Hi Star Army! I want you to know about some ongoing changes to the way the forums are set up. We're eliminating the "archives" sections and subforums and moving the posts into top-level forums, such as faction forums. I'll explain why below. Also I'll explain how, if you want to view only a certain plot's posts, you can use the forum's prefix filter to create a "virtual subforum" showing only posts from that plot.
Recently, we've been slowly working on a project to reduce the number of sub-forums on the site. In particular, subforums which no longer have any activity. Star Army has been around for a long time and our inactive forums actually outnumbered our active ones. I don't want the site to feel like it's primarily a mausoleum for old plots.
Another problem was that it didn't make a lot of sense to have two faction forums (e.g. Yamatai and Yamatai archives) for the same content, and when to move inactive threads from one to the other was unclear. The faction forums were not used much more than the archives anyway, and the archive forums for factions were mainly just used as containers for inactive plot subforums. In short, they were redundant.
Beyond this, user feedback from roleplayers suggests that the very existence of archive forums is a major turn-off for people looking for a roleplaying community to join. Put simply, I want more people to join and roleplay with you guys and archives appear to be getting in the way of that.
The solution is to get rid of the archive forums (but keep their posts, of course). And I'm on it!
I'm slowly liquidating SARP's archives by deleting the subforums that are inactive due to completion, etc. Their posts are all being moved to the main faction forums, except for the adult ones which have a special subforum for that. Yamatai is now completed. As part of that process I've been tagging threads with prefixes...
"But Wes," you say, "if we move the posts into a single forum, won't that be messy and hard to find what we want?" Aha! Here's where the tagging comes in! One of the great things about our new XenForo forum is the prefix system. Previously we just used it for "RP" and "OOC" but it's much more useful than that because it allows you to filter posts by type. So I've been adding prefixes for every plot so that you can also filter posts by plot. Let me show you how:
At the bottom of each forum there's a tab that says "Thread Display Options." Click it to open and you'll see an option to pick a prefix. Select the plot you want and hit "Set Options." Voila! You now have a virtual subforum for the old plot you chose (example: The YSE forum, filtered by prefix to only show YSS Asamoya posts).
This way, if you only want to see posts from Plot X, you can. You can also directly link to the filtered forum as shown (Example: Miharu).
OOC threads: Since they're all OOC and they're generally not used, I've been merging the extra OOC threads like JP Scheduling threads into the main OOC one for most forums. The reason for these merges is to avoid clutter in the OOC and Planning Forum, which is where the OOC threads are being migrated to.
In summary:
Recently, we've been slowly working on a project to reduce the number of sub-forums on the site. In particular, subforums which no longer have any activity. Star Army has been around for a long time and our inactive forums actually outnumbered our active ones. I don't want the site to feel like it's primarily a mausoleum for old plots.
Another problem was that it didn't make a lot of sense to have two faction forums (e.g. Yamatai and Yamatai archives) for the same content, and when to move inactive threads from one to the other was unclear. The faction forums were not used much more than the archives anyway, and the archive forums for factions were mainly just used as containers for inactive plot subforums. In short, they were redundant.
Beyond this, user feedback from roleplayers suggests that the very existence of archive forums is a major turn-off for people looking for a roleplaying community to join. Put simply, I want more people to join and roleplay with you guys and archives appear to be getting in the way of that.
The solution is to get rid of the archive forums (but keep their posts, of course). And I'm on it!
I'm slowly liquidating SARP's archives by deleting the subforums that are inactive due to completion, etc. Their posts are all being moved to the main faction forums, except for the adult ones which have a special subforum for that. Yamatai is now completed. As part of that process I've been tagging threads with prefixes...
"But Wes," you say, "if we move the posts into a single forum, won't that be messy and hard to find what we want?" Aha! Here's where the tagging comes in! One of the great things about our new XenForo forum is the prefix system. Previously we just used it for "RP" and "OOC" but it's much more useful than that because it allows you to filter posts by type. So I've been adding prefixes for every plot so that you can also filter posts by plot. Let me show you how:
At the bottom of each forum there's a tab that says "Thread Display Options." Click it to open and you'll see an option to pick a prefix. Select the plot you want and hit "Set Options." Voila! You now have a virtual subforum for the old plot you chose (example: The YSE forum, filtered by prefix to only show YSS Asamoya posts).
This way, if you only want to see posts from Plot X, you can. You can also directly link to the filtered forum as shown (Example: Miharu).
OOC threads: Since they're all OOC and they're generally not used, I've been merging the extra OOC threads like JP Scheduling threads into the main OOC one for most forums. The reason for these merges is to avoid clutter in the OOC and Planning Forum, which is where the OOC threads are being migrated to.
In summary:
- We're getting rid of archives in general because they're redundant, and they make SARP look like a graveyard.
- Old RP posts will live in the main forums of their factions and can be viewed with all the other plots next to them, or filtered by prefix to create a "virtual subforum."
- OOC threads will live in the OOC forum