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?

So, there is a dice roller in the Pokemon Tabletop boards. I'm not sure how it works, or even the syntax, but we could ask them about it and see if we can incorporate it into the new forum.

I actually have several suggestions.

Suggestion 1: A quick reply system. Several boards have this already, and it would make it so that you don't have to leave the page in order to post your post.

Suggestion 2: A [spoiler][/spoiler] or rather a clickable quote block. Basically this hides part of the post and allows for various things that could be helpful to the forum.


Suggestion 3: Built upon that, collapsible quotes. If a quote goes beyond a certain bit, it should either get a mini-scrollbar or have some sort of javascript expand option similar to the spoiler tags.

Suggestion 4: Numbered posts in the thread. This is actually relevant in games like Reapers where you need to be able to reference posts directly and being able to link to a specific post helps with building things.

Suggestion 5: A built in dicebot for the forum. PHPBB has a dice module that you can get for it. It will roll consistently random and could be used in conjunction with the spoiler tag mentioned above for RP threads.

Suggestion 6: Possibly a page with a mibbit widget linking directly to the IRC. Not saying that it is necessary, but it wouldn't be a bad thing for the board.

As for dice, the javascript code in the following quote works well in the forum I run:


Just change the "Summon Eva's Dice" to something else.

I would like two things;

* Sometimes I just think the site and players take themselves too seriously. Don't get me wrong, there is a time and place for serious stuff but sometimes, when I look back at the archives I get the impression we lost some of that playfulness.

* Also if we're going to have a PM system, please allow more than 50 PMs in the inbox/sent.

Just a quick update: we're still listening to the feedback, and we're currently working on the new forum. Causality is mad at work building the Codex as I type this! We'll be going live sooner than later!

MY FINGERS ARE MELTIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIING

MY BRAIN IS MELTING

This isn't a suggestion so much as a general question/clarification.


Logic says that we're all going to have to rebuild characters for the new forum.
Is there a way we can know what information we'll need for that? I've copied down my own bio/info pages already (all this kinda stuff), but are they going to be organized differently so I should merge things? New things I should add?

Just curious.
I've got another day to grab things before I have limited-to-no internet access for a while, and I'd like to have things set aside for when I'm set up again, in case everyone else is already over there by that time.

I assume information about the precise details when it happens will be made somewhere more public than the IRC this time? Because it's pretty alarming to be totally unaware of a major change being announced.

All you'll be required to do is register your characters on the new site. We won't be deleting the Valiant board. There will be a biography forum to post a "hello", but it's not the same as the character pages here.


When the new forum goes live we will be making announcement on a new thread on this board.

This very much. All my characters are now serious :c

It must be rectified!

As someone who would also like to see a bit more playfulness and lightheartedness again (and will be working on some things for the new site!) but that is something that relies on us, the community as a whole to do, and not just the site runners.

One of the reasons I support the rep/kudos/upvote/whatever system is that it will (hopefully) encourage more of it (and other kinds of writing too~) so we can mix some more things up.

Hey hey, guess who's back with a brand new rap, could the real mr Talodias please stand up, please stand up, please stand up etc.

From the midst of frozen tundra, swampy forests and unhappy people comes sergeant (IRL sub-sergeant, akin to British corporal, hoping my next promotion will be in soon) Talonz and he has a few suggestions. As a denizen of the north and fucked up timezones I've always felt that I missed a lot of things when I couldn't join the big RPs and chat RPs, ME related or otherwise. I'm suggesting we have a sub forum, a part of the VL where we have a system where people can recruit or look for RPs, with definite timezones, summary, timescale, wanted players, general information, what game system, what materials you need etc. This way you could easily look for something that you can take part in, instead of roaming the IRC at 4am hoping somebody might be recruiting.

Further on similar lines, and maybe a sort of solution to the irc-"problem", members could arrange more of all kinds of extra-forum activity, such as gamenights in Dota, LOL, BF, CoD, hell, ME3 MP, book clubs, weekly writing/photo/drawing challenges, anything and everything that comes to mind. This is such an awesome community I'm sure members would like to spend time (figuratively) with each other outside RPs and the occasional glance at Awesome Thread. Of course, this comes from the members themselves but you wanted to hear this kind of things as well, right?

You'll hear more from me in 87 days. That's how much service I got left.

Glory to the Hierarchy!