Forum Renovation

[jhonenfreak]

This subject seems so popular lately, it needs it's own thread. What does everyone suggest be done to the forums to keep it orderly and running smoothly?
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[Stratadrake]

Prepare to be inundated . . . maybe. ;)

1 - Better description for the General Discussion subforum? Maybe something like "General discussion for anything that does not fit in the below categories" -- obviously not the best description for it but you get the idea, not just about ANYTHING under the sun....

2 - Possible merging of the Art Help and Art Tips/Suggestions/Tutorials subforums. The difference between the two seems lost on newbies. Maybe make the Tips/Tutorials forum a subforum of Art Help?

3 - Possible reorganization of the Requests/Commissions subforum. Maybe a subforum for commissions? And maybe a subforum for people to post their "Give me requests!" type threads in (maybe called "Artists For Hire" or something ). If I have two pet peeves about that forum (which I do ), number 1 is the people who make "Taking requests!" threads without bothering in the slightest to explore the subforum themselves for unfilled requests, and number 2 is the people who post "I have a request!" threads without putting any clue in the topic title for what the request is actually about.

4 - Do you think the Fanfiction subforum can be part of the main Art Dicsussion category instead of Misc, or should it be left as is?
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[Stratadrake]

*bump* What, am I again the only one with suggestions?

-- I notice that the forums, by default, display topics only from the past 30 days. Since the topics listings are always split into pages every 20-40 topics or so, I have to wonder if that's necessary, or if the default setting can be all topics period. At the very least, shouldn't the Announcements forum default to for all topics and not just the last 30 days worth?

-- I sometimes miss the list of online forum members and forum stats that you usually see displayed at the bottom, after the forum listings.

-- Every now and then some member uploads a full-size (800x600 or larger) drawing for use as an avvie, when avvies are limited to 125x125 pixels in size. Isn't that a bit ridiculous?

-- Again, the maximum filesize for attachments could probably be lower, like 80~100kb or so, as an encouragement for members to keep their attachments of reasonable size.
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[Lasher]

No but right now i don't think i should give any of my ideas out. They're to controversial and disliked. *shrugs* But in the meantime, may i make the suggestion of someone moving this to the site dicussion board? It would be better placed there i think.

[DragonicFlames]

For the rp boards, maybe you could have subforums and not jump everything into one forum. One for fanasty/Midevil Times, Scifi, Game Similuations, TV Show Similations And the orginal can be the misc. But I am sure all of the rp, or atleast most of them, should fit under one of those Subforums.

Also, if you delete the older topics more, then we wouldn't have so much junk on there. Or you could delete the topics that don't have any replies to, besides the person who opened the topic after a month or a month and a half, because there just seems to be a lot of them around but no one is answering them. It rather crowds up the rp.

For the people who have deleted their s/ns maybe you could delete all the topics that they started (I am not sure if your doing this or not, so I thought i would put this up here, if ya are, Carry on. ^^ )

On the Contest Board, after the contest is closed after like a month or two, delete them off. I don't think we should have the "old contest" thing we have up there. I think that we should get rid of all the old ones. For the ones that have been just hanging, maybe you could e-mail the owner of the chat and tell them that they have to close their contest or have it to be deleted. because I think there are a lot of contests hanging out. And if your too lazy to finished up your contest then it's your fault for having it deleted, and all those people who entered your contest should be angry at you, for your laziness.

On the Anime/Manga board, after a month can ya delete all the fangirly topics, because everyone gets tired of looking at them. I am sure lots of people ( S.U.F.F.E.R. ) are tired of looking at old Fangirl post that have been haunting the board and some random person brings them back up. That's probably what pisses a lot of people off.

I think you should have a subforum of Anime/manga that deals with anime and manga that are yaoi or yuri or just plain hentia, 'cause if we just give them some where to go chat about that junk, they'll leave the regular board alone and give us some room to talk about manga and our questions about it.

As per the polls, Can't we have a limit on how many choices there are. If there is already a limit, then can we have a stricter limit. Just in one of those post I saw atleast 15 different choices not to mention the choices that said, "all of the above" and " Other". I think it should be limited to atleast 7 choices. That way we can cut down on the space one forum takes up on the computer screen.

As for the Avvies, I think we should Have a limit for the amount of times a person changes his/her avvie a week. because some us are avvie happy and change it every day we are on.

I think we should get rid of the personal photo things, when you look up the profile of the person on the board. It doesn't really have much of a purpose to some people. In fact I have an anime picture up there, because i didn't want it to "naked" so to speak, and they probably take up a lot of room. I am not sure if you can adjust that feature, but i thought that might help.

If I think of anything else I'll come back.
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[Stratadrake]

Actually, when it comes to avvies I'm in favor of a set limit to rule out full-sized images. 50kb should work for most static avvies; unfortunately that would rule out many animated avvies....

Also, maybe this is better, that any avvie with dimensions over the current limit should be [b]refused[/b], not just scaled down to that size. I've seen it done on other boards -- yes, it's an annoyance to see like a 128x128 avvie refused because the limit is 125x125 (maybe you could set it so that the size limit is 125x125 but only stuff larger than 200x200 gets refused? That way there's some leeway as to how big it must be)

I'm also in favor of a mandatory minimum post count before members are able to create new [i]topics[/i]. Ideally the required minimum could vary depending on which board it is and how much it's abused by n00bish topics, like giving the Help forum no such requirement (after all, if there's a site-related problem, you should be able to report it regardless), but make it a decent value like 10 because some people just don't stay around very long.

Then it'd be kinda like the auto-approval feature. You need to prove yourself in order to get auto-approval, so in the forums, you would need to prove yourself before you can be trusted with making new and contributing topics.

And yes it is a rather debatable idea... like the Help forum shouldn't have that requirement (if possible) since when there's a problem there should be nothing stopping one from reporting it and seeking help... but the other forums (particularly Anime/Manga, where it seems like every 2 out of 3 new topics are killed because they're stuff that's been done before) could have it as a rule.

As for the polls. IMHO, the limit on poll choices should never be less than 10 poll options. I like having a wide limit on how many choices we can have, but seriously, 20 or 30 options is more than enough for most polls, let alone 50 or the 100 that it currently is.
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[UltimaMewtwo]

Set different mods to watch threads. Maybe in groups. Something like that.
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[cstdenis]

[quote]For the people who have deleted their s/ns maybe you could delete all the topics that they started (I am not sure if your doing this or not, so I thought i would put this up here, if ya are, Carry on. ^^ )[/quote]
That would just cause problems.

[quote]On the Contest Board, after the contest is closed after like a month or two, delete them off. I don't think we should have the "old contest" thing we have up there. I think that we should get rid of all the old ones. For the ones that have been just hanging, maybe you could e-mail the owner of the chat and tell them that they have to close their contest or have it to be deleted. because I think there are a lot of contests hanging out. And if your too lazy to finished up your contest then it's your fault for having it deleted, and all those people who entered your contest should be angry at you, for your laziness. [/quote]
nothing wrong with archiving the old contests, it just isn't getting done very reliabily. Maybe the RP boards need a dedicated mod.

[quote]On the Anime/Manga board, after a month can ya delete all the fangirly topics, because everyone gets tired of looking at them.[/quote]
Then it would be almost empty <_<. As I have said, there is little more than fangirly topics under there.

[quote]As per the polls, Can't we have a limit on how many choices there are. If there is already a limit, then can we have a stricter limit.[/quote]
I think the limit is set at like 100. I like lots of choices.
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[Jailcrow_of_Mandos]

I'm trying to help the RPG section without taking control of it by using a contest because I'm not really well-known here and wouldn't like to start some kind of crazy power struggle. I don't think the contest will really work, though, because these people aren't too keen toward work... even though it's only like 5 pages tops on Microsoft Word... anyways ^_^

Pretty much, I've heard some people would like to kick out the RPG section altogether if RPGs wouldn't then start crowding other sections of the board. Like Strata was saying on the newbies making new topics, maybe it would help to have people meet ceterain requirements before making an RPG.

Makign them fill out some kind of short information form on what their RPG is going to be about, etc, etc- why it's different from the 20 other Harry Potter RPGs so it should be allowed. I understand an argument there would probably be that no one would want to read these things, but I would. I love RPGs and take them very seriously, and I'd be glad to help get the RPG section a better reputation than the filth it is now :/

This would also help eliminate people who start an RPG without giving the proper information on it for people to even join or that are repeating some other RPG. The form could even be built in if possible- like the "Topic Title", "Topic Description" boxes. Make them required fields for other info on the RPG. Maybe that's a bit too much work for things that will probably be over looked unless an actual person is in charge of them.

Just shooting out ideas

[ragingflea002]

I've been liking the "Fast Reply" ability.
Signatures are looking better. The conduct of a few members, whom Lasher is watching, is more noticable.
Getting rid of the RPG section is a bad idea. It's as bad of an idea as deleting the Anime/Manga section. You'd have people RPing in Unmoderated and Music. Spam would be the only other place to go, but then we'd simply be allowed to Spam the roleplays.
I've looked in the RP section, however, and the number of similar plays are astounding. A seperate mod(or just having a current mod) moderate that section primarily could help.
But the one thing I see a lot of is a good bit of newbies just posting wherever, whenever. I don't see a direct way to stop that, mainly because the member title will always be member, except for the certified n00bs and the SH. You can designate a forum for them UNLESS they are certified n00bs, and they're already under surveilance, by independant groups, such as S.U.F.F.E.R. and the Mods.
A Newbie Forum would probably be a waste of time because they might just ignore it, but it could be worth a try for a week or two. Make Strata's Newbie Commandments a pinned topic and see if any Newbie's reply positively.
Again, it would most likely be a short-lived forum, but a try is a try.
I think Strata's idea for a minimum post count is excellent. It would give a chance for SH, or inactive SH, like myself, to monitor the behavior of Newbies. They pop up everywhere, so they're hard to miss, the immature ones, at least. Then in the SH forum, we can take note in the Black List for the Forums or something.
Denis is right about the fangirls. They're adding on to quite a bit of the main site and the forums. Still, these forums are a privelage. Too many "HE'S SO CCUUUUTE!!!!" threads aren't really productive.
There are some cool ideas here.


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[DragonicFlames]

I agree, there needs to be a mod or someone down there in the rping sections. I mean, it's getting pretty annoying, I don't think anyone is really reading the rules (for the expection of me.. Cause I am weird like that. ) to the rps.


Personally, everyone down there is basicly a newbie to rping. They do name posting, Godmoding, moding in general, Powerplaying, just about everything that is wrong to the idea of roleplaying, Spelling in the computerized way ( ie WAZ UP? How R U? ) it's scareing the Beanubis out of me. I even tried out their way of name posting. It is just stupid.

Joe: wow I am talking..

How weird is that, you don't see in novels that. And that is a basic of type roleplaying. You must act as if your are telling a story. (Based off of D&D basicly) And the plots are non existant! There is not substance. And the anpu awful ways of... ::shutter:: character ploting. Everyone is complaining about the mary-sues in fanafiction, you should try the rping boards. --; Well it might not be as bad as some of the other places with all the mary-sues, but with the DESPIES! I feel as though I should SHOOT myself so that I won't suffer much pain of reading all the crap about how no one likes them in the rping boards. There charries have about the personality of a stick. What happened to thinking about what you rp?!


( Sorry for the rant.. xX; But I think all of that need to be addressed and said, 'cause denis, I think you're losing a lot of people who might like to come onto your forums, because of the poor rping boards.) I also think that if we get a mod down there, he or she should have the power to delete topics that are just repeating each other and when people complain, they simply point out the rules that clearly state not to make similiar topics.

I guess I spend too much time rping in the aol chats. Anyway.. bye, I think I should let the other smarter people handle this. --;
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[Stratadrake]

* Although this doesn't pertain to the forum [i]specifically[/i], I think there should be a limit to how long a username can be. 20 letters long should be enough for most people, and besides, those who have longer usernames, we tend to just abbreviate them anyway....

(Random thought of the day: You can't tell a book by its cover, you can usually tell a fangirl by their username)

* Maybe put a little note at the top of the Requests/Commissions forum saying "Please put your requests in their own thread. If you are taking requests, please browse through the existing threads in this forum to see if you can fill any of those before creating a thread for requests."

* It seems like a bunch of newbies lately don't understand what the Art Help/Technical forum is for, they're posting threads that should properly belong in Site Related/Help. Think it should be called "Technical Art Discussion" for clarity? And maybe revise the mini description, perhaps "For discussion about materials, media, implementation, technique, etc."

* SPELL CHECK. Okay so it's not [i]that[/i] big of an issue, but still, there are a few misspellings here and there in subforum names, descriptions, and notes that should be sorted out, like "regurarily" in the Announcements forum :huh: (should be "regularly")
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[Stratadrake]

Just a random bump for this topic. Firstly, the good things:

- The note at the top of the Tips/Suggestions/Tutorials section, and on top of the Fanfiction section to make it clear what those sections are intended for.

Then, I'd bump in a suggestion or two, but it turns out that one of them I've already said before:

[quote]2 - Possible merging of the Art Help and Art Tips/Suggestions/Tutorials subforums. The difference between the two seems lost on newbies. Maybe make the Tips/Tutorials forum a subforum of Art Help?[/quote]

Even with the note at the top, newbies are still confusing Tips/Suggestions/Tutorials with Art Help. (This is in part because of bumping existing threads that should rightly be moved into Art Help) It's hard to say exactly who falls where but it feels like for every newbie that asks for tips in Art Help, there's another asking for tips in Tips/Suggestions/Tutorials. Tips/Suggestions/Tutorials [i]could[/i] work better as a subforum inside of Art Help -- it would still be separate and distinct from Art Help, but since only Art Help would show on the main subforums listing, newbies wouldn't be getting confused about which one's which, and they'd end up asking for art-related help and suggestions in the correct forum, instead of the wrong one.

... And the other idea is the one Genkai made his new thread about. "Newbie Forum", anyone?
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