GM forum?

Brinton
Brinton
edited June 2015 in General Archive
I am working on a page for a multi GM campaign. Is there a way to have a GM only forum? I am looking for a good way for the GMs to discuss what is cannon, ideas, and the like without players reading spoilers.


Thanks in advance!

Comments

  • Unknown
    edited July 2015
    No, I don't believe there is a way to do GM Only forums presently, though I do think that would be a boon to a number of campaigns around here.

    One way you could try to work around this for now would be through the Wiki. You would essentially make a page called GM Discussions and then make that whole page GM Only via the check box option. Then, you basically just have folks keep their respective responses to the top of the page so that information piles up in descending order from the most recent addition. If you go this route I would suggest having each person use their own class on a div or span that can help make sure the postings look a little better via some CSS magic (you could basically get it to look essentially like reddit through this method).

    Again, it isn't the best solution in the world for this kind of thing, but it is at least a workaround until OP enhances the campaign forums to include such a feature (assuming they ever do). If you need some help with getting a decent CSS setup for something like this I would be happy to help out.

    --
    Alex
    "Dragon Age: Requiem":https://da-requiem.obsidianportal.com/
    Post edited by Unknown User on
  • Brinton
    Brinton
    Posts: 5
    Thanks! I am fairly comfortable with HTML, but I am not very familiar with CSS. I would love some assistance with that. Hopefully this will help some other people as well.
  • GamingMegaverse
    GamingMegaverse
    Posts: 2,998
    We use gm secrets and player secrets a lot- works really well.

    Just trying to help out.

  • Unknown
    Yea, I also tend to find the secrets to be sufficient as well, but I can understand the desire to have something a little more consolidated as well.

    So, taking a preliminary stab at this to get something rolling on this, lets look at what we would need to set this up:

    First, you need to determine how many people are going to be using this page as we'll want to setup a special class for each of them. As a simplified version of what this means, lets assume you have a total of 3 GMs working on the Campaign. What we need would be something like this to start off the CSS side of things (you can substitute a persons name in place of gm1 or gm2 if it feels more natural to you that way - it is how I do things personally but I don't know the names of your GMs):

    .gm1Post {

    }

    .gm2Post {

    }

    .gm3Post {

    }

    When each person is making their posting on the page they would simply add in the following:

    @Post content here.@

    Now that we have all of that in place, we need to decide on exactly how we want to have things formatted with these posts on the page. One thing that is pretty straight forward would be to provide each GM with their own unique font to use to help differentiate the posts. This is something that I normally do myself for a number of things, but it may not be an approach you want to take (for instance trying to get an exact Reddit style format you would want all text in the posts themselves to be the same). If you do go this route, you will want to either select fonts for each person yourself or send your GMs over to "Google Fonts":fonts.google.com to pick out their own (this is the approach I normally take will supplying some basic guidelines like "use the Handwritten category only" so they are involved in how their content displays). You just toss in the Google Fonts like normal, and update the CSS to reflect the proper code:

    .gm1Post {
    font-family:'Milonga',serif;
    }

    .gm2Post {
    font-family:‘Sofia’,cursive;
    }

    .gm3Post {
    font-family:'Waiting for the Sunrise',cursive;
    }

    Just adjust the details after font-family: with whatever the code is on Google Fonts for the particular font you have selected. From here I would suggest kicking in some code so that after each posting there is a small line to separate the posts some more and make sure that the posts span across the full width of the page:

    .gm1 {
    font-family:'Milonga',serif;
    }

    .gm2 {
    font-family:‘Sofia’,cursive;
    }

    .gm3 {
    font-family:'Waiting for the Sunrise',cursive;
    }

    .Posting {
    width: 100%;
    border-bottom: 3px solid #4588ba;
    margin-bottom:10px;
    }

    Then we need to modify the HTML that we will be using on the pages for posts to this (obviously you substitute gm1 with gm2 or gm3 as you need):

    @Post content here.@

    Next we can actually slip in the persons picture along with their postings to make it all look a little bit more like a forum posting. We could also setup things for replying to postings to make those indented and so forth. I will pause it here for now though as I have not actually tested any of this in practice, so if you want to take a stab at setting this up and trying it then we can see if any of it needs some tweaking yet and then discuss how you would like to specifically modify it.

    Let me know
  • Brinton
    Brinton
    Posts: 5
    Thanks! I'll give this a stab as soon as I get back home.
  • VyraLove
    VyraLove
    Posts: 2
    Well this is actually pretty neat. I'm one of the GMs/Mods and actually posted up a request on the feature request topic. xD
    So if it ever does get added, well, it's there to show some kind of interest that people may want it.
  • Unknown
    Cool, let me know how it pans out and any adjustments you want to make with it.
  • Brinton
    Brinton
    Posts: 5
    Worked like a charm. Thanks! I'll just slap profile pics in there next then I should be in business!
  • Unknown
    If you want you can make it so the pictures just toss themselves in automatically via the CSS. I will assume you used the last bit of CSS and HTML I posted above to achieve what you have in place right now. So, our new HTML is going to look like this:

    @Post content here.@

    As you can see we have added in an empty div that is going to generate the image for us. Now for the CSS all we have to do is add in a little more detail so we can position the image, and decide what the images are going to be. Here is the modified CSS that I would try out:

    .teaser {
    width:48px;
    height:48px;
    float:left;
    margin:15px 5px 5px -20px;
    border-radius:5px;
    background-size:contain;
    background-repeat:no-repeat;
    }

    .gm1-logo {
    background-image:url(https://db4sgowjqfwig.cloudfront.net/campaigns/103824/assets/438433/GM_Post.png);
    }

    .gm2-logo {
    background-image:url(https://db4sgowjqfwig.cloudfront.net/campaigns/103824/assets/438423/commentary.png);
    }

    .gm3-logo {
    background-image:url(https://db4sgowjqfwig.cloudfront.net/campaigns/103824/assets/402220/Cassius_Post.png);
    }

    .gm1 {
    font-family:‘Milonga’,serif;
    }

    .gm2 {
    font-family:‘Sofia’,cursive;
    }

    .gm3 {
    font-family:‘Waiting for the Sunrise’,cursive;
    }

    .Posting {
    width: 100%;
    border-bottom: 3px solid #4588ba;
    margin-bottom:10px;
    }

    I think, if I did this correctly, should place an image (roughly the size of the ones used on the forums here) to the left side of the posting. The text of the post should wrap around the image without any particular issues. You will want to change the image URLs for the pictures to what you want (you could use the profile pictures of the users here on OP if you wanted), and you may need to adjust some margins. In the HTML all you are changing is the number associated with the GM in the classes, so gm1, gm2, or gm3 are all interchangeable. Give this a try and let me know how it turns out.
  • Bortas
    Bortas
    Posts: 645
    I'm a low effort kind of guy - why not a facebook messenger conversation amongst the GMs?

    -bort
  • Brinton
    Brinton
    Posts: 5
    That would just make too much sense.
  • Unknown
    Sometimes you want to keep things consolidated to one area.
  • Bortas
    Bortas
    Posts: 645
    Excellent points, both ;-)

    -bort
Sign In or Register to comment.

March 2024
Wrath of the Highborn

Read the feature post on the blog
Return to Obsidian Portal

Howdy, Stranger!

It looks like you're new here. If you want to get involved, click one of these buttons!

Discussions