care. 5. Things like HTML5 will in all likelihood effectively replace Flash and possibly make things better. I don't want to make it sound like Flash is flawless or that there won't be any way to produce similar or even identical or better content in the future via other methods. That doesn't change the fact that Flash is getting dumped not because of some inherent badness, but because Adobe does not, and has NEVER seen it as worth the effort. Which is fair enough in some ways I suppose, but that doesn't mean that there's not a lot more nuance to how we got here than "Flash bad". I'll use the operating system comparison, since it's a reasonably apt one save for one huge difference which I'll get to, wherein lies the problem/shame in all of this. Windows XP is, at this point, genuinely obsolete and unnecessary. Eventually, Windows 7 will be the same. There is absolutely something to be said for dumping support for old OSes to make way for better, newer ones. The problem with the Forced Flash Phaseout (hello, alliteration!) is that probably 98% of the time or more, any new operating system will have backwards compatibility. It's not as if huge swaths of Windows 7 programs or files will be flat-out inoperable with Windows 10. There are exceptions, of course, but by and large backwards compatibility is absolutely industry standard. The same largely goes for game consoles (which are essentially computers) and where there ISN'T backwards compatibility. there will probably 9 times out of 10 be work done on a functional equivalent of such via emulation. See, for example, XBox 360 games digitally downloaded on the XBox One or the Nintendo Virtual Console. That is literally just an officially released emulator (or in the case of the XB1 and PS4 to PS3 backwards compatibility, a natively built-in emulator into the operating system), wherein it can read either the physical disk or the code of the digital file, say "I know what to do with this". switch into emulation, and function as a previous console. That's also how game emulators and ROMs work on computers. The problem is that as of this moment, NO ONE is doing anything to back-compat or naturally emulate Flash, again probably in large part because Adobe doesn't care enough and no one else has the code. I really can't think of anything this drastic in modern computing history wherein as of this writing, such huge chunks of worldwide-accessible content just flat out won't work anymore with no forward-thinking solution currently in sight. It really is unprecedented. maikrowsoft 1 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
jellysundae Posted August 11, 2017 Share Posted August 11, 2017 1 hour ago, bluetemplar187 said: Windows XP is, at this point, genuinely obsolete and unnecessary. Interesting you saying that. I had a conversation with my mum about the ransomware hacks that happened to the NHS here in the UK recently, and she told me that hospital computer systems run on XP...I found that completely insane and I dunno where she got this information from, but that's what she said. It seems a lot of state-funded (in other words not got anywhere near enough money to run properly) organisations run on woefully out-dated OSes. Maybe after these recent hacks they'll have some leverage to be able to update to something that's actually secure... 1 hour ago, bluetemplar187 said: It really is unprecedented. Isn't that the whole problem in a nutshell? When people can't be shown previous examples and be told "look, this is what happened before when this was done," they struggle to give a damn. A lot struggle to give a damn even when they can be shown, don't they, because humans...it's only when cause and effect impacts directly on them that they finally understand, then they start the struggle of trying to get someone else to care. bluetemplar187 1 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
bluetemplar187 Posted August 11, 2017 Share Posted August 11, 2017 8 minutes ago, jellysundae said: Interesting you saying that. I had a conversation with my mum about the ransomware hacks that happened to the NHS here in the UK recently, and she told me that hospital computer systems run on XP...I found that completely insane and I dunno where she got this information from, but that's what she said. It seems a lot of state-funded (in other words not got anywhere near enough money to run properly) organisations run on woefully out-dated OSes. Maybe after these recent hacks they'll have some leverage to be able to update to something that's actually secure... Isn't that the whole problem in a nutshell? When people can't be shown previous examples and be told "look, this is what happened before when this was done," they struggle to give a damn. A lot struggle to give a damn even when they can be shown, don't they, because humans...it's only when cause and effect impacts directly on them that they finally understand, then they start the struggle of trying to get someone else to care. Yeah the fact that they were running XP is LITERALLY the only reason they were vulnerable. Anything running 7, 8, or 10 (don't recall with regards to Vista, to be honest) could NOT get hit so long as the regular security updates were installed, which happens automatically unless you opt out. And yup, that's more or less it. Also I misspoke, there are emulators that can run .swf files (Flash), problem is they require the person to have the files downloaded, then import them into the emulator, which is both immensely clunky and doesn't work for anything internet-connected, not to mention it requires the individual to either have the .swfs (i.e. they created them) or a way to download them, and either way they need to be stored offline, they won't just work as objects running in a browser anymore. jellysundae 1 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
jellysundae Posted August 11, 2017 Share Posted August 11, 2017 2 hours ago, bluetemplar187 said: (don't recall with regards to Vista, to be honest) My laptop's using Vista, Windows and security things like AVG have just stopped support for that, so that would have been vulnerable too. It still completely blows my mind that ANYONE still uses XP, but when it's the National Health service...words defy me! Private enterprises that are too tight, or too ignorant to upgrade (or too busy spending their profits elsewhere) fair enough, but something that's run by the government... *looks at last 7 words* ... Actually yeah, I'll just shut up, I'm not surprised by this at all. x_x Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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