[Forum Ideas] just a few ideas...

[RebelMoogle]

I hope this hasn't been posted before, couldn't find anything through the search function.

I had a few ideas concerning the forum and thought I'd share...

Smilies fitting the Board & Site style

the yellow smilies really stand out, which is good.
I thought some more fitting smilies might be better though, maybe from old games, or just simple blue ones which look pixelated.

Level mod
A simple level mod where you get experience for character count in posts and if people answer to your topic.
this is a phpbb plugin I made myself, very simple. every level you could get a new rank, this is the way it works in my forum.
you can see what it looks like here: http://www.rykalstudio.de/forum
sorry the content is in german.

what do you think?
If it's to much trouble or not worth it, or you don't want to mod the board to much, I can see that. I'd be willing to help, I programmed a lot of php, study Computer Visualistics (similar to computer science but more graphics programming ) since 2005, and also have worked with photoshop and my trusty wacom tablet since 2000.

Maybe someone has some more ideas?
we could just make this a forum ideas thread... just for fun... and maybe some of them are good enough to become real.. who knows

[curbee]

Are you proposing to make the LRR forum into an RPG?

[JesterJ.]

No offense, but to me it seems a little gimmicky. I think it's a really cool idea and might work splendidly on other boards, but I've always thought of the LRR Forums as a pretty straight forward place without all them fancy bells 'n' whistles the kids are playin' with now'days. Your mod is damn cool, I just don't think it would fit very well here.


Not that I have any say in the matter whatsoever, but there's my $.02

[RebelMoogle]

nahh no rpg, just another way of showing how active you are on the forum,
but i see your point of too gimmicky...

what about the smilies though? only a fitting smily pack would be needed, right?
it might just be me, never liking the standard smilies... except for mr green

[curbee]

Smilies are entirely over-rated.

[Annchan]

I would like more smilies but it would be hard to find some that aren't too strange or that are out of place. also I don't like large ones.

[Fuzzyfreaker]

If you do the RPG level thing, then it just incites for more people to make spam posts, taking a place of conversation and turning into a place of competition. And that's never a good thing. It may work for other places, but I've seen it can go horribly, horribly wrong.

And the smile things is interesting, but again, it's not really needed. I rarely use the actual ones, but, I like things the way they are.

[Bob The Magic Camel]

We don't need more reason for people to view their post count as their e-peen (should that be iPeen now we're post-2000? Personally, I look forward to 2010, when all electronics become o-objects.)

[Master Gunner]

i c wat u did thar.

[Nevrmore]

People still use smilies unironically?

[Graham]

We might not be sticking with PHPbb forever, so we'd have to see about that.

I'd be okay with expanded smiley options. Not sure about the leveling. Ranks are what we have the LRRcast forum rank contests for.

[Frozengale]

We could always do Smilies that are more along the lines of Endless Paradigm and such places, where they are kinda big, so we have them of LRR Characters instead of small pixely things

[Evil Jim]

We might not be sticking with PHPbb forever, so we'd have to see about that.

I'd be okay with expanded smiley options. Not sure about the leveling. Ranks are what we have the LRRcast forum rank contests for.

This. One thing I really like about this forum is that you earn your rank by doing something epic, stellar or just by generally impressing the hell out of the LRR crew. It gives your rank significance, & something that cannot be acquired by post count alone. So far this is the only community I have seen that does this & I wouldn't want to see it changed.

[tamaness]

Smilies: I don't use them unless I'm being sarcastic. I disable smilies by default in all forums that I visit.

Forum ranks: I like seeing the custom ranks that the crew gives out for total epicness. I'd rather not see that cheapened by having it be a measure of post count for e-peen purposes.

[RebelMoogle]

didn't know about the rank contests, that's actually so much better!
It gives some more meaning to the ranks... what an excellent idea.
I love it (sorry for not knowing this already.)

Maybe I'll get around to making a few smiley style suggestions, but not before monday (exam)

[GHOVO]

nahh no rpg, just another way of showing how active you are on the forum

We haz a post count ... is that not good enough?

[RebelMoogle]

nahh no rpg, just another way of showing how active you are on the forum

We haz a post count ... is that not good enough?

well the exp. points of the level doesn't count posts, it counts the quantity of content / number of characters and how many people reply to the topics you make. you can specify how much people get for each and min / max values

you can also specifiy subforums were you get nothing (spam / OffTopic Forums)

[GHOVO]

nahh no rpg, just another way of showing how active you are on the forum

We haz a post count ... is that not good enough?

well the exp. points of the level doesn't count posts, it counts the quantity of content / number of characters and how many people reply to the topics you make. you can specify how much people get for each and min / max values

Ah ... There is stuff I wanna say but dunno how to say it without being insulting ...

[Evil Jim]

didn't know about the rank contests, that's actually so much better! It gives some more meaning to the ranks... what an excellent idea. I love it (sorry for not knowing this already.)

Listen to the podcasts. That is where crew issues challenges & awards the winners. They don't do them every single week but the podcasts are worth listening to regardless & the best way to find out what's going on with them.

You can see how some of our current forum members got their ranks in this old thread.

Pretty much all the ranks are from LRRcast contests (which we should really do more of...)
I think the only one that isn't is florn, who happened to be our 2000th forum member. There was a reason we did that... can't recall.

Oh well. Still, the reasoning behind them is always funny.