Hi!
I have some suggestions to make concerning the forums system here. Anybody else who has ideas for forums, feel free to post!
Before I go into my suggestions, I want to say that the forums, as of now, operate awesomely, and are organised really neatly, and everything works out okay, and thank you to Krin for making the forums the way they are!
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But then, of course, there are a little bit of confusing and 'annoying' things to address. I know that some others have addressed some of the problems I'm about to talk about, but I'm just going to put my opinion out there too.
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Firstly, as of this moment that this thread is being posted, there are 56,586 threads total on the entire forums, and of which around 798 are admin made threads. Of course, as time progresses, more and more threads will be added to the forums, increasing the already huge number of around 56.6 thousand threads. Imagine that a person plays Sylestia, posts on some threads, then leaves for a while, coming back in a couple of months, or years, even. Given how fast the threads change on the pages of each forum, they're going to have quite some problems finding the thread they last posted on when they last visited Sylestia, and they're going to have to sift through the hundreds of pages of threads, depending on what forums they were posting on.
So here's my proposal: There's already an advanced search for players and pets, so why not add one for forums? People should be able to search for keywords, time of creation, author of thread, what forum the thread is in, etc. And not just that; I also suggest that a search for posts is added. Meaning that, given a thread, which has a lot of pages, and you want to find a specific post by a specific person or at a specific time. The search could help you find that post you want to find, instead of you sifting through hundreds of pages on a thread, like for example those threads with a couple hundred of pages. In general, what I mean is to have a(n) (advanced) search for the forums as well, because many people, including me, have tried to look through hundreds of pages just to find one thread, and sometimes, missed that thread or somehow messed up, and had to start over again.
I'm not the only one to think this, here's another thread concerning this: https://www.sylestia.com/forums/?thread=56282
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Secondly, there has been a recent confusion over roleplays and roleplaying games. I assure you, the two are quite different. However, because roleplaying games are part roleplay and part game, people get confused and you find roleplaying games in both the games/contests/giveaways forums and the roleplaying forums, and a lot of great roleplaying games don't get found because they're in the roleplay forum, and most RPG players hang around the games/contests/giveaways forum. So there's been a question as to what's the difference between roleplaying games and roleplays, and here's the rundown:
Roleplaying Games (RPGs)
-Players control their character's actions
-Narrator controls enviroment, what players see/hear/sense
-Most likely one to two characters per person, no more
-Definite storyline
-Two roles: Narrator & Player
-NPCs controlled by narrator, created my narrator
-Powerplaying is absolutely a no-no
-Sometimes, there are skills + abilities involved that must be level up-ed
-It's a text-based game, basically (think of D&D, but with more free options)
-Guidelines for players
-The player's character can die, and the narrator controls that
Roleplays
-Has no 'definite' storyline; anything could happen
-Powerplaying may happen, and most of the time people might not care, or they just complain
-As many characters as one wants
-NPCs created by roleplayers and controlled by roleplayers
-Roleplayer controls their character's actions, what they see/hear/sense/touch
-Roleplayer controls events that happen
-No skills+abilites
So that was basically a summary of the differences. And to say they don't fit in with either games nor roleplays, RPGs have their own twist to them: most of the time they don't have winners nor prizes, if they were to be counted as games. If they were to be counted as roleplays: Your character can die, and you have no control over that, as opposed to roleplays, where if a character has to die, the character's creator has to agree to the character's death. I'm sure there are numerous other differences, but these are the general things.
My proposal: Make a forum specifically for roleplaying games, or you could do a games/RPGs forum and a contests/giveaways forum, but it's best to separate RPGs lest others get confused.
Another thread on this topic: https://www.sylestia.com/forums/?thread=56705
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Thirdly, this is just a small suggestion that I don't think is about as serious as the above two, but I'm sticking it here anyways. So, the forums and threads all look the same, with the same font, same things we can do to those fonts, and to get creative, people have to go to other sites, create their own titles and stuff, and put them on posts using the IMG button.
I'm suggesting that we could personalize the threads we make, if we want to, such as different fonts and different styles, or even just changing the background colour of the thread we want to make.
Also, I believe the forums on Sylestia use BB script (I may be wrong), and it's missing out on a lot of things if it is. For example, <marquee> from HTML, or the <spoiler> thing that could be used to cover up spoilers instead of changing text colour to white and telling others to highlight the block of white text to see the spoilers. I believe there should be the settings we have now for changing the style of our posts, but there should be more that could be used, and probably taken from HTML, because HTML has quite a lot of options for editing texts and visuals.
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To Krin & Fai:
Thank you for reading all of that if you did! I understand that coding stuff takes a lot of time and is not necessarily easy, since I do coding myself, but please take these ideas into consideration!
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