Backgrounds - user created?

Black_Vulmea

I like the new campaign backgrounds, and I added one to my _Traveller_ campaign. But the selection is somewhat limited - how about letting us load our own? I've love to put an old map of France behind "_Le Ballet de l'Acier_":http://www.obsidianportal.com/campaigns/le-ballet-de-l-acier.

SSveter

Yea I have a sea-faring themed campaign and would like something along those lines. Maybe like a storm tossed sea background or endless ocean vistas.

williamdietsche

Same here. I love what they give to a campaign, but it will be nice for users to be able to put our own HD backgrounds up there.

DreadGazebo

The thing with custom backgrounds is, while we're sure most of you have exquisite taste in imagery as well as a knack for nice high quality stuff the problem lies within those that don't. The site overall is a reflection of Obsidian Portal as a whole, every campaign having their own background images could result in inappropriate imagery or just plain look bad (think 1990's geocities websites). However we are looking into more possibilities for them and we will definitely have a at least a few new ones after the contest submissions have been judged. :-)

SSveter

What contest??

DreadGazebo

We had a contest going on, posted on FB/Twitter/Blog about it a few weeks ago for people to submit their own (non coyprighted) high res artwork for backgrounds. The judging isn't quite over yet so if you still want to submit, sneak it in!

DreadGazebo

That being said, is there something more we could be doing on our part to raise awareness of contests and the like? I'd love to hear ideas :-)

williamdietsche

I understand your point....but here is the consumer-oriented part of me coming out.

I think the OP staff is pretty diligent with getting back to people about feature request and the likes. You could do a process where we upload the picture and it doesn't pop up until a mod approves it. Something like that. Like you upload the background and when you click the button you get the message, "Your Background Image is waiting approval, please allow 48 hours for changes to be made to your page." I just think waiting to put my own image up is better than not being allowed to at all.

It's just my opinion, and I don't wanna be a d**k because I love this site, but we're paying for the product (Ascendant)...so the thing about the poor quality image to me is a moot point. Though it is quite easy to get free HD pictures, just google it. As for the inappropriate material, I could do the same exact thing by just adding an image to any of my pages. Don't understand that either, because if someone wants to put an inappropriate material up they will find a way regardless.

As for the contest I was sorta unaware of it. I also think that the contest is still too restricting. Why don't you just have a mass submission of HD pics. You don't have to promise you will even look at all of them, but choose the ones you like the most. Take about 5-10 pics in one submission and add them to the ones available. Do this every so often and there will be a plethora of images. Only problem I see is that there will be too many default options. Once again, why we should be able to submit HD images. You could then restrict how many we upload, and it wouldn't be a cluttered mess looking through a bunch of images because we'd obviously only want to upload images we want to use.

All that aside I really appreciate what you guys do...I must say I had several customer service related questions leading up to me purchasing a subscription, and I was answered better than any other online service I paid for. Looking forward to changes that will make my campaign pages better.

DreadGazebo

Thanks for your honest input and appreciation for our customer service, it's good and honest feedback like that that keeps us going! As for the background ideas, I think they've got some potential, and with the backgrounds being a brand new feature we will definitely be looking into ways to make it better. Again, thanks for the suggestions - we'll take them into consideration as we move forward with the feature.

Monstah

So, where are the user made backgrounds? I made one myself, and it appeared to me the judges decided all (or most, I can't recall) were fit for the site. I wanna see them! I want to use the one I made myself, plus I'm _very_ curious about all the others!

Taellosse

I would just like to second williamdietsche's position, for what it's worth. An additional suggestion: you could reserve custom campaign backgrounds to Ascendant members if you're concerned about your servers getting overwhelmed by lots of hi-res pictures.

Obear

Hello, I just activated my own Ascendant account and would like to add to the comments above. I must admit I was rather surprised to find out that despite my paying membership I am still not able to upload my own background. Frankly, this is not acceptable. While I understand the concerns that have been stated in allowing this, as some of the other posters have mentioned above, this is a service we are paying for and that should take precedence.

Duskreign

Did it mention uploading custom backgrounds on the list of Ascendant features? I'm not being facetious. I have been Ascendant for almost 3 years, and I haven't seen the signup page in forever, so they might have changed it to reflect that being able to upload a custom background was something you were entitled to.

There are html workarounds to do that, if you want, btw. "Check out this wiki to see what I mean.":http://www.obsidianportal.com/campaigns/age-of-legends

- Duskreign

EDIT: Here is the HTML code for you to do this yourself. You would have to place this on every page in your wiki, but the nice thing about this is you could use a different background image on different pages of your wiki, which is something that the OP offered backgrounds can't do as they currently are.

friendlypickle

Just got on here to request this very thing, seems I'm not alone. I'd like to add my applause for giving us this feature along with my ungrateful request for control over the feature and being given the opportunity to load up my own custom background. Thanks for all the good work you do!

GM Stan

The_Compass_Rose

That's wonderful Duskreign, I don't know enough HTML to get the code to work quite right but that sounds like a great solution. And I'm just the type to use a different illustration for as many wiki pages as I'm able.

I'm very happy with the ease of use compared to my old approach (I was just making my own "wiki" from scratch, and now copying everything over) and this understandably comes with a loss of customization. I was pretty surprised that I wasn't able to upload my own backdrops though, since as someone pointed out before me, any seemingly objectionable image can be added several other ways. I'm actually bothered enough about this that I'd like to make my campaign public, but I don't like how it visually looks enough to allow that (I'm a professional artist though, so I get very picky about what's good enough to show.) I'd much rather just keep things private if it's going to look generic or like everyone else's. Things like that Age of Legends link are wonderful, but myself and my players lack any of the programming skill to do it. I thought I could mix things up with images and maybe color changes to the GUI, but it's a little more limiting than I was expecting when I signed up.

GamingMegaverse

Compass- I do not have any programming skills, other than the ones I have learned here. People like Duskreign, Arsheesh, Chainsaw, et al freely share the code, and you plug in your own images. I use different backgrounds for different things- ocean to indicate islands, a werewolf-like Wolfen to indicate Wolfen lands, an Ankh for the "performers" and the generic hieroglyphs for everything else. I just used codes borrowed/stolen from them, and put in my own images. Please give it a shot. Check mine out for examples.

killervp
"A God...Rebuilt":http://www.obsidianportal.com/campaigns/a-god-rebuilt
Duskreign's "COTM for November":http://www.obsidianportal.com/campaigns/wyrmshadow/wiki_pages/112011

Baalshamon

Compass, I am in the same boat as killervp. I came to OP a few months back and never even heard of textile. My total experience with code was I once cut and past an html code into Myspace. lol
You have many great resources on this site and people like those mentioned by killer are always available to help out. I have found campaigns on OP I liked and just wrote the GM's. In almost every case they shared their code with me and offered suggestions for my page.

Good luck and remember, just ask if you dont know how. One of us will help out.

-Steve
"Star Trek Late Night":http://www.obsidianportal.com/campaigns/star-trek-late-night

HurstGM

I did that as well. I e mailed my top 6 favorite campaigns and all of them contacted me back with thier code or other advice. the help is there just ask.

Morrinn

The OP community is extremely helpful and even though i was dubious about the textile formatting at first, I found it pretty intuitive after a while.

Beaumains

To answer the question of how to better create awareness of Contests, I see three options off-hand:

1) Send distinct emails when a contest starts, with a brief description in the subject line (e.g. "ObsidianPortal: Campaign Background Contest [ends Dec 3, 2011]").
2) Allow more variety in subscription options, rather than a mass newsletter, which may containg varying degrees of content that is interesting (and timely).
3) Post a 'banner' on the big places (site main, user/profile main, not campaign main) -or- quicklink to the Announcements thread here, and remotely show updates (e.g. New!), or create a permalink that sets to the title of the newest Announcement/Update.

The last one is probably the most involved, but also probably the most reliable.