Suggestions for the board

engine

There are some useful materials in this forum, like tutorials or samples. However, they tend to get buried within the workshop forum, which is basically used to present ones finished stories. How about separating finished games and WIPs from stuff like tutorials/code samples/engines/utilities to make it easier to find?

writer_

Took me a minute to figure out WIPs (works in progress).

I agree with your premise as I was just looking for places to post my story and looked to this forum for guidelines/locations.


That said, posting to THIS forum is severely limited
Restrictions: 4 per post, maximum total size 192KB, maximum individual size 128KB

greyelf

[quote author=writer_ link=topic=2128.msg6047#msg6047 date=1419267398]
That said, posting to THIS forum is severely limited
Restrictions: 4 per post, maximum total size 192KB, maximum individual size 128KB

I believe that is due to klembot not wanting to turn this forum into a hosting server.
(Remember bandwidth and storage space is not free, so if your not paying for it then someone else must be. *smile*)

engine

Well, to me this isn't about hosting but more about what kind of thread should be where. The majority of threads in the Workshop seem to be games the creators want to showcase but then there are also resources and tutorials and stuff which, as I think, should better have its own place.

klembot

I like the idea of being able to see at a glance whether something is a WIP, code, or a finished story. Only question to me is how to actually implement that in the forum software, Simple Machines Forum.

I'll mention that we're toying with switching to Vanilla forums software, which has more built-in capabilities to tag topics and such, but right now we're hung up on migrating the existing data over. If we do go this route, we will give everyone a heads-up with plenty of time to look at the new software and weigh in as to whether switching to it seems like a good idea.

greyelf

Does the creator of a Topic have the ability to later change the Title of the Topic? If so then perhaps defining a Topic Title format would help?
Game name (state) [last release date in YYYY-MM-DD or YYYY-MMM-DD]

eg. Uberstory v1.1 (WIP) [2014-12-20 or 2014-dec-20]

Sharpe

As discussed, I am most in favor of having as very few sub-forums as possible for reasons explained.

AntonMuerte

While I can understand keeping the sub-forums as few as possible, would it be possible to have a "how-to" section (although maybe not on the forum, but linked to) that contains code snippets or other useful bits?  I'll occasionally go on Help just to see if there's anything on there that I can add to my WIP that does it better than I've done it, or I may stumble across it when I'm just browsing the forum.  Sometimes, I'll be looking for something on Help and I'm not entirely sure how to phrase what I'm looking for as my keyword may be different to someone else's so I can end up literally trawling through the entire section just to see if there's anything that's been asked before.

It could be a "locked" forum that's mod maintained and read-only, and contains either a link direct to the post or just the code as a download.  However, I can understand that this could place too much of a workload on the mods and/or is unworkable (how do you decide if a piece of code is worth including, and would people get upset if theirs wasn't included etc?).

greyelf

I don't know if anyone besides the "powers that be" can edited it but is this not what the wiki is for? *smile*