Forum Categories Revisions...

[datahead8888]

Since we will be using @Quintus 's forum (correct me if I'm wrong) on the secretchronicles.de site, we probably should think about what forum categories we want going forward. We've already talked about adding a German section to the forums, but there are a lot of other categories to be added. Feel free to discuss them here.

We also might consider moving some of the existing posts into other categories (either because better categories get created or because they weren't in the best categories to start with). I might be able to move some if I have the access to do so, though it will be a long term project.

[Quintus]

Nice idea. Just let me know what you would like to see, and I will add it.

Vale, Quintus

[datahead8888]

Here's a rough draft. Let's all discuss this a bit before actually adding it to the forum.

• Secret Chronicles
  • Discussion
  • Help
  • Development - Building
  • Development - Coding
  • New Graphics
  • New Music / Sounds
  • Add-Ons / 3rd Party Tools
• Levels
  • New Levels and Worlds
  • Level Editing Help
• Scripting
  • 3rd-Party Scripts
  • Development
  • Discussion
• Website
  • Feedback
  • Announcements
  • Infrastructure
• Other
  • Off topic
• German
  • --I don't know German, so someone else will have to look at the old site, compare it to the English categories above, and decide what to put here.

A link should be included to github and the issue tracker on the main forum page along with an explanation. This will prevent confusion when people do not find a "Bugs" category or "Feature Requests" section. Ultimately, we should probably add a git management tool and issue tracker to the secret chronicles website itself; this will move us away from github.

Things I took into consideration above:

• Development is a little bit deemphasized per @Luiji 's suggestion. It is, however, quite easy to find in the forums.
• We probably don't want sections for "Bugs" and "Feature Requests" in the forums when we want people to use an issue tracker.
• I added a German section. As other languages become prominent we can revise this structure.

[datahead8888]

I've already made some changes to the above categories. No one else has suggested changes, so we should probably just go with these for now. The one consideration is whether we want to find a way to internationalize the German forums or any other language forums through the website language options.

@Quintus, if you give me admin access on your forum, I can move some posts once the categories are created.

[Quintus]

I have created new forum groups and categories (after adding the possibility to do so to Chessboard first :-P). @datahead8888, you have moderator rights in all the forums now.

Any further reorganisation of the forums should be discussed in the forum itself.

Vale, Quintus

[Bugsbane]

I haven't really looked at the forum at this stage, so this isn't a criticism of what's there, but with really good forum options available like Discourse, what exactly is the benefit of doing "roll our own" forum software? Is it part of the sinister plan to have Ruby take over the world?

[datahead8888]

It could be viewed as reinventing the wheel, to your point, since any forum could work for the game. Then again, I'm the one who's been advocating building wheels for the project in some cases. Thus I don't really have a problem if Quintus or someone who knows Ruby well is willing to support it.

[Bugsbane]

I'm all for reinventing wheels when there's a benefit. I'm just coming into this not knowing the prior discussion and wondering what it is. I mean, I assume there must have been some reason for choosing this over the other options. I'm not arguing against it. Just wondering why?

[datahead8888]

Quintus said there is a demand out there for Ruby based forums, and I think he wants to share it for use in other projects such as Ruby website forums. Thus he may want to reuse it elsewhere.

[Bugsbane]

Ah, ok. Ruby Takes Over the World.™ :)

[datahead8888]

Rubies will be a collectible item in the game (and Ruby is the level scripting language of choice). Secret Chronicles is a Trojan horse being wheeled into a city housing a sinister Ruby army.

:P

[Bugsbane]

My thoughts exactly! I had to laugh when, just as I'm committing the ruby images, I'm seeing an SMC mimetype icon onscreen with a near-identical ruby...

[Quintus]

Discourse is extremely resource-hungry bloatware. I doubt our server would even be able to run it (probably too less memory). Apart from that, I find its user interface to be a real nightmare, it gives anything but overview. The "categorzed view" of Discourse is a bad joke, there are nearly as much categories as posts when you allow people to choose anything they like. Announcements are not shown in categorized view. In the noncategorized view, everything just flows around and one is lost in all the unordered threads. Also, try surfing the website with read-only intention without JavaScript enabled. This will simply not work.

As for rolling my own forum solution, this has a double background. On the one hand, I did not want to run PHP forum software, because each time I look at their code I feel like someone is hitting me in my face. Plugins? Patch the code. Comments? Do you need that? Support for anything other than MySQL? Go to Oracle. On the other hand, there has been a long demand in the German Ruby community for a simple bulletin forum software, and I try to fulfill that one now. I hope my software can finally make it to be used for the German Ruby forum.

Vale, Quintus

[Bugsbane]

Fair enough. I really quite enjoy using Discourse on the ArkOS forums, but to each their own. I'm just happy there is a forum! ( I just found the new one and registered)

[datahead8888]

I just found the new one and registered

We really do need to start ramping up usage of the new forum. As more people make posts there, even more people will make posts, and yet more people will register . . .

The release is probably what's really going to bring people to the forum.

[Bugsbane]

We really do need to start ramping up usage of the new forum.

I certainly will. As I've said, I'm more of a forum user, but I didn't actually know where the new one was until recently.

[datahead8888]

I'm going to start trying to move posts to more appropriate categories in some cases if applicable. I may also discuss the categories a little more with Quintus in one case. The forum will of course be the place to discuss that, though.