Ideas/implementations for the Forum

[Kybyrian]

Sorry but uhm, what are OGs, WCs, and ECs exactly?

 

[Vanessa28]

Olympic Games, World Championships, European Championship. And then more ment for things like prediction threads during those events. Just an idea

 

[Kybyrian]

Hmm not sure, seems like that would be a more tedious thing to keep track of. But not even that, just not sure if it seems like a good award idea. I want to work on implementing some new things soon, but my internet never really lets me get around to it. Admittedly I've been slacking around lately, but I do have a lot of things I need to attend to.

 

[A Link In Time]

I find it appropriate to bump this thread.

I definitely endorse the idea of longevity awards but a three year membership shouldn't be the end of the line in that department.

Other possible suggestions for major milestones deserving awards:

• 10000 forum post count
• 10000 Wiki edits
• Site Staff for 2 years (these drop like flies; they needed to be awarded)
• 10 articles published for the ZD Main Site

Often times, newer members look up to the more established ones and this could be a means through which to "share the wealth" and encourage our forum veterans to emit that positive vibe for a longer period of time.

 

[Locke]

I find it appropriate to bump this thread.

I definitely endorse the idea of longevity awards but a three year membership shouldn't be the end of the line in that department.

Other possible suggestions for major milestones deserving awards:

• 10000 forum post count
• 10000 Wiki edits
• Site Staff for 2 years (these drop like flies; they needed to be awarded)
• 10 articles published for the ZD Main Site

Often times, newer members look up to the more established ones and this could be a means through which to "share the wealth" and encourage our forum veterans to emit that positive vibe for a longer period of time.

I believe I speak for the entire Wiki Admin team when I vehemently oppose any sort of recognition for number of wiki edits, but the others sound good and I definitely think we need more of these milestone-based awards.

Wiki edits aren't like forum posts. One could go through each section of an article and improve them one at a time, or one could edit the entire article at once and achieve the same result. Whether it took one or ten edits as counted by the software, all I care about is that the article was improved, and I can't put a number on that. This is also why there's no edit count requirement for the wiki forum ranks.

 

[A Link In Time]

I believe I speak for the entire Wiki Admin team when I vehemently oppose any sort of recognition for number of wiki edits, but the others sound good and I definitely think we need more of these milestone-based awards.

Alright. Fair enough. That said, I do believe Wiki work should be acknowledged in some way. Perhaps this means a milestone-based award for continued perseverance in editing-a year of dedication to the ZD Wiki (personal matters taken into account, 5 of or 6 days per week of quality edits).

 

[Emma]

I believe I speak for the entire Wiki Admin team when I vehemently oppose any sort of recognition for number of wiki edits, but the others sound good and I definitely think we need more of these milestone-based awards.

Wiki edits aren't like forum posts. One could go through each section of an article and improve them one at a time, or one could edit the entire article at once and achieve the same result. Whether it took one or ten edits as counted by the software, all I care about is that the article was improved, and I can't put a number on that. This is also why there's no edit count requirement for the wiki forum ranks.

I can confirm this. I've personally witnessed this very thing happen before. It was a total disaster. People were so concerned with hitting that edit count that they made a huge number of poor quality edits. Often with intentional and obvious mistakes just so they could make another edit to fix it. They'd do things like fix one typo per edit, even though another one was plainly visible near that typo, even in the next word. There was one person that was extremely bad. He would literally make dozens of such edits per minute. Yes, per minute. He'd make them faster than we could check them and he swamped all the logs and lists with his edits and completely destroyed the management efforts of the staff. He'd amounted 20,000 edits in a month and a half. A count that took me over two years to reach. It was a total nightmare. One which I never want to relive. We are never doing anything recognizing edit count beyond the small requirement for being autoconfirmed (50 edits, strictly a protection against things like vandalism and NOT a reward for editing). Beyond that, no edit count recognition. It'd be an invitation to disaster.

 

[A Link In Time]

Regarding username changes: Username changes should be handed over to members with a button available on their pages for them to type in a new username. Would this lead to some people attempting to change their username too often? Possibly. The solution I propose for combating people who frequently desire a name change is setting a quota of one name change per period of time. One name change every year seems like a reasonable compromise. Most won't get tired of a new username that soon especially if they chose wisely and this will prevent confusion regarding who's who.

 

[TheMasterSword]

Regarding username changes: Username changes should be handed over to members with a button available on their pages for them to type in a new username. Would this lead to some people attempting to change their username too often? Possibly. The solution I propose for combating people who frequently desire a name change is setting a quota of one name change per period of time. One name change every year seems like a reasonable compromise. Most won't get tired of a new username that soon especially if they chose wisely and this will prevent confusion regarding who's who.

Now, a quota would work, but another issue is overall abuse of the system. For example:
THareous changes his name to Spyro.
ALIT changes it to SPyro
mastersword2 changes his name to SPYro
and so on and so forth. Of course infraction would be of use here.
Also, it takes time to get used to new names. It took me at least a few days to get used to the whole Waffleninja PancakeSamurai thing. Now imagine if everyone changes their name twice a month, at different intervals. This creates massive confusion for the members themselves, who don't have friends added.
Furthermore, it creates a problem on the chatbox. It's a hassle when you want to have fun on the chatbox but you can't know who you're talking to, and the only way of finding out is to ask (which would happen often whenever someone new enters the conversation) or to go check your friends list and go on their profile to see who it is.

Also, ALIT what would be the approximate quota?

 

[Nicole]

Regarding username changes: Username changes should be handed over to members with a button available on their pages for them to type in a new username. Would this lead to some people attempting to change their username too often? Possibly. The solution I propose for combating people who frequently desire a name change is setting a quota of one name change per period of time. One name change every year seems like a reasonable compromise. Most won't get tired of a new username that soon especially if they chose wisely and this will prevent confusion regarding who's who.

See the thing with that is that I'm fairly sure there is no feature available that can allow users to do that themselves without the help of an admin. We have to remember that the administration can't just install anything on the forum; it has to be an available plugin or vBulletin feature. The only debatable point here is the idea of multiple name changes. I personally don't like the idea of allowing multiple name changes, but I think it would be good to poll the forum community and do whatever the majority wants.

Also, regarding the 10000 forum post count award idea... no one has ever made that many posts in the history of ZD. That's like... a very outlandish number. A few thousand I can understand, but 10,000 is unprecedented. I'm not sure that it's a good idea to award people for having large post counts is a good idea, either. I personally wouldn't support it, but again, whatever the majority wants is fine.

 

[A Link In Time]

See the thing with that is that I'm fairly sure there is no feature available that can allow users to do that themselves without the help of an admin. We have to remember that the administration can't just install anything on the forum; it has to be an available plugin or vBulletin feature. The only debatable point here is the idea of multiple name changes. I personally don't like the idea of allowing multiple name changes, but I think it would be good to poll the forum community and do whatever the majority wants.

Also, regarding the 10000 forum post count award idea... no one has ever made that many posts in the history of ZD. That's like... a very outlandish number. A few thousand I can understand, but 10,000 is unprecedented. I'm not sure that it's a good idea to award people for having large post counts is a good idea, either. I personally wouldn't support it, but again, whatever the majority wants is fine.

Actually, vBulletin does support the ability for users to change their usernames themselves. Here is a link to the vBulletin forum thread discussing the feature. ZU actually has this installed and I've found it to work pretty well. The quota of one name change per year mentioned earlier would prevent largely prevent confusion of who's who.

In response to TheMasrerSword, I doubt such a situation would ensue since that would obviously be trolling if several members changed their usernames to look exactly the same bar an upper or lowercase difference, etc. but it wouldn't cause much harm seeing as how there are already many "Zeldafan" named members, etc.

Statement:

Now imagine if everyone changes their name twice a month, at different intervals.

Answer:

One name change every year seems like a reasonable compromise.

 

[Djinn]

Well it is getting close to December so I think it is almost time to post about the next idea I had. I would like to add a rotating staff to take care of some of the events we have on the forum. so far we have had Secret Santa.
http://zeldadungeon.net/forum/f115/secret-santa-sign-ups-26152.html
http://zeldadungeon.net/forum/f115/secret-santa-sign-ups-26152.html
And the Valentines Day event for the last two years. Of which we still have the card system and Cupid account to hand out the cards.
http://zeldadungeon.net/forum/f115/zelda-dungeons-valentines-day-event-[update-]-16534.html
And again with the last two Golden Key Awards events. However a lot of the people who hosted these events have stepped down, have gone inactive or have decided to leave the site. And I believe it would be a shame for these events to leave with them. So my idea is to create a rotating staff specifically for hosting all the background work behind all the various forum events we have around here. That way they become much more of a forum tradition around here to be maintained by a special banner usergroup. If they reduce activity then someone else could be brought in to take over their responsibilities.

This idea would not require too many changes. We have a relatively unused section of the forum meant for handling the Awards Last summer. I would suggest renaming it Event Planning and repurposing it for all forum all general event usage. So far only the Awards Staff and mods can view it but I would change the awards staff usergroup to Event staff usergroup and add in the bannr. Then make the mods honorary members but not the main members for it. That would go to regular members since they are the ones specifically granted access. The mods and Admin would be the ones to implement the changes necessary elsewhere on the forums for whatever plans that come up. There would be a few stickied threads meant for instructions on how we take care of the events. Like one for Valentines, one for Secret Santa, giving details on what dates the events should start, when they should end and how to do them etc. And maybe another one on suggestions for more events to be held on the forums in the future. They would also handle the awards in the summer and there would be a little more leeway on changing the rules for handling those if they invent a better method of holding them. (we used a totally different method each time before so things are clearly not set in stone) and then the non stickied threads can be the main discussions for each year's/month's event and how the staff are handling it.

We will keep a schedule for all various events and then on the right times the Event Staff can make a public post in the Community Section for signups, announcements, etc. Contact Wyatt or Axle to have members placed in/out of usergroup and have a timetable for their events.

 

[Vanessa28]

I would like to help out with the Secret Santa thing

 

[TheMasterSword]

Amazing idea! I really like it, I just hope the regular members don't get mad over another usergroup.

 

[Djinn]

We we have been adding in a few more awards categories recently however we are not fully decided upon the icons that will represent the award medals quite yet. So I thought I would make a list of them ans place them in here to chose. Each one needs two images, a roughly 25x60 pic for the profile and a smaller 10x19 to go underneath the username in posts. The size does limit what can be picked.

But what we have is an award for members who have stuck around for three years or longer on ZD, which will probably be called Elders (is nothing else is decided upon) And another for members who have reached an unprecedented number of posts showing their large contribution to the community. This will be a milestone award, for the amount of effort placed and reaching that larger than normal postcount.

So at first we have the traditional award medals

And here are some of the smaller forum post icons for the Elders grouping. I could not decide between something birthday/anniversary looking or something showing off the more elder title.

And some of the smaller icons for the Milestone award.

And here are a few more stylized ideas for the Milestone showing off someone who posts often.

Here are a few things for the 3 year anniversary/elders award

I did not think about it before but I kind of like the eternal flame idea for it.

If anyone has any ideas or suggestions them post them here.