New LEM Features?

[DooMer]

The site is going to be moving to a new server soon. Are there any suggestions for new additions that might help you guys out? A wiki for consolidating information for example?

Although we'll have more control, the downside is that we will have some bandwidth limitations, so dealing with file transfers and things of that nature may not be available.

Also, after the move I'm probably going to merge Programming with this forum, making it Level Editing & Modding. This will probably help the programming guys out if they're part of a more active forum. Any arguments against this?

[4days]

that all sounds excellent, especially the wiki

can't think of a strong argument against the merge, it shouldn't be very difficult to tell the topics apart.

[AEon]

It's probably the programmers that will have a hard time finding programming related info in "our" mapping / modeling dominated forum . Maybe, like we did for Q4 the programming related new posts could get a prefix, like "MOD - ".

A wiki would be pretty cool. I recently did some massive editing in another wiki, so I have a tad experience with that (even wrote some nice "macros" there), and it definitely helps to better present the information, than trying to put everything into threads/posts. A wiki would be neat, though, aren't there quite a few of them out there already?

OT: Is the email based notification for threads "under observation" (e.g. a thread one created) not working any longer? I never get a notification it seems.

[DooMer]

I wasn't aware of any issues. The mail server and everything else is going to change, so if you still have problems when the move takes place, let me know.

[AEon]

Although we'll have more control, the downside is that we will have some bandwidth limitations, so dealing with file transfers and things of that nature may not be available.

The past few days I started to "save" (correct) all my links to external images, that made me wonder if forum specific image uploads (i.e. to not loose images in threads) would be an option? But your mention of the bandwidth limitations, seems to rule that out?

IIRC, the wiki (code) provides such content upload (e.g. images) by default, so that would be another plus for a wiki.

[Hipshot]

I have great experience working with MediaWiki (the wikipedia one), so that would be awesome.
And merging the programing section with this would probably be really good too. Just a "modding" forum as a whole kind of.

I've been wanting a wiki here for years. Espec since it would be much easier to update and fix tutorials and similar.

Maybe it should be setup so that you need an account and you can't register one yourself an admin need to do it for you. To minimize the potential spam factor and reduce the time people needs to sit and maintain the wiki.

[AEon]

Maybe it should be setup so that you need an account and you can't register one yourself an admin need to do it for you. To minimize the potential spam factor and reduce the time people needs to sit and maintain the wiki.

Age-old discussion, of who should actually have the right the edit anything. I used to lean towards your direction on this subject, but now I am not so sure. The bottom line is usually the number of potential wiki contributors. If most of the "mischievous kiddies" never bother to do anything anyway, why not let everyone else get an account? Or maybe one could link the wiki account to the one in the forum, for a certain level of accountability?

Anyway I love editing texts and helping to make everything look and read consistently in design - did that in the other forum as well. Set or define a certain design that reads well and then consistently apply it to all the pages. E.g. some of obsidian's tutorials would be really cool material for the wiki, and come to think of it, the Q4 Mapping FAQ I started a while back as well - well all the sticky threads at LEM basically. A really old thread on mitering would still be fun to have (I even have the old screenshots of aedesert, where I applied that, somewhere). The wiki would probably be the most help in saving the very old archived threads, that, IIRC, at least in part are stored with google archives?

Incidentally when will this migration be happening? And what is up with the quite regular complete "timeouts" of the forum here (happened at least once a day these past few days)?

[Hipshot]

Maybe it should be setup so that you need an account and you can't register one yourself an admin need to do it for you. To minimize the potential spam factor and reduce the time people needs to sit and maintain the wiki.

Age-old discussion, of who should actually have the right the edit anything. I used to lean towards your direction on this subject, but now I am not so sure. The bottom line is usually the number of potential wiki contributors. If most of the "mischievous kiddies" never bother to do anything anyway, why not let everyone else get an account? Or maybe one could link the wiki account to the one in the forum, for a certain level of accountability?

Anyway I love editing texts and helping to make everything look and read consistently in design - did that in the other forum as well. Set or define a certain design that reads well and then consistently apply it to all the pages. E.g. some of obsidian's tutorials would be really cool material for the wiki, and come to think of it, the Q4 Mapping FAQ I started a while back as well - well all the sticky threads at LEM basically. A really old thread on mitering would still be fun to have (I even have the old screenshots of aedesert, where I applied that, somewhere). The wiki would probably be the most help in saving the very old archived threads, that, IIRC, at least in part are stored with google archives?

Incidentally when will this migration be happening? And what is up with the quite regular complete "timeouts" of the forum here (happened at least once a day these past few days)?

I think we are more or less om the same page. We had the account linking at work, a good idea. Good if you have the ability to set separate rules when needed.
And as well as you I love text and guide consistency in design, we could probably help each other.

Lets see what happens - it's a future story.

[monaster]

Although we'll have more control, the downside is that we will have some bandwidth limitations, so dealing with file transfers and things of that nature may not be available.

The past few days I started to "save" (correct) all my links to external images, that made me wonder if forum specific image uploads (i.e. to not loose images in threads) would be an option? But your mention of the bandwidth limitations, seems to rule that out?

Does that mean that posting lvlshots and the like won't be possible anymore?
Regarding the rest of the topic: merging won't be a problem for me either, just go for it.
A "new" LEM (or whatever the name of the future forum will be) feature suggestion: reattach the "where did that user post most of his topics" statistics into profiles, I found it quite informative since you could easily see if one person has only contributed to one single forum or if he/she has other interests too making him (probably) an expert on brush editing or an allrounder regarding level design and mod scripting (speaking of programming forum).
If I find something else that could probably turn out to be a new feature I'm going to post them soon.

[DooMer]

lvlshot will still work. image uploads probably would be okay for this forum.

The migration is probably going to happen this weekend.

[^misantropia^]

Also, after the move I'm probably going to merge Programming with this forum, making it Level Editing & Modding. This will probably help the programming guys out if they're part of a more active forum. Any arguments against this?

Nope, fine by me. LEM probably doesn't need another moderator, so feel free to de-mod me.

[obsidian]

I think you should stay moderator as the only real resident programmer. There may not be a whole lot in LEM as far as killing spam and general maintenance is concerned, but I think you could still contribute largely as a superuser to whatever wiki system we set up.

As far as image uploads, would such a feature be possible where a moderator may be able to select a bunch of images and check them for archival? That would make the difference between someone uploading loads of screenshots and taking up space vs. moderators being selective about which screenshots are important for tutorials.

[Plan B]

I think you should stay moderator as the only real resident programmer.

Absolutely, especially when the LEM and Programming forums get merged.
I often lurk in Programming. It's quite a different beast, and you clearly know your stuff and how to succinctly convey it


Just scanned through the archived threads, and indeed the majority of image locations have died throughout the years.
So the concept of storing images locally alone is an excellent one.

I'd like to see archived threads as a wiki section, where threads and their images are archived in their entirety.
I don't think moderator image selection is necessary, because ordinarily posters don't really spam them, and I'd like to see archived threads integrally, as they were posted.
A system where image locations in archived threads get automatically changed to their archived locations would be ideal, of course, but I don't know if that's possible.

[AEon]

I'd like to see archived threads as a wiki section, where threads and their images are archived in their entirety.
...and I'd like to see archived threads integrally, as they were posted.

That could get ugly. The wiki comes along with its own "simple" layout language, that is actually quite simple to learn after a while, but rather limited. You can add HTML code everywhere, only - personally - I'd discourage doing so. I normally write a "macro" in such cases, e.g. for text coloring or info boxes and the like instead.

We will have to see in what state these archived threads are, at the very least quite a bit of formatting will need to be done. And some content editing as well, I fear... i.e. skip "spam" or OT stuff etc. I might actually be better to totally edit such threads reducing them to their essence.

Maybe there is a way to automate this... I could probably write a PHP parser that translates forum posts (that have a very fixed code layout) into HTML or Wiki. We'll see if that is actually required and of use.

A system where image locations in archived threads get automatically changed to their archived locations would be ideal, of course, but I don't know if that's possible.

Ideally a "check-box" or "save locally" button next to the image would let the moderator "save" the image on q3w.

I for one hope that all the stuff we currently have still works after migration and nothing gets lost. Keeping fingers crossed.

[4days]

Maybe there is a way to automate this... I could probably write a PHP parser that translates forum posts (that have a very fixed code layout) into HTML or Wiki. We'll see if that is actually required and of use.

aye that would be entirely do-able - but it might be better to avoid it as you say. it's easy/sensible enough to just distill the thread content for a wiki (since that's what they're for). if we've got our own forum that's safe from the whims and inconsistencies of the current hosting then it shouldn't be an issue to leave threads somewhere in the forum (since that's what they're for), with a link from the wiki page in the references and a wiki page of links to archived threads. as it is, phpbb and mediawiki have more than enough features out of the box to keep everyone happy to begin with.

would definitely like to see misanthropia stay on as a mod. he always makes very helpful and succinct posts and on the rare occasions when he needs to have a pop at someone, he's one of the funniest posters on the board.

limiting editing access to the wiki (e.g. with mod-created accounts) is also probably a good idea - the LEM crowd are all safe but there's inadequate street lighting once you get out of this forum
either way and for any number of reasons, access to regular backups for admins and/or moderators would be worth having.

[AEon]

Luckily you can easily undo anything in the wiki, alas the issues is usually the problem of not being aware that something got messed up. But again, if one checks the latest posts from time to time one should spot such "activity".

[DooMer]

Enabled attachments for this forum only. Lets see what happens.

[Silicone_Milk]

Enabled attachments for this forum only. Lets see what happens.

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