What's the progress on that, and the larger plans to feature content, advertise, grow the community, &c. &c.?

I can speak to one element that's in the works, and I'll have to leave the rest for others to discuss. I've been working on designing a character sheet system. The plan is to hook it into your user CP, and allow each individual to have as many characters as they want.

I'm currently about 50% of the way done with the database design, and about 10% or so done with the front-end design specs. The system will launch with d20-based games (3e, 3.5, 4e, Pathfinder, d20 Modern, etc). Sapper has been a huge help with filling in my knowledge gaps for 4e; the rest I'm comfortable with. My hunch right now is that 4e will be done first, with Pathfinder shortly after it, then the others.

After the d20 systems, we'll have to look and see what system would be next.

However... I had to take a break from that to get caught up on my freelance work. I have a bunch of stuff due between now and early May, and needed to get moving on some of it in order to meet deadlines. For now, I'm not going to give an expected date on this system, because I don't want to create unfair expectations. Once I'm able to pick the project back up and get it closer to completion, I'll be more comfortable giving estimates.

As for the other projects - front page, wiki, probably something else I'm forgetting - I've not been involved in their planning or implementation so I can't offer any insight into their status.

That's awesome! Will the format of the character sheet be customizable to the point where it can be easily expanded to include other games, or do you guys have to create new sheets manually? (I'm kind of guessing the latter based on your description).

Wouldn't it have been easier to do a "character sheet tag" and link into something like MythWeavers in the same way we have a video tag that links into YouTube?

~SE++

It's the latter, mostly. There are elements that will be reusable regardless of system. For example, what I'm calling the "character header" table. This is what links a character to a user, and includes elements such as the character's name and the game system (which will be a drop down list).

However, it's early enough in design at this point that things could change.



That certainly would've been easier. It also wouldn't be a reason to come here; it would push activity to MythWeavers, rather than pulling activity here.

Along the same lines, content breeds content. The more topics and features you have the more likely people will show up to post in those topics or use those features, not to mention the ever important google crawlers. The more stuff on NGA for the search engines to log, the more likely we are to be found when people are plugging things into google and such.

It's true. I've noticed that with M:EM: the more people working on a particular setting or set of characters, the more work gets done. Content breeds content is a pretty good maxim for our expansion plans, I think.

(Of course, actually finishing projects also breeds content. I really need to wrap up the design for the Seasons of Dusk anthology. =_= Stupid grad school.)

So I take it the sheets would be at least easy to link to from other sites, which would make this a good place to get an account? Is that the basic plan? And is there a similar plan for decklists?

...And while we're talking about stuff that will inevitably take up server space, is Bun still shouldering all the server costs or do we have plans to make things a bit more stable via ad revenue and the like?

I actually thought about that over this weekend, since I never really see Miss Bun around; how much is this really costing her, and if theoretically she disappeared, how long would this place keep going autonomously?

Yep, each character will have a unique URL to make it linkable.



Dunno. I know it was being worked on, but it's all greek to me so I didn't really follow along too closely as to what was being talked about between Welder and Mister P.



Speaking for me personally, I hate ads. Though I understand why they get used since they're easy revenue.



Without getting too deep into stuff, the site could continue without Miss Bun if she were to suddenly disappear from existence.

I know the feeling, I've got a ton of irons in the fire both on site and off. I should really just sit down some time and focus on one set thing for an afternoon and start clearing off my list.

Regarding character sheets, the plan is you'd have them on your profile and then could link them via the url both on site and off. So like with Mythweavers you can build a sheet and then past the URL for all to see, and yet the public cant go muck up your sheet:
http://www.myth-weavers.com/sheetview.p ... tid=644557

We've brought up decklists before, and I know there was some work going on here with MysteriousMisterP for his fancy decklists. But as far as building a decklist and tying it to your account and making it linkable... its surely doable, we'd just have to figure out how would be best to go about building the tables as well as how we want the front end to look at the end. We certainly welcome input and ideas so feel free to chime in. And of course here in the metaboard is the forum feature request thread, or you can make a thread solely for that topic so that we could group brainstorm / think tank.

Fake Edit : Fire beat me to the punch, but I'm going to post anyway.

Indeed - I don't think storing a decklist and adding it to the user CP would be all that hard. I'll add it to the list of stuff to work on with Welder as far as database / user CP changes go. As implied further up, it'll be another week or two before I can even think of starting design, due to heavy workload at the moment.

I have no idea what features people would want, but it'd be great to have the decklist thing as I know some of our M:EMbers use external sites at the moment to construct decklists for M:EM planeswalker characters, and it'd be great to store that in-house.

Also, I know we talked early on about being able to integrate custom cards into our databases somehow, but I'm not sure what exactly the YMTC people are looking for with that... It would be awesome to be able to build decklists that included cards from custom sets though.

Sapper, are you working on the main page stuff? Any idea what's going on with that and/or the wiki and/or more permanent/fancy housing for M:EM archive stuff?

I hope these questions aren't bugging you folks, it's just been a while and I figured it was a good time to at least check in on how things are coming along. (I just wandered very briefly back to the Motherboard the other day and the sight of the deserted blasted wasteland that was our former home kind of got me thinking about further efforts to secure this as a lasting site... >_>)

Custom card integration for autocard isn't something I think we'd be able to do any time soon--it'd most likely require rewriting the code almost from scratch and creating an entirely new architecture to support it.

If we just implement a [hover] tag or something, then I'd be okay with providing the hyperlink to the image. However, changing the [card] to work with it will indeed need a fair amount of time, most likely.
Of course, that means I can also do the same with goatse images and whatever else suits me, but it's not too different from just hyperlinking it naturally. But if you do want to stay on the safe side, then I guess you could always do [ymtc=mown/heroes of ashenfall/dream stalker]3x Dream Stalker[/ymtc] if you want to be really careful. Starts getting unwieldy at that point though, so I wouldn't recommend it.

If you have questions around table design or need general SQL assistance you can feel free to ask me. I'm a senior DBA. I think you only need like... 4-5 tables tops to be able to represent decklists and a roughed out card database.

Thanks, Niche. I'm a Senior Oracle Applications Developer, though. So I think I have it covered - just a small learning curve on the differences between Oracle and MySQL. However, having another resource is good in case I ever get stuck and can't find my answer via Google.

Do you mean for forum-wide autocarding, or decklist-specific autocarding? (Or are the two ultimately going to be so tightly linked as to be irrelevant?)

I was more talking about the latter, but I like the [YMTC= ] thing Mown suggests either way. It seems like an elegant enough solution.

Even if we don't have autocarding for custom cards, I'd really like to see a front page with articles and the like. Personally, I'd like to see that before anything else. We have MythWeavers for character sheets, we can link images for cards we make, but what we don't have is an organized location for user generated articles.

~SE++

So, let's kick around the deck idea a little bit actually. I'm already designing DB objects and php pages, so what's a few more.

The biggest question: what should it look like? Something like this or this?

And then data entry (for lack of better word): Should it just be a window like the new post window, and the user types in all that? Are there prompts to ask, such as having two fields - one for number of cards, and one for card name? Should there be any sort of math checking, like making sure there's at least 60 cards?

Is there an existing site (like there's MythWeavers for character sheets) that I can go look at to get ideas?

This is a good point. None of the other features are anywhere near as likely to provide a draw for people to come to the site, nor as useful a tool for promotion. And we already have at least some content ready to roll as soon as the page goes live in the form of M:EM... I mean, we've got two book-length short story anthologies now, several self-contained novellas, and it looks like we're going to have enough material for an anthology set in a completely original world pretty soon, so we've got plenty of material.

If we had a sense of when things would be ready to go live, people could start writing other articles as well and maybe even build up a bit of a buffer. Like, if we were given at some point a two-month warning before things go live, people can plan accordingly.

@Fire:

Visually just a list like that looks fine to me, although having it all in a single column is not optimal, considering how long the card lists get... I know other sites have things in two or more columns, and that might be best here.

Would math checking be an optional feature or something that would render the deck unpostable if it didn't conform? I'm assuming the former, yes?

I know there's a site that Barinellos uses for all his Planeswalker deck designs. I'll try to remember to ask him what he uses. It's definitely a more slick sort of interface than just the lists that people are composing manually here.