Long thread, but I chose this title because there's a lot to cover, and it's not worth making multiple threads on each topic.
Just bringing you guys up to date on a few things.
NSFW Avatars/Signatures
First, to follow up on Caution's announcement regarding nudity, in regards to NSFW avatars and signature images a few of you have. After our last CA meeting, it was decided to not allow these as they pose an awkward situation for people who want to browse the forum at work or in public. NSFW images aren't going to be allowed in avatars, and if you want to put them in your signature or anywhere else on the forum, you must have them wrapped in nsfw tags. It works the same way as spoilers. This was decided to address a number of complaints I've heard for a while now. We don't really care if it's a girl in a bikini or something, but there are some questionable .gif avatars/signatures out there that just don't need to be displayed on the forum without an nsfw tag.
[nsfw]somethinghere[/nsfw]
Admin Complaints Changes
After talking with the AO's and other BD's, we've also decided to make Admin Complaints visible to all admins. It's been a pain to deal with complaints when AO's and BD's have to go around PM'ing different admins to get their sides of what happened, and it's usually helpful for the admin to know who's making the complaint in effort to get down to the bottom of things more easily. If you want to make a complaint against an admin anonymously, then you can still PM an AO or BD. Allowing admins to view that section just makes things run more smoothly because other admins can post their side of the story if they were there, and it should speed up the process of getting complaints done. Admins, I made a thread about this in your section as well, please read it.
Forum Plugins
With everything else we've had going on the last few weeks, the forum plugins like User Tagging, Donations, and Shoutbox are still a problem that need to be fixed. It's just a matter of doing it now. The homepage is also at a standstill until we have a solution to fix it. I'll get with Spiked on that since he knows more about that one than I do, I'm not sure what I'm going to do with that thing yet. While the Donation plugin is down, I've set up a temporary Donate page that can be found by clicking "Donate" on the top navigation bar of the site. Nothing fancy at all, but it'll do till I can design a better one. I'll put a list of Subscriber perks on it tonight too.
Other Stuff
I'm currently in the middle of redesigning the user profiles for the forum as well, it will look more like it used to when we had vB3 for those of you who remember. Reason being to display more info and have it organized in a better way. For example, user stats will no longer be under the "About Me" tab, it will have its own tab along with contact info. It's not much, but I've always hated the way profiles are on vB4.
If you haven't already noticed, I've changed the Members tab to show only the detailed roster page. The list of ranks and duties can now be found on the About page.
I've also changed some things with the sidebar to the right of the forum. First, I've added a new block called Featured Server, this is where we will display one of our popular servers or a server we want to promote more. I've also added a Current Poll block. It's not much, but I thought it was a neat little feature to have. With these additions, I've taken off the YouTube and Recent Posts blocks to open up some extra space. Recent Posts are already displayed at the bottom of the forum in a more detailed way anyway, so having it twice on the same page was just redundant. Might take some getting used to.
Another thing if you haven't already noticed, since we only have 1 Gmod server and 1 Minecraft server, those two subforums have been grouped together with the rest of our servers to reduce space and clutter. There was no point to having a Gmod Servers section dedicated to only 1 Gmod server, same with Minecraft.
Speaking of Gmod, I'm not sure what we're doing with TTT yet. It's been discussed in the past to just close the server down because it's seen very little population for a long time now, but on the other hand it's nice to play something a little different. So that's still a discussion we [bD's] are having with the AO's and CA's, and we'll keep you posted.
Store plugin, I believe this is between Spiked and Paul at this point. I'll have to get with them on it.
That's about all I have right now, I don't want to make this too long, but there were a lot of things I wanted to cover, and they weren't all worth making separate threads for. Any questions, post below.
Promotions, you say? Indeed!
