Extremely important information about the future of our forums (Staff only)

[Antvasima]

Okay. That would probably be useful, yes.

 

[Crabwhale]

That's good because honestly FF is very impractical all things considered.

 

[Starter_Pack]

@Antvasima

I just spoke with one of the higher moderators on Lake Valor, since I'm not entirely sure what software they run, and they said they would get back to me soon.

Do you happen to have a Discord account, by the way? I'd like to get you in contact directly with the owner of that site so you may personally help in investigating whether or not the software used by this community will be sufficient for our needs.

 

[Andytrenom]

FF?

 

[Starter_Pack]

FanFiction dot net.

 

[Crabwhale]

Fanfiction

 

[Sera_EX]

@Starter Pack

Ant does not use Discord and most likely never will.

 

[Crabwhale]

Could Amino be of any use?

Not saying that from myself, just a suggestion.

 

[Antvasima]

@Starter Pack

Thank you very much for the help.

I do not have an active Discord account, and am extremely overworked today (I will probably have to go to bed very late as it is), but you can show him my first post in this thread, in which I go into detail about our requirements. He can also reach me via our private wiki chat or fanfiction.net after he has read this thread.

 

[Sera_EX]

Amino isn't exactly on the list of best options.

 

[Starter_Pack]

Could Amino be of any use?
Not saying that from myself, just a suggestion.

Coming from my own personal experience of that particular platform, I don't think Amino will work for a number of reasons.

In all honesty, it's just a Reddit version of Tumblr.

@Antvasima

Very well. I'll link them to this page, and have them attempt to contact you through those means as well.

 

[Antvasima]

It is also very important that we can keep registrations as invite only in the beginning.

 

[Elizhaa]

Honestly, I agree that moving our discussion/forum system to another site is the best solution because we have would a better system compare to fandom's system which would suit our needs way better.

 

[Matthew_Schroeder]

Hmm. I would be far too swarmed with notifications if I get one for every single upvote or quote. I hope that it is possible to change the settings so we only get notifications if a thread has been updated with new replies, like we have now.

You can mute notifications on your settings. Or choose what will give you notifications and what won't.

 

[Elizhaa]

Moving the site to the a website like the one proposed by Matthew and Starter pack could work. Having sub-forum for our site site like fc/oc and Joke battle wiki is a good idea too.

 

[Antvasima]

@Starter Pack

Thank you. Fanfiction.net works best for me, as I am extremely overworked already.

@Matthew

Okay. That seems good.

 

[Skalt711]

WHAT??? WHO DARES TO TOUCH THE FORUMS???

In all seriousness, I'll be looking for possible alternatives. Xenforo looks catchy, gonna investigate this software

 

[Antvasima]

It is also very important that we can keep registrations as invite only in the beginning.

Is this possible? If not, the trolls will inevitably start snatching our usernames.

 

[Skalt711]

Xenforo doesn't seem to have built-in invite-only registration... It is possible with an add-on, but this one is quite old. I'm afraid that it may not be compatible with the newer versions.

 

[Starter_Pack]

I am currently playing around with the system on Lake Valor while I await a response from the admits of the site, and I noticed that the site saves drafts of your posts automatically, which could potentially eliminate the hassle of creating a super-long, multi-paragraph argument, only to end up losing it.

I don't know if Xenforo is capable of this as well, but it seems to be a pretty good selling point for this one.

 

[DontTalkDT]

It is also very important that we can keep registrations as invite only in the beginning.

Is this possible? If not, the trolls will inevitably start snatching our usernames.

As alternative one could maybe try to keep the URL secret until the staff registered.

Otherwise we can always remove their accounts if that happens.

 

[Antvasima]

Okay, please investigate further. I don't want the new forum to be immediately destroyed by any trolls.

 

[Skalt711]

Discourse has a built-in invite-only registratio, no idea about how it works though

 

[Skalt711]

(Discourse is free for self-hosting btw)

I have some work now, I'll be AFK for a while

 

[Antvasima]

As alternative one could maybe try to keep the URL secret until the staff registered.

Otherwise we can always remove their accounts if that happens.

It does not seem realistic to both keep it a secret and get all of the 61 people in the staff transfered to it within a brief span of time.

 

[Antvasima]

Is it possible to set up a Discourse forum in a wiki address that my friend owns, and is there a higher quality paid option?

 

[Skalt711]

Made my work quickly.

I believe that the Discourse forum can be assigned to a custom address. If the forum is going to be hosted at Discourse's own cloud, the problem is that the only paid plan option with unlimited amount of staff members is the Enterprise one, which needs to be directly discussed with the forum hosting staff.

 

[Antvasima]

Thank you for the information. How many staff members can we at most have otherwise?

 

[Skalt711]

15 with the Business plan, which goes at 300$ per month.

 

[Antvasima]

Oh, that is both quite a lot of extra money, and very insufficient for our purposes.

 

[The_real_cal_howard]

Matt and Starter's ideas did pique my interest. I've been around the bend with Smogon and if we could get our forums like that, it wouldn't be such a bad thing.

Also (and I'm surprised nobody asked this yet), what does OBD do/use? They have external forums unconnected to FANDOM and have a very similar structure to us, so something like that has already proven to work wonders for vs debating sites.

 

[Antvasima]

@Skalt711

We probably need room for about 80 staff members or so. Could you ask them if they can give a poor entertainment wiki a less expensive deal?

 

[Antvasima]

@Cal

It would be useful to know what the ACF and OBD use, and how well it works out for them, yes.

 

[DarkDragonMedeus]

First we got the highlights system removed, and now there's no longer going to be message walls or even threads? I really don't want to say anything about how it's going to turn out publicly, but we'll figure something out even if it won't necessarily be as smooth or quick. It's hard enough having to have both VSBW tabs and tabs for other websites without dealing with lag.

But as I said, what happens, happens.

 

[Skalt711]

@Antvasima

The Discourse forum can also be hosted at DigitalOcean with the 20$ per month cost. But it will take technical knowledge to set up a self-hosted forum.

As for the less expensive deal, I'm not sure I can handle conversations well yet (Too young ). It should be also noted that the Enterprise plan is only aimed for full-fledged companies.

 

[Antvasima]

If we use the DigitalOcean option, can we get more staff members accepted?

Also, what would Xenforo cost us, and are there other valid available alternatives to that and Discourse?

 

[DarkDragonMedeus]

It should preferably be a platform with has no finance fees, as some people may not have enough money to afford it. It's kind of bad enough that staff members aren't getting paid, but if they actually have to pay to manage; that's even worse.

 

[Antvasima]

Well, it needs to fulfill our needs, and we will have Paypal donation options along with ads to help us out.

 

[Sir_Ovens]

God, discussing issues by alternating between two different sites will be, pardon my French, absolute ass.

 

[Skalt711]

@Antvasima

There should be no staff member amount limit on the self-hosted (DigitalOcean) option.