Hey Andy,

We removed them because we feel that the syntax introduced in FactoryGirl 2
is the ideal solution; it requires no monkey-patching and works with all
ORMs, not just ActiveRecord. There will be no replacement.

We deprecated the alternate syntaxes in 3.2.0 so there would've been a lot
of output when running tests warning you that the syntax was removed. Since
we're following SemVer, we removed the syntax completely in 4.0. This
announcement was made when I released FG 3.2 during RailsConf:
http://robots.thoughtbot.com/post/21719164760/factorygirl-3-2-so-awes....
We also have a NEWS file (
https://github.com/thoughtbot/factory_girl/blob/master/NEWS) that itemizes
big changes to the codebase, where it was listed as well.

If you were using RSpec's described_class to piggyback off of the make
syntax, we've changed build/create/build_stubbed/attributes_for to accept a
class in addition to symbols to refer to the factory - this was done
specifically to help during the removal of the alternate syntaxes:
https://github.com/thoughtbot/factory_girl/commit/f83c27e15d00beff864....
This feature was released in 3.4.0, so if you want to rollback to the
latest 3.x (3.6.1), you should be all set to convert these over gradually
until you're ready to upgrade to 4.0.

Hopefully I covered everything; let me know if you have any more upgrade
questions.

Best of luck,
- Josh