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.
Comments
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.
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.
GM Stan
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.
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
Just trying to help out.
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
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.