I think.... We need a poll...

That's a bloody good idea actually.

We should make a list of all the current ideas in play here and then do a poll on it.

And you always seem to make new accounts, so let's leave "What you always seem to"s out of this, shall we?

Not recently, no, but it was the reason I joined this forum. If I was still hugely into Oddworld (Which I am, but now it's just whenever they release games) and I came to the main Oddworld forum to find that it was shared by a bunch of other games I had never heard of, I wouldn't stay long at all.

Thanks for having so much faith in me.

I wasn't threatening the forum when I said I would probably leave, I was just trying to point out that not everyone would be happy with it. And I'm all for a radical change to get this place moving, I just don't think the "indie games" one was appropriate for the Oddworld Forums. And after all, you're allowed your opinion, I should be allowed mine.

Anyway, Alcar has said that idea isn't going ahead so I don't know why I even brought it up again.

Alcar said that he isn't going to change the name of the forums, he didn't pull the plug on any of our ideas. Stop the wishful thinking, please.

Now, let's get a list of ideas going here. I'll start.

Shop hack.
Expanded Non-Oddworld Games.
Expanded user created content areas for Oddworld fan cornerers.
Inclusion of Non-Oddworld RPG.
Extra OT subforums for world events/news and movies.
More forum events.

Oh I'm glad so many liek my idea :) I was wondering why no-one else had come up with it tho :o

Anyways, an update for the list maybe?

Shop hack.
Expanded Non-Oddworld Games.
Expanded user created content areas for Oddworld fan cornerers.
Inclusion of Non-Oddworld RPG.
Extra OT subforums for world events/news and movies.
More forum events
And a front-site for OWF, where ppl can upload piccies, movies, or other fancreated stuff ^^

Issues to Discuss: Revenge of the Redux Reloaded. Poll.
 

A poll was desired, and I shall deliver.

Vote and discuss, for I am merging these topics.

I want to vote shop hack, more forum events and contest, OWF front page and expanded user content. I'll manually vote user content, could a mod change the other options to include my vote please?

Sorted.......

WTF, people. We already have an option for User content. :p

It's the front page thing... there's no need for another option.

Well, there's the 'expanded user content in Fan Corner' option, which I voted for manually, there's the front page option, and there's now a second 'user content' option, added by Hobo. Which I don't understand why. I think the front page is meant to be different to more fan Corner user content. I think the former is meant to be videos, pics galleries etc. while the latter is more stuff actually on the forums. I am a bit confused by it myself though. But again, could a mod add my vote to the other options I mentioned earlier?

Oh right, i misunderstood. *edits*

I voted for more forum events and a community project.

I don't think we should have any more forums, what we have now has worked for years and I think if we added any more forums we'd have to make more forums than we intended. As if there's a forum for Anime, you could argue that Sports would need a forum also.

And a community project would bring us together as a group, because at the moment I can see quite a fine line between the OT Clan and the GD tribe. [Where some members don't post in OT or GD] Hopefully then we'll become a happier, funner site [Yeah...] or at least we'll know each other a little better, I mean just 10 minutes ago I saw a member with 100 posts who I'd never seen before.

Forum events partly falls under what I just said, but it's also abit of fun and the Oddlympics were a good example of this. Need I say more?

I'm against the frontpage, we used to have that... Oddworldian.net I believe, and it was a nuisance. There's already OW Universe and other websites affliated with the site, I think it'd be simpler to keep the OWF as it is.

- Rexy

Hmm, I used to cruise Oddworldian a lot, I preferred it over Oddworld Web, but I recall it only having a link to these forums, like Oddworld Web had as well. I don't think it was a frontpage. Only Alcar can let us see the truth about it, no?

Anyways, as for them options, stuff like Oddlympics would be cool.

Ummz... What's a shop hack? I've tried figuring it out from people's context and even looking it up, but I'm not having any luck. :confused:

I'll vote soon after someone explains this.

It's a hack for a forum that allows people to rate your posts for points and with points you can buy shiny new stuff. Unless you're a mod, in which case you f.uck the system by editing it all. YAY!

That sounds sexy. I would love that sort of thing. Actaully, I would really love pretty much all the options on the poll, sans N-O RPGs.

But my question still remains, how will others be informed of these new changes, so as to attract new (And awesome) members?

I'm for the increasing of user content etc over in Fan Corner. The past six months it's been the most active ever since three years ago and I'd like that trend to continue.

Contests were originally planned back in the day by Alector and I, then Paramiteabe and myself, and eventually Oddguy started jumpstarting things as well, but I did a lot of hard thinking, and ran into several problems trying to find a perfect formula or the best way of running the contest and judging scenarios, etc. Unfortunately, with most concepts such as a contest or an election, award, I knew they might simply turn into popularity contests even by non biased judging. But yeah like I said some more activity over there is always good and I'm open to anyone's suggestions as well. Cheers!

Yeah, like the guys said shop hack is a thing where you postcounts mean prizes! Basically for each post you gain "money" that you can spend on various stuff to funk up your postbit. It rewards contribution basically.

It can be set up in a myriad ways. It can be set to give money for each positive rating of a post, or just to give money for whenever you post, as well as to give money for threads or page views. Basically whatever you want. I'm most in favour of money per post, since ratings might be a bit slow. But that would be down to the mods and admins to decide really.

When the Oddworld Forums were using UBB instead of vB, they were hosted on Sydney's Oddworldian server. There was no oddworldforums.net domain as of yet, so to reach the forums you would have to type in a very long address which did start with oddworldian.net.

However, there was also a 'splash' page back in the day, which had lovely pictures showing off both Oddworldian and Oddworld-Web, as they were the two forum 'sponsors'.

Alcar...

Ah right, my bad, then.

But wouldn't that create more spam? As people would want to make more money they would post more pointless posts. I know that the staff got rid of post counts quite a while ago due to spam.

I'm not saying it's a bad idea, it's a great idea. I'm just wary of the post count thing.

- Rexy

Well, we still have postcounts, so I don't know quite what you're talking about in that regard.

I think that, quite possibly, somewhere at the back of your mind, you're worried that this whole shop hack thing would "legalise" spamming, and moderators would be so swamped with spam that they wouldn't be able to do anything about it anyway.

The fact is that, while it's possible and has happened on some forums that have lax rules and use shop hack variants, I've NEVER, not even once seen spam on a forum that uses shop hack while at the same time having a strict no spam policy. Spam generally means money removal, warnings, and bannings, and therefore any spammers hoping to make lots of cash will soon find out that their clever scheme will bring them nothing other than a swift boot to the crotch. If people want to make lots of money, they need to be REALLY decent members who make lots of good contributions to the forums - so long as those contributions are properly spelled and interesting, then that's all that matters. Spamming is the fast way to get yourself into "virtual overdraft" as it were.

The shop hack system does not reward bad behaviour if the moderators patrol the forums like they're supposed to, and in fact the shop hack system would allow moderators another form of punishment (money removal) for misbehaving.

Well, I'm a mod on a couple of forums, i might be able to advertise ac bit, something along the lines of:
Oddworld Fourms: Even if you don't like Oddworld, you'll like this site. Some of the best general discussion on the 'net, intelligent members, forum events and a wholesome community etc. etc. or something like that. Although I'll only advertise when the decisions have been made on what to add, that way I can advertise the new and shiny stuff.

Again, at the Webquad series of forums, where I moderate, and CS used to go, we used the punishment of money removal, and it is very effective. You do get a tad more spam with shop hacks, but if the mods delete it and then reduct the offender's money/shop stuff, and the other members ignore the spam, than everything is fine. Also ,I've looked at some of the old Oddlympics stuff, anfd it looks like a lot of fun, we should also have those old annual member awards thingies, if they're still going. I'd be happy to see either of those back.

We had those a while ago. It was around January or so, I think. All I remember is I was almost there too long to be eligible for best new member (which I won! :)).

So... Someone tell me of these glorious prizes and whatnot we would buy with the moneys of shop hackyness.

I think we should hold the awards again.

Prizes could be many things - custom titles, funky editing for custom titles, the ability to sticky one thread, to get a cool person to make an avatar for you or whatever

I'm really loving these ideas, so kudos to everybody who contributed. I voted for the forum-wide community project, because we have a whole lot of talented members who would make such a project a joy to work on (whatever it might be). With any luck, it will hopefully bring everybody together in a positive way, while giving us something to do as we wait for OWI's next big move. If this is too ambitious for us, then any one of the other choices would do just fine, I like 'em all!

Yeah. Some forums have gone the whole nine yards with it and allow you to change your stars, custom title, user name, as well as the background colours of your postbit - I've even seen some forums where you can buy yourself moderator privelidges for huge sums of money.

I think we could potentially have a lot of fun with it.

sounds good to me, one question. If we get his shop hack thing, will our posts before we install shop hack count

No, everyone would start out with zero.