It's not like you've been all that quiet about it... we just haven't actually been linking it in the M:EM, and heck, squinty has a link in his signature.

I wish soft-deleted posts didn't count towards your records of the number of posts in that thread. I like knowing who's going to be at the top of a page, so I often refrain from deleting my messages because I know that in the future I'll have to calculate when the next page break is going to be more complicatedly.

Is there any chance you guys would be able to get the avatar submission thing to automatically resize Idownsize?) jpegs uploaded instead of saying they are too big? I don't know how hard this is, but I have seen it on a ton of forums.

I'm sure this would be a nightmare to implement, so I'm more pointing it out as a long-term would-be-nice goal than a "hey y'all should be doing this now" goal, but the old group system on the intermediate mothership was actually pretty nice. it let you set up workspaces that you could control like a local mod, which was really nice for organizing larger projects. I don't really like how it wound up playing out in terms of building communities (insulation taped to insulation insulated with a thick layer of insulation) but having a "workspace" section where you can basically have your own mini-forum and invite people in would be sweet.

again, not that I expect that to be reasonable to implement. but a meerca can dream, right?

Ewwwww.

to the feature or the implementation?

Yes.

the feature is really useful for certain things. for instance, it's a great way to organize designing a custom set, which is something we don't really have a place for here right now. might also be useful for a more in-depth construction of a campaign world or something, I don't know, I don't do those sorts of things, but I know that having your own personal forum is really great for the structure needed when designing a set.

that said, on the implementation front I totally agree with you.

Razor!!!

I hear what your talking about, and something like that was similar to how we were looking at groups when the forum first got going, but it has a few problems:

1) a giant pain to implement
2) no idea how to do this without it leading to a bunch of insular communities that never interact at all. dotp has this problem already to a large extent, and it is also part of why it has been so hard to get rpg developed; people post where they are comfortable, and if you give people space to make their own little private areas, posts start drying up, and you end up with tasteslikespam.com

I get the logic behind it, and I like the idea of it, but the danger of 2) really makes me question how much 1) is really worth investing it, when it might actually hurt the forum in the long run. Sorta like letting women vote; it sounds good in theory, but look where it got us.

You forgot about "3" being how much of a pain the become to moderate because not only do insular communities tend to choose to do things like flame each other rather than report posts so that mods can see it, but each of those pocket communities also tends to see itself as having a different set of rules rather than the CoC. It was an issue that was huge on WotC because these small groups now suddenly thought that being spammy, flaming, posting offensive material, etc was all fine because "thats just the sort of group this is" instead of following the rules of the boards Code of Conduct. And with them being insular and not tattle telling on their own members that sort of material went unnoticed by the mod team for quite a while most of the time, if i was found at all.

I see that, although I think 2) could be mitigated with some decent branding. call it a workshop instead of a group and make the main entrance be through your own user panel, and it'll feel much more like it's your space to work on projects, rather than a place to set up communities. you could even take out the ability to share it directly with others entirely, so that it would just be a private workspace, but that makes collaborations more difficult.

no solutions to 1) though. but I've seen talk in other threads (and I agree) that one of the best tools in building a community is immersion, so having as many of the tools people need on-site as possible is valuable. for instance, right now, I could get everything I want from this feature by going back to the mothership and doing my work there, but that's not spending time on NGA. so, while I don't imagine this is a near-term implementable feature, if this does wind up being a whole thing (and I've been gone for nine months, maybe that's no longer the goal) having a private section where I can segment and organize projects is a valuable tool to have.

I have a private section where I can organize projects ... its called my computer.

I'm not saying that groups are 100% bad, but any pluses they have become quickly outweighed by the cons or are easily doable without needing to have a group. For instance everything that you've brought up so far would easily be doable via the wiki: You could have all the information of a campaign setting broken down into various wiki pages, each of those wiki pages has a discussion page automatically built in where people can talk and thinktank, and you could simply have a single master thread in the appropriate area that not only links to various wiki pages or to a table of contents page but also included more conversation about the project as a whole. There are in fact already wiki pages doing this on the NGA wiki, like Squinty's Sandbox. I see no reason that working on a MtG set couldnt be easily done the same way.

there's a wiki?

yeah that addresses most of my needs here except for potentially privacy if I didn't want anyone else looking at it. but still, should solve most things.

Well groups would be open forum anyway so you'd still be resulting to PM or outside means to communicate private things to people, and anything you didnt want read...well... a message board tends to not be the place to post that sorta thing.

And yes, theres a NGA wiki but its mostly still being built, its not had its 'official launch' but people are allowed to start setting up things there.

see, that's my point. a private workspace is a really useful thing to have, and integrating it into a site I already use encourages me to spend more time there. I've used the mothership group settings for maybe ten or so different private projects over the years. it's a piss-poor platform for communities, but as a workspace it's top notch. (besides their awful rich text crap, but that's why I want it here.)

Yeah wish the fact that we have a wiki was a bit more obvious at this point, since most of the major features seem to be ready to roll. Folx are still organizing things based on threads and that's not really the best tool we have available anymore.

Although I honestly question a little the use of the wiki as a workstation since M:EM is using it as basically the core finished product of the entire project, and I think Squinty's Sandbox is designed to be a similarly large-scale collaborative work. Like, if the wiki is being primarily optimized for visibility of major products of NGA having it flooded with small projects when maybe individual index pages that link to a wide range of threads could work better seems like a design working at cross purposes with itself.

Still, I think razorborne is right that there are significant advantages to having semi-private workspaces. Particularly with the PM cap set so low that any significant amount of collaboration is in real danger of getting wiped out.

I've still never had an issue with the PM cap, even when active in almost a dozen PBP games while simultaneously just chattering. Of course I also know how to use folders and such. *shrug*

Cool glad things are working out for you guess they logically must then be working out just as well for me thanks for clearing that up.

Sarcasm aside... have you even created folders for your PMs?

I dunno bro do you even lift?