What's new
  • If you were supposed to get an email from the forum but didn't (e.g. to verify your account for registration), email Wes at [email protected] or talk to me on Discord for help. Sometimes the server hits our limit of emails we can send per hour.
  • Get in our Discord chat! Discord.gg/stararmy
  • 📅 April 2024 is YE 46.3 in the RP.

Admin Notes - March 2019

Here's some recent Star Army news!

General Updates

I updated the following stuff:
  • Xenforo (forum software)
    • Enabled push notifications
  • Xenforo add-ons:
    • 8WAYRUN Discord Integration (it's working again!)
    • XenFocus Titan (style) - this was recently made the default style. NOTE: You can customize the background and other parts of this.
    • Themehouse Tactical (style)
To customize the new style, use the little icon that's right of the alert bell icon or scroll to the bottom of the forum and it's also next to the style chooser link.

Staff Updates

I spoke with Nashoba and we agreed that he'll temporarily step down from staff. This is to relieve pressure on him as he works on his IRL situation (he is job hunting) and I want to stress that it's intended to be a temporary change. The intent is to allow him to focus on the most important activity in the site: roleplaying. During this hiatus, Nashoba's staff banner will be replaced with a new, honorary "Retired Staff" banner I'll make. The retired staff banner will also be available to other ex-staff (e.g. Fred).

It is also my intent to promote our Staff Apprentices to full staff members by the end of April (Jack Pine and Syaoran). New staff members will be given specific roles like facilitiating RP or managing conflicts in the community.

Finance

Star Army is down to 4 donators and the donations are not covering the cost of the site. In order to keep up upkeep costs and with luxuries like getting art for people, and to avoid crappy solutions like ads, I am considering having a donation drive. If we can pass $200 in the upcoming drive, I would like to make a new order of custom patches to mail people. I was thinking the newer-style hinomaru would be good. I'm also open to other suggestions. It's kind of a tradition that we have these donation drives in March or May for whatever reason, although we haven't done one in a few years. Also, don't worry, I'd pay for the whole site myself if I had to. But some help would be nice, so stay tuned for details on a donation drive and how to get your patches.

RP Updates

April is a mandatory RP Review month, which is a fancy way of saying I'm going to make all the Game Masters do a checklist regarding how well they're keeping up with their plots. The objective is to make sure the wiki is getting properly updated, wanted ads and the list of plots are updated (new members really need these to be up to date!) and that inactive player characters are swept off the rosters. With this in mind, I need all the people roleplaying here to help your GMs out by updating your character wiki pages now, and by making sure all the plots you're in are getting posts from you so your characters don't get cut for inactivity.

I feel like this section should also have some updates on what's happening in the big picture of the RP, so let's all work on moving the overall story of SARP along. What do you need as far as getting entertainment out of the Kuvexian War? Any questions, comments, or concerns about RP?

Also, I'm currently looking for assistance with Star Army stuff, so let me know if you are able to contribute some time and effort and I'll tell you some tasks I could use a hand with.
 
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Raising the Site Minimum Age?

I am increasingly looking at making the site's minimum age 18 instead of 16. We live in a world where having a website that allows children to join is increasingly complicated. Although access to Star Army's small adult-only sections are completely off-limits to our 16 and 17 year old members, the fact that we have those people in the same community is potentially problematic and more than that, recent legal fights over content and copyrights make it clear that we're almost certainly in a better position when everyone on the site is an adult and can agree to contracts, including the site's Terms of Use, without having to get their parents involved. So if I raise the site's minimum age to 18, the way it would work is that we'd make 18 the minimum to register and all of our current underage members would be allowed to stay and they'd all age out of that category by 2021. Your feedback on this is appreciated.

Splitting the Calendar Namespace?

I propose that we split the calendar namespace on the wiki to TIMELINE: and CALENDAR: where timeline would contain in-character years and events (e.g. YE 31), and calendar would keep all the OOC years and events (e.g. the wiki page for 2007). A redirect would be left in place for the moved pages and all pages would have their links automatically updated by the move plugin. Your feedback on this is appreciated.

Character Namespace Updates?

I propose that CHARACTER: be redirected to CHARACTERS: and all pages moved accordingly. Additionally, I would like to split character pages into an active section and an archived/inactive section. This would allow us to count characters more easily and de-clutter some character lists by only showing active characters. An alternative to this is to use a plugin-based tagging system. Your feedback on this is appreciated.

Quality Suggestions for Wiki Articles

Wiki articles now have an expandable section at the bottom of them that lists any automatically-detected issues with articles, like not having a title header, broken links, incorrect section header nesting, and other issues. The quality suggestions are only on the StarArmyGhostNebula2017 style so far. Using this tool has helped me correct formatting issues on dozens of pages so far and helps the admins know which pages need the most attention for formatting. Every thing the tool checks for was already a part of the Star Army Style Guide. What's your thoughts on this tool? Additionally, there's an option to disable marking pages off for having only a single author. Should we keep that or disable it. I do like the idea of people collaborating on pages more.

Make the Forum Our Front Page?

I propose we eliminate the site's front page and either move the forum to the root directory or redirect the root to the forum, so that going to StarArmy.com will bring you directly to the forum page instead of the non-mobile-friendly landing page. This will give us better search engine results because the page will always have new stuff on it. Your feedback on this idea is appreciated.
 
Nothing really sounds too extreme but splitting namespaces seems like a waste of time for something that won’t provide a huge benefit, personally i see no reason to count active characters except for advertising purposes and its misleading anyway as most users have many characters. I believe active users would be a better concept to count.

On a side note collaboration is cool but often very messy, anyone who’s done a colab on a school project can tell you almost always one person writes the whole thing simply for the sake of making it all sound the same
 
Thanks for the feedback, Club24. I agree that having to constantly move characters around into the appropriate namespace would introduce a certain level of overhead/work that someone would have to do (either GMs or staff) and is probably a bit extra.

As for disabling the "single author" check, your opinion is noted and I'll decide on it based on feedback like yours.
 
Im nit qyite sure I understand this author check system you’re talking about, i was more just saying that not many people collaborate on articles.

What exactly does the check do?
 
If only a single author has edited a wiki article, the article takes one point of Quality Damage ( :p ) and the advice says to have someone else look it over and edit it.
 
Fonts Updated on Star Army Titan Style

I've made Droid Sans the default font (same as the wiki) and increased the font size slightly so that the forums are more readable. Hopefully you guys will like this better.
 
One suggestion i have is that instead of marking an article down just mark it so others know it could use a look over, plus the ntse member who reviews it should be looking it over but won’t necessarily be edited by them
 
I can't recall how I thought about the age limit in the past, so if I'm contradicting myself from years ago, I beg your pardon.

That said, I believe raising the limit to 18 is in the best interest of the site and you, Wes.
 
i mean this site isnt nearly as untamed and lewd and dangerous to a 16 year old as it was when i first joined in 2012~

That said im both for/against raising the age limit. On one hand, 16 year olds are way more mature and immersed in their lives than i was at 16. And are even much better writers these days than i was at even 19. And we miss out on being a good first impression on some of them that will no doubt come to us or stumble upon us as their first RP community.

On another i know its a legal thing and not a maturity thing.

also im afraid of going back to the 99% lewd with little to no minors to keep us adults in check and the next thing you know the uniforms get even tighter or start flying off all together all over again~

i have no imput on the calender. and im neutral on the character aritcles and ive already diven my input on the discord about the wiki rating system and that im against our new smiley/frowny face system that penalizes me for being a trash man with trash articles and ill rebel if it ever enters anything into the NTSE about them pointing out a have a red frown when i need a green smiley...

For the front page tho. I Do think the forum should be our front page. Its one thing to stumble upon the wiki and get lost in the immersion before you even found the forum like i did. Its another to start straight at the forum. Maybe we can have a kind of entry page for first time IPs that gives them the same quick rundown the wiki page does with infor and links to the wiki and new player intro and what not but upon closing or hitting OK brings you to the forum?
 
Charmaylarg Dufrain said:
i mean this site isnt nearly as untamed and lewd and dangerous to a 16 year old as it was when i first joined in 2012~

That said im both for/against raising the age limit. On one hand, 16 year olds are way more mature and immersed in their lives than i was at 16. And are even much better writers these days than i was at even 19. And we miss out on being a good first impression on some of them that will no doubt come to us or stumble upon us as their first RP community.

On another i know its a legal thing and not a maturity thing.

also im afraid of going back to the 99% lewd with little to no minors to keep us adults in check and the next thing you know the uniforms get even tighter or start flying off all together all over again~

i have no imput on the calender. and im neutral on the character aritcles and ive already diven my input on the discord about the wiki rating system and that im against our new smiley/frowny face system that penalizes me for being a trash man with trash articles and ill rebel if it ever enters anything into the NTSE about them pointing out a have a red frown when i need a green smiley...

For the front page tho. I Do think the forum should be our front page. Its one thing to stumble upon the wiki and get lost in the immersion before you even found the forum like i did. Its another to start straight at the forum. Maybe we can have a kind of entry page for first time IPs that gives them the same quick rundown the wiki page does with infor and links to the wiki and new player intro and what not but upon closing or hitting OK brings you to the forum?
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Wes said:
... we're almost certainly in a better position when everyone on the site is an adult and can agree to contracts, including the site's Terms of Use, without having to get their parents involved.
Click to expand...

Parents are they key here -- and I think they were back in the day too.

We can gauge for ourselves the maturity of the people who come here. We can't gauge their parents, whom we likely won't meet at all.

Until they send Wes a nastygram or a letter from a lawyer.
 
Okay, I've given a few days for feedback so that everyone had a reasonable amount of time to post their feedback.

Here's the decisions I made on these issues:

1. We'll raise the site age to 18, but members aged 16-17 who already joined prior to 1 May 2019 will be allowed to stay until they're 18. I'm considering putting a banner under their names as a warning to people not to ero JP with with them, like the 🔞 emoji or something (because new people otherwise might join and assume everyone else here is 18+). Content-wise the site will operate the same way but we'll probably label things as SFW or NSFW versus the current 18+ on 1 May 2021.

2. Calendar namespace: We'll keep OOC calendar stuff in calendar: and move IC stuff to timeline:. Each of these will also have an events: sub-namespace for IRL and IC events respectively. Timeline will be moved into Timeline: and I'll create a timeline sidebar.

3. We'll keep the quality suggestions for wiki articles and expand them into the other styles.

4. We'll make the forum the site's front page.

5. Character namespaces won't be changed based on activity.
 
Can we keep the ability to opt out accounts from seing the nsfw stuff like we do now? I may be 18 but I don’t particularly want to login and have a bunch of erp titles in my face
 
RPG-D RPGfix
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