Site Changes & Additions - User Input Wanted!

[Flagg]

I would like to build this site with user input. Unlike the old EC, where the lack of administration meant that changes were non-existant, I'd like to be able to customize the site to fit what the users want.


One of the unique points of the old EC was it's complete lack of censorship. That shall remain, and is non-negotiable. However, if someone starts posting obvious spam on the forums, I will ban them at my discretion.


Aside from that policy, everything else is fairly negotiable. Please use this thread to suggest additions or changes to the site.


Here are a few points I'd like answered:


* Site Name: I chose "Exalted Compendium Redux" for the time being, because that's what this site aims to be. Does anyone have thoughts on this? If this takes off, I will most likely register a new domain for the site (something.com); a name needs to be settled on for that as well.


* Forum Names: Do we want to return to the old EC names, such as "Creation", "Elsewhere", etc? For now I've used fairly starightforward tags for the forums, but I'd like to change them.


* Submissions/Rating System: I know a lot of people want this. The phpBB software I'm using right now is MUCH more feature-packed and robust than the old Yoshi-code of the EC, but it's still just forum software. PHP is not my forte, but I'm a quick study and willing to learn. If anyone has any ideas or expertise in this regard, let me know. In the meantime, a forum will be created to post homebrew stuff.


* PHP Tweaks: One of the advantages of the phpBB forum software is that it's very customizable. Do we want to return to having customizable interfaces like the old EC? It can be done.


* Old EC Content: The EC was, in all honesty, a fairly weak, out of date site, technologically. It's main strength was YEARS of submissions, and forum archives. From the looks of things, that data no longer exists on the host server. There's been mention of http://archive.org, but I know little about it. Does anyone have ideas about how we might retreive some of the old content?


* Forum Rankings: I think these are fairly trivial, but fun. Rather than have a separate, byzantine system of rankings depending on which forum is posted on, I propose we have a single set of ranks, something like:

• Celestial Incarna - Admins
  Celestial Gods - 1000+ posts
  Terrestrial Gods - 500+ posts
  Little Gods - 250+ posts
  Least Gods - < 250 posts

Ideas?


-S

 

[Ewe]

Hihi ! and um some ideas well one anyway.


Hihi im kinda newish to forums i browsed them for a long time but ive never acctually felt the drive to post or if i did i soon persauded myself not to. Anyway....Ideas.


Well the old place i liked but i thought it was a little hard to navigate, the idea that the sections where split into the caste types was kinda neat but it also somtimes left you switching between them wondering where the content you wanted was. I think it would be much nicer if everything was more basicly orgnised in one place just under sections that where easy to recognise. Anyway thats not my idea of what would be great just some input on how the other site seamed to me.


So i think it be nice if the new site had a dice roller for Exalted and maybe some other content like name genrators and such. There are ones out there on the net. At least they where until what seams a great purge of Exalted content has been unleashed upon the web.


So i think a dice roller would be nice, and maybe some facilitys for online games. ops:

 

[Flagg]

Re: Hihi ! and um some ideas well one anyway.

I think it would be much nicer if everything was more basicly orgnised in one place just under sections that where easy to recognise. Anyway thats not my idea of what would be great just some input on how the other site seamed to me.

I agree. To an extent the old EC was somewhat counter-intuitive. I think part of it was the fact that the main page was extremely busy, and the other part was due to clunky broken english.


That's easy enough to remedy. When I have a main page up (of which these forums will only be one section), I'll try to make everything pretty basic.

So i think it be nice if the new site had a dice roller for Exalted and maybe some other content like name genrators and such.

There are plenty of places that have what you've mentioned. I'll probably have a links page set up for that kind of stuff.

So i think a dice roller would be nice, and maybe some facilitys for online games.

As far as online games go, I have an IRC (chat) server already running on the same server that hosts this site. I'm going to look into seeing if there's some kind of embedded java client that would let you access it directly from this page.


Thankls for your input..


-S

 

[Ewe]

There used to be a lot of dice rollers true, but recently they all seamed to have vanished of the face of the internet. But having them on a links page would be good i guess. Still it would be nicer to have an Exalted site that had everything you needed in one place and links.


On the topic of Java console things, i know a friend of mine who is working on her own chat console because she hate digi chats. She does not acctually know what she is going to do with it however once she has made it.


Another nice feature you could have on the site is a section that had regular ideas/storylines/minor plots/places of intreast/etc. Its always handy to have access to that kind of information if your a storyteller whos rushed to come up with somthing and need inspiration.


It would be nice to see a section with storys both serious and humouros (Its nice to see a bit of both), i particulary enjoyed the stories by Disolvergirl on the whitewolf forums about the Maidens. They where very cute and funny and they kept me entertained and sparked my imagination imagining all kinds of other funny situations.

 

[henryjulian]

New submissions section


To tell you the truth..... the red and black hurts my head.


--


A submissions section should be a must. I have tons of artifacts and characters of both mine and my groups creation from our years of playing Exalted.


I can dig some up when I have the time. If we all do the same it should give ECR a decent base of fan submissions to grow from.


What do you think?

 

[Flagg]

Re: New submissions section

To tell you the truth..... the red and black hurts my head.

You can change your interface in the profile settings. So far, there's only this one and the phpBB default. I'll add more soon enough.

A submissions section should be a must. I have tons of artifacts and characters of both mine and my groups creation from our years of playing Exalted.
I can dig some up when I have the time. If we all do the same it should give ECR a decent base of fan submissions to grow from.


What do you think?

Sounds great to me. Hopefully we can get some help to set up a submission system soon enough.


-S

 

[Joseph]

* Site Name: I chose "Exalted Compendium Redux" for the time being, because that's what this site aims to be. Does anyone have thoughts on this? If this takes off, I will most likely register a new domain for the site (something.com); a name needs to be settled on for that as well.

King Steve's Kick Ass Exalted Site?

* Forum Names: Do we want to return to the old EC names, such as "Creation", "Elsewhere", etc? For now I've used fairly starightforward tags for the forums, but I'd like to change them.

Only partly. The old ones were okay, but some of the divisions were almost worthless in any meaningful sense, and many of the forums really didn't see all that much action overall. Add that this forum will, for a long time, probably be smaller and one can see that given the old divisions, many of the older forums would get almost no attention on this new forum.


Dividing the forum up into much broader categories would probably be wiser, so each forum sees its fair share of activity without spreading things out to a needless degree. Maybe divisions along the lines of actual gaming topics rather than the book breakdowns. "Character Development Help," "Setting and Theme," "Mechanics," and "Plotline Development Help," would be a few examples of the categories in such a breakdown. They could still have Exalt-themed names, they'd just have what they actually were in smaller print beneath or something. Maybe like "Well of Souls" for Character Development discussion, "Loom of Fate" for Mechanics discussion, "Yu Shan" for Plotline Development, etc.

* Submissions/Rating System: I know a lot of people want this. The phpBB software I'm using right now is MUCH more feature-packed and robust than the old Yoshi-code of the EC, but it's still just forum software. PHP is not my forte, but I'm a quick study and willing to learn. If anyone has any ideas or expertise in this regard, let me know. In the meantime, a forum will be created to post homebrew stuff.

Submissions are important, but I think the old rating system was pretty much worthless and arbitrary (by that I mean the dots system). Maybe just a system for submitting and editting contributions, and then a way to post suggestions beneath those contributions. In essence, like what we DID have with the rating system, but without the pointless dot bullshit; criticisms would exist solely to help improve submissions.

* PHP Tweaks: One of the advantages of the phpBB forum software is that it's very customizable. Do we want to return to having customizable interfaces like the old EC? It can be done.

I thought they were a waste of time personally. If you plan on exerting some artistic creativity with the site, though, the couldn't hurt. I always used Spirit Interface myself.

* Old EC Content: The EC was, in all honesty, a fairly weak, out of date site, technologically. It's main strength was YEARS of submissions, and forum archives. From the looks of things, that data no longer exists on the host server. There's been mention of http://archive.org, but I know little about it. Does anyone have ideas about how we might retreive some of the old content?

That archive site does not have the information we need, Haku checked it out. I have no good suggestions, other than some of us working to put out some new stuff. A LOT of the stuff on the Compendium WAS useless backlog after all, it wouldn't be hard to get back a good level of QUALITY submissions, without trying to recover all the shit like "Golden Essence Bazooka" and "Super Solar."

* Forum Rankings: I think these are fairly trivial, but fun. Rather than have a separate, byzantine system of rankings depending on which forum is posted on, I propose we have a single set of ranks, something like:

• Celestial Incarna - Admins
  Celestial Gods - 1000+ posts
  Terrestrial Gods - 500+ posts
  Little Gods - 250+ posts
  Least Gods - < 250 posts

Ideas?

Nocturnis.net has a system with rankings that I sort of like. It IS a set of heirarchical ranks like the Compendium had, but rather than which list you went up in being determined by the forums you posted in, you got to pick. So you can choosen between a Demon Rank, a Vampire Rank, a Dark Ages: Fae rank, etc. That seems like the most fun way to handle it if it can be accommodated, but if it's a huge amount of work it's pretty trivial and eays to pass on.

 

[Haku1]

Okay for 'submissions', we might want to split them up for now... say...


Characters + Story


Artifacts


Charms


Spells


Misc.


That way, it'll be more organized. Yes?

 

[Flagg]

King Steve's Kick Ass Exalted Site?

Done and done. Thanks Joe.

Dividing the forum up into much broader categories would probably be wiser, so each forum sees its fair share of activity without spreading things out to a needless degree. Maybe divisions along the lines of actual gaming topics rather than the book breakdowns. "Character Development Help," "Setting and Theme," "Mechanics," and "Plotline Development Help," would be a few examples of the categories in such a breakdown. They could still have Exalt-themed names, they'd just have what they actually were in smaller print beneath or something. Maybe like "Well of Souls" for Character Development discussion, "Loom of Fate" for Mechanics discussion, "Yu Shan" for Plotline Development, etc.

That's an excellent idea. That will be the next thing I change, unless someone's got a better suggestion.

Submissions are important, but I think the old rating system was pretty much worthless and arbitrary (by that I mean the dots system). Maybe just a system for submitting and editting contributions, and then a way to post suggestions beneath those contributions. In essence, like what we DID have with the rating system, but without the pointless dot bullshit; criticisms would exist solely to help improve submissions.

For now, it'll have to be forum based... but perhaps I can have THOSE forums moderated, to weed out the truly heinous.

Nocturnis.net has a system with rankings that I sort of like. It IS a set of heirarchical ranks like the Compendium had, but rather than which list you went up in being determined by the forums you posted in, you got to pick. So you can choosen between a Demon Rank, a Vampire Rank, a Dark Ages: Fae rank, etc. That seems like the most fun way to handle it if it can be accommodated, but if it's a huge amount of work it's pretty trivial and eays to pass on.

I'll play with this software and see what it can accomodate.


Thanks for the ideas.


-S

 

[Flagg]

Okay for 'submissions', we might want to split them up for now... say...

Also a good idea. Expect to see something later tonight.


-S

 

[wordman]

* Site Name

patternspider.com


loomoffate.com


castemark.com


deliberative.com

* Forum Names: Do we want to return to the old EC names, such as "Creation", "Elsewhere", etc?

Don’t really care about the forums much. Hardly used them on EC. The names you have now seem OK to me.

* Submissions/Rating System

I have a lot more to say on this. I will probably start another thread.

* PHP Tweaks

I was going to say that I don’t care about this, but wasted almost no time switching away from the hideous, unreadable black and red default scheme. There’s no reason to turn this off, I suppose.

* Old EC Content:

I looked more at the wayback machine. It appears that it will not be of much use, because EC was mostly dynamic content.

* Forum Rankings:

Don’t care. At all.

 

[Spook]

is there any way to make the Black Spiral bar smaller or soemhting, I forsee it getting annoying to shrink everytime i load the site.

 

[Flagg]

As I mentioned in the system announcement, it's a very temporary feature. I just wanted a quick and dirty way to get the copyright issue covered.


It will be replaced with something more palatable soon.


Thanks for your patience.


-S

 

[wordman]

It will be replaced with something more palatable soon.

One vote to have the "something more palatable" avoid using frames entirely.

 

[Spook]

As I mentioned in the system announcement, it's a very temporary feature. I just wanted a quick and dirty way to get the copyright issue covered.

you see, thats what i get for not reading all the threads.

 

[Persell]

Something pointless but cute: When we have a little bit more code lying around the palce, we could have favourite characters, charms and artefacts marked on our profile. It would give the new kids somewhere to look.


Almost like a "Favourite SuicideGirls" bar... (did I mention that out loud? Oh dear...)

 

[Flagg]

I've instituted a tentative forum ranking system that works like this:

• Least God - < 50 posts
  Elemental - 50 posts
  Little God - 100 posts
  Greater God - 500 posts
  Elemental Dragon - 1000+ posts
  Celestial Incarna - Admins/Moderators

If anyone has a better hierarcy, I'll entertain suggestions.


-S

 

[Flagg]

Almost like a "Favourite SuicideGirls" bar... (did I mention that out loud? Oh dear...)

I've always wondered if the girls get paid extra royalties for having a high "favorites" rating.


-S

 

[Persell]

Only in Punk Rawk currency, which has no universally agreed-upon value.


Are you on SG too? I always like to meet exciting new members. Though I suppose it wouldn't be technically correct to say I just met you.

 

[psychoph]

Again I woudl suggest looking into PHPNUKE or Post Nuke they both as far as I know can use PHP BB which means you shoudl be able to use everyhtign that is already on the site within those programs.  


They both have the ability to be modded by a php programmer to expand on what is already there plus they have many modules already created for them.  There are free versions of both programs already out that you can use.  You can setup accounts for different people with different permissiosn so you coudl have administrators who can do everything, peopel who only can troll the boards and remove posts and topics if inappropriate.  You can have peopel post news, or submit news and submissions for review and you can allow certain people to review the information before allowing it to be posted.

 

[ashenphoenix]

Reason I'm suggesting Mambo is cause it integrates with phpBB as well, and has lots of other plugins for so much cool stuff it's not funny.


I also saw something that attempted to slashdot Mambo vs phpNuke and rated it phpNuke poorly in that stake <a href="http://forum.mamboserver.com/showthread.php?t=11782">here</a>, but it is on a mambo tech support site.


There's also a site devoted to Open Content Management System <a href="http://www.opensourcecms.com/">here</a>.

 

[MikeOQuinn]

A suggestion:


An 'Under Development' forum, where folks with ideas that they can't quite seem to get right can post them and chat about them before putting them up on the Pending Submissions forum. You know, the place where GM's butt heads and find that two (or many) are, indeed, better than one.


"I have this idea for an artifact based on <insert syllogism here>, but I'm not sure how to tweak it to get it right. Anyone able to help?"


Stuff like that.


I know I'd use it.

 

[Flagg]

An 'Under Development' forum, where folks with ideas that they can't quite seem to get right can post them and chat about them before putting them up on the Pending Submissions forum.

I'll consider it, but I already feel like there may be too many separate forums as it is.


I think this kind of thing would be fine in the existing "Setting


& Themes" forums.


-S

 

[Seiraryu]

Well, I'd like for the little suns under our names to match the interface we're using.  I'm using the all white and grey one, but the background to the suns is all black.  I don't know...it's a nitpicky thing, I know.  But I'm a nitpicker.


Also...they should go under our forum ranking, like yours and Joe's.  Maybe it's just the way my browser sees it, though.  Meh.

 

[Flagg]

Well, I'd like for the little suns under our names to match the interface we're using.  I'm using the all white and grey one, but the background to the suns is all black.  I don't know...it's a nitpicky thing, I know.  But I'm a nitpicker.

I would too. Unfortunately the software only supports a single set of icons. I'd like them to have a transparent background, but the only way to do that is with a GIF, and if I save them as GIFs with my software (The GIMP 2.2) they look like ass.


If anyone thinks they can pull it off, I can send you the PNG files with transparency to convert.


-S