Together, they represent one of the most extensive rebuilds Tides of War has undergone. The objective has been simple:
For a community that has existed since 1999, that distinction matters. We didn't want to replace TOW with something new and simply put the old name on it. We wanted to take the community, history, forums, accounts, posts, and identity we've accumulated over more than two decades and build a modern Tides of War around them. Today, we'd like to show you some of what we've been building.Modernize Tides of War without erasing Tides of War.
First: What is ToWNet?
You may begin seeing development announcements like this one published under the name ToWNet.
ToWNet is the technical side of Tides of War. It's responsible for the development, coding, maintenance, and technical systems that keep TOW operating. That includes the website and forums as well as the custom systems that connect areas such as Tidal News, the Theaters, Entertainment, Tides Guide, TOW Club, the Archive, and other parts of the community. When you see something "From ToWNet," you're hearing from the people working on the technology behind Tides of War.
More Than a New Coat of Paint
At first glance, the biggest change may appear to be visual. The old forum presentation has been replaced by a new Tides of War design, and nearly every major area of the site has been redesigned. But this project goes considerably deeper than a new theme. phpBB remains at the heart of Tides of War. It continues to manage our members, forums, topics, permissions, private messages, moderation, and more. Rather than throwing that system, and decades of community history away, we've built around it. The result is a custom TOW website connected directly to the community underneath it. One account. One community. One Tides of War.
A New Tides of War Homepage
The homepage has been completely rebuilt. Instead of serving simply as a doorway to the forums, it now provides a living overview of the community. Members and visitors can see Tidal News, recent community activity, the TOW Theaters, important areas of the site, community history, and current statistics from across Tides of War. It's designed to answer a simple question when someone arrives:
What's happening at Tides of War?
And as activity throughout the community changes, the homepage changes with it.
The Five Theaters Return to Center Stage
The original identity of Tides of War was built around its Theaters:
- By Land
- By Sea
- By Air
- By Space
- By Fantasy
A New Tidal News
Tidal News has undergone a major transformation. News no longer has to look like a collection of ordinary forum topics. Tidal News now has its own newsroom-style frontend, with lead stories, dispatches, article imagery, authors, publication dates, individual article pages, and dedicated news sections. Underneath, we're still able to take advantage of TOW's existing accounts, permissions, and community systems. But to the reader, Tidal News now looks and behaves like an actual publication.
The Press Room
We've also built a new Press Room for Tidal News contributors. Authorized writers can use the Press Room to access the areas in which they have permission to publish and create stories for the new Tidal News system. This allows us to give contributors publishing capabilities without requiring them to navigate the administrative side of the website.
The News Media Library
The latest addition to the Press Room is the News Media Library. News contributors can now browse imagery that has already been used in Tidal News and reuse it in another story. So if we have common artwork for TOW Club, a game, an event, or another recurring subject, writers don't have to upload another copy of the same image every time they write about it. It's a small feature on the surface, but it's part of a much larger effort to make publishing on TOW easier.
Entertainment and the YouTube Gallery
We've also begun giving TOW's media content a proper home. The new Entertainment area provides a place for community media outside the traditional forum presentation. One of the first major pieces is the YouTube Gallery. Videos can be presented through a visual gallery and dedicated watch pages rather than requiring members to browse a forum full of source topics. The forum system still exists underneath for management and organization, but members receive an interface designed for actually watching and discovering videos. It's an example of the approach we're taking throughout the new TOW:
Keep the power of the forums underneath, but don't force every kind of content to look like a forum post.
Tides Guide
Forums are excellent for conversation. They're not always the best place for information that needs to remain useful years later. That's where Tides Guide comes in.
Tides Guide is being developed as TOW's permanent reference and information area — a home for guides, policies, community information, historical material, and other resources that shouldn't disappear beneath years of newer forum discussions. As it grows, it will give us a much better way of organizing the accumulated knowledge of the community.
TOW Club
The TOW Club also has a dedicated place within the new site. Club Headquarters, membership information, Treasury, dues information, and Club forums can now be brought together rather than existing as unrelated pages and forum topics. This gives us a foundation for continuing to develop the Club as part of the larger TOW experience.
Opening the Tides of War Archive
This may be one of the most important parts of the project. Tides of War has been around since 1999. That's a lot of history. Over those years, games have come and gone. Communities have formed, flourished, and eventually become quiet. Members have moved on and sometimes returned years later. Much of that history still exists. We don't believe the answer is to delete it simply because it isn't current.
The new Tides of War Archive gives us a way to preserve and present that material as history.
Archived communities from the TOW Theaters, turn-based and board gaming, and other parts of our past can be explored without cluttering the areas where today's communities are active.
Enigma: Rising Tide
That includes a dedicated archive for Enigma: Rising Tide. Tides of War served as the community support platform around Enigma during that chapter of our history, and a substantial amount of material from that community survives in the TOW database. We're preserving it. Not because we expect a twenty-year-old forum to suddenly become active again, but because it is part of the story of Tides of War. The Archive gives us the ability to recognize the difference between old and worthless. They aren't the same thing.
The Forums Have Changed Too
While we've been building all of these new areas, the forums themselves have undergone extensive modernization. Forum indexes, topic lists, individual discussions, posting screens, profiles, private messages, navigation, member controls, and moderation interfaces have all received attention. The objective isn't to hide phpBB. It's to make phpBB feel like it belongs to Tides of War. That work has occasionally meant rediscovering just how many features a mature forum system has accumulated over the years. As we've replaced older templates, we've also been identifying functionality that needs to be restored or better integrated into the new design. The result is an interface that is increasingly TOW from top to bottom while retaining the capabilities of the forum platform underneath it.
Private Messages and Member Profiles
Private Messages have received a particularly extensive overhaul. The inbox, outbox, message reader, composer, recipient controls, replies, forwards, and conversation history have all been brought into the current TOW interface. Profiles and other member-facing areas have received similar treatment. These may not be headline features, but they're important. A modern homepage doesn't mean much if clicking into the rest of the community suddenly transports you back twenty years.
Contact TOW
We've also built a new way for members and visitors to contact the Tides of War staff. Contact TOW allows someone to submit a request directly through the website. Staff can then handle that request privately through our new Request Desk. Guests don't need to create a TOW account simply to continue a support conversation. They can be given secure access to their request and receive a notification when staff responds. Registered members can similarly keep their conversations connected to their TOW account. The idea is simple: If someone needs help from Tides of War, there should be an obvious way to ask for it.
Better Sharing and Discovery
We've also been improving something that's largely invisible until you leave the site. Pages throughout TOW now provide considerably better information to search engines and social networks. Tidal News stories can identify their title, description, image, author, publication date, and permanent address. Forums and topics can provide more useful information about their contents. We've added support for modern sharing metadata, structured information, canonical addresses, a sitemap, and other systems that help outside services understand what they're looking at. In practical terms, sharing a TOW article or discovering Tides of War through a search engine should increasingly lead to something that properly represents the community.
Why Keep phpBB?
During a project like this, an obvious question is: Why not just start over? Because starting over would have been easy. Preserving Tides of War is harder. We have decades of posts. Thousands of topics. Thousands of registered accounts. Old communities. News. Conversations. Friendships. Projects. Arguments. Jokes that probably made more sense in 2004. And an enormous amount of material that collectively tells the story of this community. We could have installed a new platform, created an empty database, and announced a "new Tides of War." But it wouldn't really have been Tides of War. Instead, we've chosen to do the more difficult thing:
More Is ComingBuild the future around the history we already have.
We're not finished. There are still areas to modernize, features to build, old material to organize, and undoubtedly bugs hiding in places we haven't visited yet. That's normal for something this large. What has changed is the foundation we have to build upon. TOW is increasingly becoming a unified community platform rather than a collection of disconnected pages surrounding a forum. And now that much of that foundation exists, we can spend more time asking the interesting question:
What should we build next?
Built for the Future. Rooted in Our History.
Tides of War has survived several generations of the Internet. The web of 1999 bears very little resemblance to the web of 2026. But the reason TOW existed in the first place hasn't really changed. It was a place for people who shared interests to build communities together. Technology is simply the structure that allows that to happen. That's what ToWNet has been working to rebuild. Not a replacement for the old Tides of War. Not a nostalgic museum frozen in time. A living Tides of War that remembers where it came from and has somewhere to go next.
— ToWNetPreserving our history.
Building our future. Together since 1999.
The technical team behind Tides of War
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