Kallak
Hello OP Community,
Just posting this really quickly to say that the impending updates blog post is just about completed and will be arriving within the next couple of days (potentially even some time Friday, we'll see). If you have not heard as of yet, the current week's blog material has been put on hold to allow for work to be done on the upcoming Site and Tech Updates post. This post follows my recent Skype meeting with John Hudak and will go over some of the things that have been happening on the 'back end' of Obsidian Portal, recent changes and bug fixes, and things you can expect to see coming up.
I'll definitely be interested in discussions after the article has been released. Until then, take care.
Comments
I hope I was able to get as many questions answered that people have as possible. If not, and you still have questions, please send me a PM and I'll do my best to get them addressed in our next updates post - which is already in planning, and will address (among other things) the Reforge kickstarter items.
Take care for now, more to come.
I appreciate that keeping OP not only running but improving is a monumental task, and I appreciate the work and effort going into trying to keep this place together.
I hope tech updates can become a regular feature on the blog -- perhaps offset from the regular Thursday content.
I am curious though, why there was no mention of the new community rules. I was hoping for a bit of an explanation as to where they came from and why they were posted. I would like a forum to discuss them, but with the sticky closed, am unsure how to begin.
- Ketherian
Now if we could get the embedding issue fixed :)
Keelah Se'lai,
Keryth
"Shadows Over New York":http://www.obsidianportal.com/campaigns/shadows-over-new-york
"2013 Campaign of The Year":http://blog.obsidianportal.com/2013-coty-shadows-over-new-york/
"Campaign of the Month July 2013":http://blog.obsidianportal.com/shadows-over-new-york-julys-campaign-of-the-month/
First, that was very informative and Kallak has put together a great article, very well written in terms of style.
Second, this gives me hope, and hope is not a word I use idly.
As Always,
_~Mae_
Concerning the new community rules, I missed the series of events that preceded their release due to finals week at university, so I didn't have a complete frame of reference to work with on that front. From what I understand (and please bear in mind that I speak in no official capacity on this whatsoever, and am operating on incomplete information that was acquired in parts, some of which were second hand, so I may be incorrect on some or all of this), the forums have been unmoderated for quite an unusually lengthy period of time, and during that time the primary mode of being noticed by the "powers that be" included large numbers of angry posts on the boards and elsewhere. This coupled with the level of frustration that some users had/have built up surrounding outstanding issues resulted in some forum activity that was deemed over the top by those "powers" who were now actively looking at the boards since they were making ready to start cleaning up and moving things. When that activity was addressed by support staff, there was some push-back to the sudden onset of increased moderation that those users saw as trying to silence them and hide issues, which led to the posting of the new rules, and account actions that were taken following continued push-back to that.
Again, please don't take this as gospel, because it most certainly is not (which is sort of another reason for me not really addressing it in the post). The thing I think really needs to be taken away from the new community rules is that we're no longer in that era where people need to rant on the boards to be heard (I mean, hell, I'm a good example myself, I had questions and went to get answers and had a very positive response - and was able to lay the groundwork for future communication of updates). Users can provide input and feedback without doing so in a manner that's intended to be rude and/or insulting. In fact, one of the things that John mentioned to me was wanting to be able to collect user input on front end things in the future. As a specific example, the look of the the three portions of OP (the site, forums and blog) is very different across the various parts, and at some point later, efforts will be made to bring them all in line visually, and there is the desire to get user input and feedback on this front. What looks good, what doesn't, what do the users like about the way things look now versus what do they not like etc...
I guess the long story made short on that issue is that I sort of missed the boat and am playing catch up.