Changes YOU Want Made to the Forum.

Ladies, Gents, and Citizens of a Different Breed:

As you are no doubt aware by this point, Cerberus Daily News will soon be migrating back to the phpBB system to address a number of communication issues with our players. As the administrator and the dedicated technician behind the Valiant System, we would like to thank the user Diplomatic Immunity for all his hard work over the past year and a half, and hope that he look back on his labors with a strong sense of pride.

In the meantime, however, migrating the boards provides us with a prime opportunity to discuss the sort of features we want on the new system, and since we want folks to keep posting their misadventures here, this is where you come in.

The simple question is: What sort of board features would convince you to keep posting on Cerberus Daily News? We're not talking about features such as the Private Messaging System - cornerstones such as those are largely why we're making the migration. Instead, think selfish. What board widgets - beyond what we had on the original forum can you think of that would enrich the Cerberus Daily News Experience for you?

Keep in mind that our own programming skills and free time are both limited - the forum currently lying at your fingertips was created using several months of Dippy's blood, sweat and tears. If it's an entirely new feature that would require intensive coding, it likely won't meet the cut. On the other hand, if you can supply not only a description but a forum or the source code to implement the change...well, you've just made that change that much easier for us to make.

Also, feel free to ask about changes that don’t change the code. There’s more to this site than just the formatting - it’s a community, and that means we need to hear from you on a personal level too. What would you as players want from the board to keep you interested in playing? What is it that you think would help define your characters better and keep you interested in interacting not only with each other out of character, but incharacter?

Don't be surprised if you see us moderators adding ideas under our non-mod alts. After all, we're ostensibly here because we want to be here, not because we have to. We'd like to keep it that way - consider it a way for everyone to get their ideas heard on equal footing.

So please, go wild. Talk to us. What would changes would get you, the writer, to talk more often?

Well, I might as well throw in my two cents here.

I know what I want to see from the board. More RPing. Not talking back and forth - which is cool, don't get me wrong - but actual dice-throwing, droid-fighting, biotic-using role-playing! I'm an old grognard at heart; it ain't an RP unless you've got a handful of dice ready to sling. So I'd like an option to run some games with these folks that can be considered canon. Not on the board, but in chat, so that things move smoothly and quickly - but lord knows you could use what you learned afterwards as bragging rights. It's an idea I've been thinking about for a while, just never got around to implementing it.

Abad mentioned it on IRC, and I'm sure others will put it far more eloquently than I did, but a "props" system allowing you to flag down a post as one you like, with, if possible, an additional reason. Ideally this should not be anonymous, if you want to say something about a post, it should be available publicly.

As someone with a fuck-ton of alts, I want to be able to rapidly switch between my characters.

It would also help if we cultivated a community that gave a shit about each other.

The cliques, the 'keeping to ourselves and our friends' shit isn't good for the community, rather, it's a fucking vise grip on this board's neck.


WE NEED MORE GIANT STORYLINES!

We need stories that affect the entire roleplaying universe that aren't just a news story for discussion!

We need more open calls to adventure and action! We need stories with hard consequences! Death, romance, action, drama!

We need ships exploding in upper atmospheres! We need people falling in love, we need space opera and space warfare!


Also, Taco Tuesday!

This isn't a technical suggestion - but as someone who's been interested in site's media format, I would absolutely love encouraging people to work on adding more of that forum. There's the articles, of course, but we have entire mediums of material we could add to the site - my DDS materials, our "ad space" on the CDN VI, and the upcoming Citadel Election threads, just to name a few. It adds to the - I dunno, verisimilitude of the site when you see the sort of insane adspace that plagues the 22nd Century...and admit it, as much as you might play for the characters or the gameplay, you made damn sure to hear every single thing the Tupari Machine in ME2 had to say.

I'm currently brainstorming ways to get that going - but in the meantime, if you can think of something to encourage this, by all means, shout it out too!

I really like this since I think right now we have become far too reliant on IRC. Which is cool, I like IRC too. But it should not be an essential tool if you want to RP on Cerberus Daily News. Not to mention if you want to do a big thread you have to wrangle with different timezones and schedules which is really impractical and frustrating when you can't make a IRC meeting to roll a virtual die and get skipped over.

The most important feature that Valiant brought for me was the easy multi character handling instead of multiple logins (and multiple PM accounts in consequence). So if there is any chance to keep this, it should be kept.

I also like the character description pages, the possibility to have short bio and important info at hand that goes beyond name, age and hobbies.


Would it be a possibility to add an uneditable dice throw as a option to posts?
I am more of a talk-RP person who occasionally enjoys freestyle action too but there are occasions where a "hey, let's throw a dice to decide this" comes in handy. I mean, I can do that on my desk but rolling a dice in private is not the same.

Multiple themes in different colours!

Others have already mentioned the Alt-switching function Valiant has, and this may be part of carrying over that anyway, but I just wanted to specifically mention the ability, when editing posts, to change which Alt the post comes from - I can't count the number of ((Oops, wrong alt)) posts that've been avoided by that for me just in the Rocks thread alone.

And if it's possible, a minor tweak to the way quotes are presented - I like how the 'wrote' part of 'Username wrote:' in the quote attribution is editable/removable in Valiant, it lets us avoid having IC PMs reading "Private Message from Sender to Receiver wrote" like we used to see on the old board, 'repurpose' quotes as all manner of things when it suits a post to do so, drop the attribution line entirely when extracting mutliple quotes from the same source, and so on.

Edit: oops, almost forgot - a link to the wiki in the page-top title bar, like we have in Valiant now, would be great.

As someone who is nominally responsible for Presslink, being notified that there's been a new news update in some way, either at the top of the main index or through some other means would be cool.

Where is the information about this board migration? I haven't seen anything about it prior to this thread.

In particular, I'm concerned about when it is and what exactly I'll have to do when it occurs. And will the archived old forums be affected?

The news broke out in a couple of areas, many of which were on chat and were poorly documented here - a problem we largely intended to fix with this thread, as the first that announced the move was made under stressful circumstances for board management. As for the time when we change, that's not nailed down - again, largely because we want to hear from the CDN community (especially including long-time lurkers like you) about what you'd like to see on the new boards. Once we have a good idea of what we can and will implement, we will lay down more concrete dates for the incoming transition. The forums here will NOT be lost - instead, Valiant will become archived much like the original forum was, so don't worry about losing any of the RP work you (or anyone else) have done.

---

In terms of other things we could use: An active codex from the different games and our Retrospectives as a handy reference. Yes, we have the CDN and ME wikis, but it would be a whole lot simpler if we could just integrate that into a locked subforum on the new site.

While we're at it, let's get the old Biography forums back. We've had the Guestbook up for a while, but honestly I think that taking away new players' chances to flesh out their character in individual threads has hurt more than it's helped. Sure, we'll have people spamming macros of "welcome to the forum," but every once in a while we'll get a good debate - and hell, help out new folks just getting their feet wet.

I would love to see this too. Something that can make arguments a huge pain in the butt on CDN (and thus causes me to drop out) is having to dig through a lot of different sites and old threads to find what people are talking about.


Empty quoting is frowned upon so I am just writing a long sentence here to say that I agree.

In general, I'm having difficulty in thinking of anything else that hasn't already been mentioned. I've bounced around the idea of a shoutbox in my head (would encourage people to chat on-site more instead of IRC all day) but IRC basically makes them redundant. And I'm not sure how easy it would be for the mods to monitor since I doubt logs are recorded.

going on from steely's idea: integrate the news and other content submissions in a way that they could be submitted straight to a repository that gives a notification.

So stuff wont be confined to limits of an inbox.

I forgot something, another technical one: Valiant's trick of resizing large images to fit within the standard width of the post window, rather than display images full-size and force the entire page wider like the old forum used to to.

Not sure how possible this would be. But it may be possible to have a hidden sub-forum visible only to the mods named "USER SUBMISSIONS" and a way (either on the front page or on the forums proper) to submit content to it.

I am not good with computers so *shrugs*

I'm working on a follow-up on all this and have gotten all the Codex entries - and since we always seem landlocked to the Citadel, I've branched out and started grabbing entries for all the planets across the ME-verse. To that end, I'd suggest that everyone fire up their endgame saves and take a nice tour around the galaxy. Don't just troll the MEWiki - really go back to the game, fire up that save, and go reading up on the ancillary stuff while the Galaxy Map music plays in the background. It may well help you get into the writing mood again, and there are troves of information (even in the home planet systems) I'm sure that everyone's overlooked.

For example, from the home system of the turians:


And from the Aralakh system:


I am flabbergasted no one's asked Dwick about Kruban

First of all: thanks everyone for putting in suggestions so far. Keep them coming!

I'm writing this to give you folks an idea of what's been discussed among the mod team so far, to let you know what we're thinking, and how your suggestions are going over.


The bad news is that the only dice mod I could find for phpBB is abandoned, and hasn't been updated for two years. Simply relying on IRC all the time isn't practical, so we're looking at other potential solutions. Having a stronger RP element also necessitates actually codifying a system to use, for the sake of balance and improved gameplay. It's not an easy matter to resolve (any sort of system we put in makes life that much more difficult for newbies), so we're taking our time and being thoughtful about this. We might not have a resolution before the new board goes live, in which case we'd maintain the status quo until we have a proper solution.

Short version: no dice, but other things may be falling into place.


I've found a reputation mod that seems to do what we're looking for. Both myself and Icarus are born and bred on forums that have a reputation system, so we're all for them. But we're also very well aware of their pitfalls, so we're looking at how to work the mod to our advantage.


phpBB (and any other BB system I've seen) doesn't have the user/character set-up that Valiant does. At best we can link accounts and enable fast user switching (phpBB has a beta mod for this). For all intents and purposes from the system's point of view you're still logging in and out of accounts. This means that there won't be any unified inbox, sadly. We're looking at the mod as a potential, albeit imperfect, solution.


These were unfortunately under-utilized by the players (myself included). We're bringing back the Biography forum. Deciding to nix it for Valiant was my mistake, as I didn't realize how many practical benefits it brought in.


This is a vanilla phpBB feature, we just need to make sure we install enough themes.


This won't be feasible short of asking a mod, sorry.


Returning to phpBB will mean having the same "new/unread thread/post" feature that we had in the old forums. But we'll need to do something special for Presslink, I agree. Still needs to be looked into.


We're introducing a "codex" forum, to make life easier for everyone.


It's something we still need to look into. The nice thing about inboxes is that both senders and receivers know when an item has been opened, and some sort of "deposit" forum doesn't necessarily allow for the former. Inbox limits are set at a system level, 50 was just what Rook set at the outset.


I already grabbed the mod to do that before you even mentioned it!


The first goal is more news stories, since that encourages more- and more varied- discussion, which in turn provides better for characterization and hooks for future RP. I'm ten times as responsible as the next person for letting this fall to the wayside.


Only if you're paying. ;)

Once again, thanks everyone for sending in your thoughts. Keep them coming, and don't be shy! If you have some pie-in-the-sky ideas, let us know. That'll give us something to shoot for in the future.

Will the ooc field be back? I really like it, it doesn't break immersion like an ugly ((ooc :)) text.

Some forums have their IRC chat in a frame, visible like at the bottom of the page, with easy join. This could be pretty useful for new players confused as to how get to mibbit and find the chan and stuff. And to show them that it is an active chan, worth looking into.

Another idea I hesitated to share (so now that's on you for saying not to be shy!) is to bring back a proper front page, closer to what we had on the old forum. A long list of articles, if possible with the number of posts from the associated forum thread, bringing us closer to our News roots, and the gimmick that jump started the roleplay.
Now obviously we don't want to have it unmoderated like it used to be, but the fact that it was an easy way for a new member to get into the CDN atmosphere, test out a character, and if it worked expand it in the forums was unique and great.

Finally I'm going to shamelessly bump my previous suggestion for the job postings thread. I feel like we have a lot of new players coming in and unsure of how to get started RP wise. Having experienced players volunteering first RPs through this story device could be the first experience they need, I think.

Depends on the person, not everyone would be a mercenary or have the free time to take random jobs off the extranet, if they're already a full time diplomat/restauranteur/CSEC/etc.

That being said, there is the distinct possibility that some players are working on something not entirely dissimilar to what you're suggesting.


As far as suggestions go, I think switching back already re-implements a 'subscribe to thread' option so I don't think I really need to ask for that.

Is there a way to 'group' characters? Almost like a friend list or something, but a mechanic that would display AEGIS or Titan, or SATAE or something. A way to group characters from a certain faction together. Purely cosmetic really but it may be helpful for people as well, to see which groups are out there to possibly join, as well as provide a handy list of everyone in said faction.

Not sure if I'm describing that right.

I'm not a fan of the 'shoutbox' for a few reasons. In general, I just don't think it reflects very well on the presentation of a site. I've seen plenty of sites with them, and they always stand out to me as big zits on the page. They immediately draw your attention and they just never, ever look good. Even worse is when they're obnoxious enough to start making 'ping' noises whenever someone says something. Moreover, there's just no reason for it with the IRC. Shoutboxes are harder to moderate, harder to pay attention to, and they unnecessarily fragment things.

Plus, they're a breeding ground for spambots. I don't want the first thing new visitors to see is NAKED JULIA and ADORABLE JEN.

And I just think it's over-thinking things. If your primary reason for introducing a shoutbox is to get people into the IRC, you should just make getting into the IRC easier. I've seen plenty of sites include an embedded Mibbit client somewhere (and not on the main index) where you're prompted to customize your nickname, and it'll instantly log you into the relevant server and channel. I think I'd like to see that, actually. Somewhere easily noticeable, like the top of a page or... y'know. A side-bar. But more on that in a bit.

It's not a bad idea on paper, but in practice, I'm not sure I like the premise. I just don't like the sound of 'experienced players' showing newbies the 'right' way to play through these things. I think that the way CDN worked for ages was that newbies generally staked out those things themselves, through threads and through their introduction - and the more I think about it, the more I realize that scrapping Biographies was short-sighted. But that's prattling. I think that this sort of thing reeks of establishing a 'mentor/pupil' dynamic between these theoretical new players and the old ones, and for a lot of reasons, I think that heads down a really baaaaad path.

Especially as I think what wound end up happening is that the same players are going to be taking this role as the 'experienced player' all the time, every time, and again, I don't like how that sounds in execution. It's like, you're a freshman at high school or whatever, and you walk into school, and it's Clubs Day, and in the lobby, there's tons of club stands that are hocking fliers and yelling over each other and accosting you for a pitch on why their club is the best club loudly and aggressively, and maybe you want to just get to class, but they're as insistent as their station will allow them. Sure, you can ignore them, and they're hardly mean about it, but it wouldn't be polite to.

And I don't think newbies need (as you say) the guided tour (complete with refreshments) through the board that this idea suggests. I didn't. I don't think many other players did, either. I like the idea that most of our newbies are going to be smart people. Not necessarily confident about testing new waters or joining a community, but if they're willing to join, they're probably willing to learn. I think reintroducing Biographies should be a good enough way for new players to safely dip their feet into the water in a relatively straightforward environment, and they should be allowed to figure some stuff out for themselves; figure out their 'identity' on the boards in terms of how they play and what their character is.

Not that I don't think that more veteran players shouldn't be taking the effort to accommodate new players or post threads asking for someone to 'do a job', but do they need to be coddled? I don't think so.

Although, that's just me.

But to talk less about changes that I, eh, would prefer not to happen, let's talk about something that I would: some sort of navigation side-bar. I've seen a few sites do it, and I think they're a great idea. Essentially, there'd be a little box along the left side of the board that would contain links to important information, like... the rules, the staff, the characters (and who plays who), resources, important information like 'established canon', or even a link to an embedded chat window (everything links together!) in a visible, easy to access, and fairly attractive way.

If there's one thing that I think is important, it's making sure everything that a player needs to appreciate the site is delivered in a reasonably concise, interesting way that minimizes the buffer for participating. Presentation really matters.

...and man, this is probably a bit pie in the sky (or not, I dunno!), but it'd make managing Presslink so much easier if there were some kind of bot that we could load articles into a queue with, and it'd post them at scheduled times over the week. As it stands, the process for posting an article is... well, not difficult, but a bit inconvenient. To do so, you need to log in and out of two different accounts on two separate 'boards', and sometimes it's just difficult to remember that the site's due for an article that day.

Oh, and while I'm on a roll, custom smilies would be cool. I think Jeral made a bunch of them (although I'm not quite sure where they are anymore) and I think making them (and more) easily usable could be cool, as well as add a more Mass Effect, eh, 'feel' to the boards. Ring a little closer to the 'extranet board' that the site is supposed to be.

tl;dr a krogan version of this



As long as no one's spamming ten of them in a row.

And one last thing, but a quick reply box would be killer. I don't think either board had one, and it's useful to just scroll down and have a little thing you can write in.