When I go to the forums, the only way I can tell which threads have new posts is if I remember how many posts the thread has or if the time has been updated since I was last there. I would like to see some kind of indication for which threads have new posts since I last visited.
Along with that, the indicator should be a link that automatically takes you to the first post in the thread that you have not read. That way you wouldn't have to scroll to the bottom of the page each time.
It would also be nice if there were a maximum number of posts displayed per thread. If there are more than that many posts, the posts are split into multiple pages. A typical number is 30.
Being able to sort a thread so the newest post was showed at the top would be nice as well.
I also agree on a way to sticky certain threads so they are always at the top.
Finally, the ability to add subforums would be good.
Some other things include the ability to choose whether or not your page updates show up on the RSS feed so my players can't tell when I'm making secret updates to the GM-only sections.
Also it would be neat if we could tell what has changed when a wiki page is updated instead of having to guess.
Could you add an option where you can test to see how the players see the site? It would temporarily set you as a player so you could test to see which GM-Only options are working properly and make sure you didn't accidentally show something to the PCs.
Could you add some sort of battlemap arena to the site so I could upload a image file which would be the background and then the players could upload tokens that they could move around the map?
Could you set Campaign Media to be GM-Only so the players can't see it?
I'd like the ability to edit tags. Some of my tags have ended up lowercase and some uppercase. They are not uniform and it looks ugly.
Being able to hide the tags bar would be nice as well.
Being able to search for words in any text on my site would be neat instead of just tagged items. Heck, if the search was just set to the wiki page, that would work too.
A list of all the links, whether the page exists or not, would allow me to find when I misspelled a link name or some such. It would also let me change links without having to search through every single page by hand.
The ability to set a person as an observer instead of Player/GM/Co-GM. The Observer would not be able to make changes or post but they would be able to see everything on the site. If they wanted to talk, they could send PMs to the people in the game.
That's all for now, I'll come back when I have more.
It would be great if you could make those red links for characters, like you can for wiki articles.
If you try it now, all you get is the character name replaced by "Content Not Found: character name". It's just kind of a pain to have to create a character page and go back into every page that might have featured him to add the Textile code.
1) A developer's blog. Something telling us what is actively being worked on so we know to expect it.
2) Most of the ideas listed above! I came here to ask for some file upload capability, but there are some excellent ideas that have been recommended here.
3) File Uploads. Even 1mb of information would be hugely useful. I have two games where I need easily accessible files. My Savage Worlds game has numerous house rules in a TreePad file which can't be reposted here at 53KB and then my D&D game has House Rules for the D&D Character Builder that I think uses 36KB. These are tiny files that are absolutely necessary for the game. Having them posted here would really be helpful...
A chooseable homepage. For instance, When I log in, I get to the Obsidian Portal homepage which itself has no links to any of my campaigns. I either have to click on the Campaigns tab or go to my profile to get to my campaigns. I would rather be able to log in and either go directly to one or the other of my campaigns or start directly on a page with Links to my campaign. Since everyone's choice on where to start might be different, a chooseable homepage would be nice so that everyone can be automatically directed to the location they want to start.
I finally got around to uploading a map to my campaign wiki, and I love the way it works just like google maps. Let me say it again: the map functionality and cross-linking with the wiki is awesome! The difficulty I found is in placing markers.
You see, I don't use what I would consider the "default" OP setup of one wiki page per wiki entry. Having dozens or hundreds of pages with one paragraph each describing a village or mountain range is a terrible headache for navigation. Instead, I have broad wiki pages (e.g. "geography":http://www.obsidianportal.com/campaign/new-campaign/wikis/geography#contents, "sorcerer-kings":http://www.obsidianportal.com/campaign/new-campaign/wikis/sorcerer-kings#contents, "persons":http://www.obsidianportal.com/campaign/new-campaign/wikis/persons#contents, etc.) with sections. And each section header is an anchor. I think this makes my wiki more friendly to my players' navigation.
It also means markers don't work for me, because I can't use my anchors in the markers. I.e. every geographical feature on my map would simply link to "geography":http://www.obsidianportal.com/campaign/new-campaign/wikis/geography#contents - which is not useful. So, this is a long way of making the request to be able to edit the link embedded in each marker. Since I don't know anything about the engine behind the map, I don't know how difficult this is. I suspect it shouldn't be too hard, since I'm guessing there is just a link in some code somewhere to which the map marker points, and that link could be anything.
Display the "GM Only" text more prominently in the adventure log
When i am going through long campaign notes, a lot of times, as a GM, i want to find some notes specific to my role. An option to set or even just default forced background color with a soft contrast (light blue, light gray, etc.) would help immensely.
Change the print output for character pages - this is very easy to do with CSS classes and types
1) Less white space (print one yourself - you'll see what i mean)
2) game system appears twice - remove one instance (you should consider this for screen display too!)
3) remove the edit and delete icons
4) remove "want a custom portrait?"
really only 1-3 are important, i can understand where keeping 4 is important for advertising.. but if it can done, it is intrusive in the print out.
As a few people have mentioned, some sort of calendar option would be nice. The site already ties in with Google Maps - how about tying in to Google Calendar? The ability to schedule gaming sessions from OP would be quite useful.
I also agree with including item and character pages to the map function. That would be useful as well.
Lastly, I'll add my name to the list of people asking for a "my campaigns" listing on the sidebar.
I mentioned it on the FB page, but I'll mention it here, too.
The ability to hide the Dynamic Character sheets, and make them GM / player-that-plays-that-character only. I don't want my players knowing what's on the other players' sheets.
I'd like for there to be greater admin-style abilities for GMs on their campaign forums. For example, recently a player posted a message on one thread that would have been better suited for another. It would have been nice if I could have simply moved the comment to the appropriate thread rather than asking the player to delete and then repost.
So I like that I can enable always receiving every update, but at the same time, I don't want to be spamming my friends with post after post as I edit and update the way things are written. I'll make mistakes and whatnot regularly, go back and fix them. This gives them not one post but sometimes dozens of posts and I change things and reedit till it works. Either there should be a button to say "Do not notify of this change." or there should be an option to view changes before finalizing(and thus sending out the notification). Or could you make it so it sends out a list of daily changes at the end of the day or something? While you say that you felt too many messages was better than not enough, I would disagree and say controlled messaging is better than uncontrolled messaging. I'd love for messaging to my players to be turned on by default, but I'd like to be able to turn it off if I'm doing minor edits and stuff.
Oh yeah, when I click a link from outside OP, like from my RSS feed for instance, and I'm not currently logged in, it takes me to the login page, which is good. Unfortunately after I log in, it brings me to the main page instead of to the link I clicked. Could you make it so it remembers your intended location when coming to the site and forwards you there after you've logged in properly?
Can you make it possible to filter on multiple tags? My wiki (http://www.obsidianportal.com/campaign/puppeteer/wikis/) has for example the tags "NPC" and "Rashemen" (a country). And I would like to see all the "Rashemen" "NPC"s. or all "City"'s in "Rashemen".
bq). Oh yeah, when I click a link from outside OP, like from my RSS feed for instance, and I'm not currently logged in, it takes me to the login page, which is good. Unfortunately after I log in, it brings me to the main page instead of to the link I clicked. Could you make it so it remembers your intended location when coming to the site and forwards you there after you've logged in properly?
I'm not sure if they actually read this thread anymore, but one more request anyway. I'd like to see support for document hosting, especially pdfs. I would like my players (and anyone else) to have easy and guaranteed access to new character sheets or handouts that they can find and print at leisure without me jumping through hoops finding a stable host somewhere that won't delete the file if it's not downloaded in a month. Maybe a shared host space with the images?
I would like a check box (like the GM only button) the Players could use if they wanted to keep information from the campaign between themselves and the GM
I just discovered this site a couple of weeks ago. It's really great.
Is it possible to change the text color? Specifically the color of links? There is something so non-dramatic about bright blue hyperlinks. I know it sounds like a frivolous request.. I can imagine that Obsidian Portal doesn't want everyone altering the fonts and colors for aesthetic reasons(I can imagine users slathering the site with Papyrus or Comic-Sans), but I would love to just make my hyperlinks a dark red or an earth tone. Seriously, that is my only complaint and it is a really minor one. Love this site.
Edit- looks like I found a way to do it in the help/FAQ forum. I will try that advice.
I would like the option of linking with [[ ]] and the other basic commands within the Comment and Adventure Log sections. Why isnt it like this already, I wonder?
Also a script in the Adventure Log that allows a virtual dice to be rolled like "dice+1d100" where the script would pick up dice+XdY and displace "rolled XdY = [roll1]+[roll2]+[...] = [total]".
This would allow Games to be more efficiently run INSIDE OP. And it would become less of an offshore website, and more of a game-running site.
Is there a way to lock edits to wiki pages without entering a password?
Also, a flash-based chat-room would be kind of cool.
Finally, and this is just me hanging onto hope that this will one-day be supported, a background music player for atmospheric mood-setting tunes to play while people check out a campaign site.
Is there any way to merge the wiki and character tags together? For example if I create a City in the wiki and then I create several key NPC's tagged with that city's name I'd like to see anything tagged with that city name when I click on the similar tags.
It would be great to have a feature that allowed us to leave a campaign. I created one, handed it over to another GM and no longer participate in it so I'd like to clear it out of my list due to anal retentiveness.
Comments
When I go to the forums, the only way I can tell which threads have new posts is if I remember how many posts the thread has or if the time has been updated since I was last there. I would like to see some kind of indication for which threads have new posts since I last visited.
Along with that, the indicator should be a link that automatically takes you to the first post in the thread that you have not read. That way you wouldn't have to scroll to the bottom of the page each time.
It would also be nice if there were a maximum number of posts displayed per thread. If there are more than that many posts, the posts are split into multiple pages. A typical number is 30.
Being able to sort a thread so the newest post was showed at the top would be nice as well.
I also agree on a way to sticky certain threads so they are always at the top.
Finally, the ability to add subforums would be good.
Some other things include the ability to choose whether or not your page updates show up on the RSS feed so my players can't tell when I'm making secret updates to the GM-only sections.
Also it would be neat if we could tell what has changed when a wiki page is updated instead of having to guess.
Could you add an option where you can test to see how the players see the site? It would temporarily set you as a player so you could test to see which GM-Only options are working properly and make sure you didn't accidentally show something to the PCs.
Could you add some sort of battlemap arena to the site so I could upload a image file which would be the background and then the players could upload tokens that they could move around the map?
Could you set Campaign Media to be GM-Only so the players can't see it?
I'd like the ability to edit tags. Some of my tags have ended up lowercase and some uppercase. They are not uniform and it looks ugly.
Being able to hide the tags bar would be nice as well.
Being able to search for words in any text on my site would be neat instead of just tagged items. Heck, if the search was just set to the wiki page, that would work too.
A list of all the links, whether the page exists or not, would allow me to find when I misspelled a link name or some such. It would also let me change links without having to search through every single page by hand.
The ability to set a person as an observer instead of Player/GM/Co-GM. The Observer would not be able to make changes or post but they would be able to see everything on the site. If they wanted to talk, they could send PMs to the people in the game.
That's all for now, I'll come back when I have more.
These (non wiki) forums could use some form of image support, though other than that they work just fine.
If you try it now, all you get is the character name replaced by "Content Not Found: character name". It's just kind of a pain to have to create a character page and go back into every page that might have featured him to add the Textile code.
1) A developer's blog. Something telling us what is actively being worked on so we know to expect it.
2) Most of the ideas listed above! I came here to ask for some file upload capability, but there are some excellent ideas that have been recommended here.
3) File Uploads. Even 1mb of information would be hugely useful. I have two games where I need easily accessible files. My Savage Worlds game has numerous house rules in a TreePad file which can't be reposted here at 53KB and then my D&D game has House Rules for the D&D Character Builder that I think uses 36KB. These are tiny files that are absolutely necessary for the game. Having them posted here would really be helpful...
You see, I don't use what I would consider the "default" OP setup of one wiki page per wiki entry. Having dozens or hundreds of pages with one paragraph each describing a village or mountain range is a terrible headache for navigation. Instead, I have broad wiki pages (e.g. "geography":http://www.obsidianportal.com/campaign/new-campaign/wikis/geography#contents, "sorcerer-kings":http://www.obsidianportal.com/campaign/new-campaign/wikis/sorcerer-kings#contents, "persons":http://www.obsidianportal.com/campaign/new-campaign/wikis/persons#contents, etc.) with sections. And each section header is an anchor. I think this makes my wiki more friendly to my players' navigation.
It also means markers don't work for me, because I can't use my anchors in the markers. I.e. every geographical feature on my map would simply link to "geography":http://www.obsidianportal.com/campaign/new-campaign/wikis/geography#contents - which is not useful. So, this is a long way of making the request to be able to edit the link embedded in each marker. Since I don't know anything about the engine behind the map, I don't know how difficult this is. I suspect it shouldn't be too hard, since I'm guessing there is just a link in some code somewhere to which the map marker points, and that link could be anything.
Best,
When i am going through long campaign notes, a lot of times, as a GM, i want to find some notes specific to my role. An option to set or even just default forced background color with a soft contrast (light blue, light gray, etc.) would help immensely.
Thanks.
1) Less white space (print one yourself - you'll see what i mean)
2) game system appears twice - remove one instance (you should consider this for screen display too!)
3) remove the edit and delete icons
4) remove "want a custom portrait?"
really only 1-3 are important, i can understand where keeping 4 is important for advertising.. but if it can done, it is intrusive in the print out.
I also agree with including item and character pages to the map function. That would be useful as well.
Lastly, I'll add my name to the list of people asking for a "my campaigns" listing on the sidebar.
Great site! Keep up the good work!
The ability to hide the Dynamic Character sheets, and make them GM / player-that-plays-that-character only. I don't want my players knowing what's on the other players' sheets.
I'm not sure if this is feasible or not.
So I like that I can enable always receiving every update, but at the same time, I don't want to be spamming my friends with post after post as I edit and update the way things are written. I'll make mistakes and whatnot regularly, go back and fix them. This gives them not one post but sometimes dozens of posts and I change things and reedit till it works. Either there should be a button to say "Do not notify of this change." or there should be an option to view changes before finalizing(and thus sending out the notification). Or could you make it so it sends out a list of daily changes at the end of the day or something? While you say that you felt too many messages was better than not enough, I would disagree and say controlled messaging is better than uncontrolled messaging. I'd love for messaging to my players to be turned on by default, but I'd like to be able to turn it off if I'm doing minor edits and stuff.
I agree with this, it's annoying sometimes.
It's great for character sheets and you get 1024mbs per account as well (though you can purchase more).
edit: but not to deviate from the post, I'd have to second that request as well. On-site document hosting would be super convenient.
Is it possible to change the text color? Specifically the color of links? There is something so non-dramatic about bright blue hyperlinks. I know it sounds like a frivolous request.. I can imagine that Obsidian Portal doesn't want everyone altering the fonts and colors for aesthetic reasons(I can imagine users slathering the site with Papyrus or Comic-Sans), but I would love to just make my hyperlinks a dark red or an earth tone. Seriously, that is my only complaint and it is a really minor one. Love this site.
Edit- looks like I found a way to do it in the help/FAQ forum. I will try that advice.
Also a script in the Adventure Log that allows a virtual dice to be rolled like "dice+1d100" where the script would pick up dice+XdY and displace "rolled XdY = [roll1]+[roll2]+[...] = [total]".
This would allow Games to be more efficiently run INSIDE OP. And it would become less of an offshore website, and more of a game-running site.
Also, a flash-based chat-room would be kind of cool.
Finally, and this is just me hanging onto hope that this will one-day be supported, a background music player for atmospheric mood-setting tunes to play while people check out a campaign site.