Brother Tyler

I haven't had time to read this in depth, but I really appreciate the amount of thought and time that you've put into this. I look forward to (a) seeing the rest of the content you've developed, and (b) taking the time to read this in depth. Development of DIYs tends to be a labor of love and there is too little engagement from other community members, unfortunately. Do you have any of the Nineteen Red Ravens in miniature/model form, yet? Or is everything just "on paper" at this point?

Generous member donations have brought our total up to $2,124.50, just under 85% of our goal.

It should also be understood that you don't have the option to IGNORE most staff members. This ensures that any guidance that a staff member provides can be seen by all members.

It has been about ten months since we made this change. There was, naturally, initial resistance to the change, but you've had time to work through the normal friction and [hopefully] give things a fair chance. While we hope that the expected benefits have been felt, and we knew that there might be negative drawbacks to the change, there may have been unexpected benefits or drawbacks. Benefits are all well and good, but we want to mitigate drawbacks to the greatest extent possible. To that end, we are looking for feedback from the participants. Specific questions: Has the change to the Clubs had a more positive, more negative, or relatively neutral impact on your RPG play-by-post experience here? If there have been any benefits to the change, what are they? If there have been any drawbacks to the change, what are they? And how might they be mitigated? Has the availability of relevant features (e.g., Forums, Articles, Gallery, etc.) within the club been beneficial? Has the signposting (i.e., the link to The Nook club in the + PBP Games + forum) been effective? If not, how might we improve in this area? And you are welcome to comment constructively on any aspects of the change that you think are worthy of discussion. Change is never easy, especially when we've grown accustomed to the old ways over a [relatively] long period of time. Change doesn't always work out [as well] as envisioned, however, so it's important to evaluate all of the impacts after people have had time to grow accustomed to the new way. Nothing is ever 100% better - there are always trade-offs and losses, and it's important to assess those to determine if they can be mitigated somehow or, at worst, if those deficiencies are outweighed by the positive aspects of the change. Thanks in advance.

We have now reached $2,080.50, 83% of our goal, thanks to our generous members.

We're still looking for suggestions for expanding/improving the list of tags. Also, note that the change from the current freeform tags to the finite list isn't an option that we are choosing. This is a change in the software. Whether we like it or not, whether we want it or not, the change is being forced on us [and all Invision users]. We are simply leaning into the change as we prepare for the update to Invision 5.0. My gut feeling is that the current list is missing some things, but I've included all of the top level tags that I can think of. There are limitations in my perspective, however, so I'm relying on other members to help make the tag list the best that it can be. Keep in mind that we're going with the top level things to keep the list manageable and usable. Lower level information such as (sub)faction, unit type, character names, etc. will be covered via content titles and descriptions/posts. For example, it is assumed that any content about, say, Roboute Guilliman, will include the name somewhere either in the content title, the description/first post, or both. And when I say "content" I am referring to all forms of content: discussions, images, articles, blog entries, etc. Members can narrow desired content types down via the search engine. So I don't expect this list to be too long - imagine having to scroll through a drop-down list to find each and every tag that you think is appropriate to your content. If that list is too long, members will lose interest very quickly. So while the (sub)factions and units were the first things I thought of when developing some sort of system for standardized tags, they were quickly ruled out from a practicality/usability standpoint. Similarly, I considered and ruled out things like game systems/editions, places, and events. It's not that tags for these things wouldn't be helpful - it's that a list containing these types of data points would become unusable. This leaves us with other types of data, much of which overlaps with the general type of content (e.g., battle report) rather than specifics on the content (e.g., a battle report featuring Necrons versus Orks). Also keep in mind that there are two ways to use tags when searching. The first is to click on a tag, in which case the system will give you every content item to which that tag has been assigned. The second is via the search engine, allowing you to include one or more tags as one parameter, with the engine giving you all content that meets all parameters. So tags don't need to duplicate content types (e.g., topics, images, articles, etc.), authors (i.e., member names), or the specific terms members might be looking for (e.g., Roboute Guilliman, Yarrick, Armageddon, Horus Heresy, etc.) since there are already places where those parameters can be entered. What I'm looking for with potential tags is metadata type information. And please don't be offended if my immediate response to a suggestion, especially if it's negative, seems arbitrary and hasty. I've been quietly working on improving our tags system for over a decade, giving considerable thought to what I would like to see. Many of your ideas will probably be very similar to my own ideas, but the shift to a fixed list changed the paradigm. There's nothing arbitrary or hasty about my responses. We'll try to give every suggestion fair consideration, especially if we can either use it or a derivation of it as a potential tag. My original ideas were built around freeform tags, building a taxonomy structure that members might use to craft a very wide range of consistent tags. Having finite tags presented via a dropdown list is a significant change, forcing us to keep the tag options much more limited and relying on tags as just one element within a larger ecosystem of data points in helping members to label and discover content. I expect that we'll refine the tags over time as we see how they work and assess what works best for everyone. At this point, we're looking for the 80% solution.

Thanks to our generous members , we have now accumulated $2,050.50, 82% of our goal.

This topic was created from some off-topic posts in the discussion about...

Our generous members have now donated $1,970.50, just under 79% of our goal.

Generous members have donated $1,948.80, just under 78% of our goal.

Generous members have donated $1,548.80, just under 62% of our goal. I'll be out through Monday, so there won't be any updates until later Monday or early Tuesday.

Silas Alberec

I figured Lord_Ikka's problem out (it was a setting I had to switch), but everyone else should be able to see it. You don't see it below the Newest Topics sidebar block?

Generous member donations have pushed us up to $1,537.80, 61% of our goal.

I'm looking into Patreon.