Thanks again sunshade, that helped a lot.

I've got things closer to what you suggested. Work first, opinions later. haha, So here's what I'm thinking:

I like Introduction Threads. At the very least, it's an easy way for someone to make their first post, and get involved with the existing community.

Tutorials have long term potential. Just as a current example, with all the new banners being submitted, I'd be interested in reading any tutorials revealing secrets of how they were made.

With moving all the treads, noticed a lot of archaic Sticky Threads of mine. lol Have to start removing some of those next.

私は日本語を少し読むと書くをできます。あなたも？

Mmmm. It's a low-key short-lived general chat. Fair enough, if you want to keep it. Make it clearer that it's not compulsory, though.

new description for Introductions -> Introduce yourself, if you like.
new description for General Chat -> Off Topic / Talk about anything, have fun.

Would the tutorials come out of thin air? They're more likely to be the result of a discussion in one of the other forums, to answer a question or clarify something. Doesn't have to be so formal, just post threads titled "HOWTO: Do such-and-such" and hope it becomes a trend. People browsing the Artwork forum would miss out on that banner tutorial if it's posted elsewhere.

(the Tutorial rules could be rearranged into "HOWTO: make a good howto")

Gah, I finally come on and everything gets ploped around (not saying it's a bad thing) and I had to reply and then resend a PM in BakaBT about it.

I know the Rules forum is a bit redundant, but it's usually everywhere you go. Not to mention that "Banner Rules" that exist in there contains the link to the "Banner Review Board" which is probably the easiest way to explain to people where to post.

I think the Rules forum should stay on top, seeing that's kind of uniform with just about any forum site.


-Tutorials-

The tutorials thread was the spur-of-the-moment idea that we implemented since one of the members was asking how to type/post in Japanese. I (just me as far as I know) intended it to go further to become a general/broad forum for any kind of tutorial/how-to. I intended a thread for requesting just so it would be easier for anyone to sort through anything that hasn't been fulfilled.

Unfortunately, of course, the tutorials forums hasn't grown any since my posting of IME (not to mention I also need to work on inserting more IME for other Linux distros)

I'm all about anything open-source, so while I did get the tutorial forum somewhat organized, I don't want to "own" it or be a dictator saying: "No! You can't do that with MY forum"; the point of it is that it's a community effort. While our active member count (posting wise) isn't all that high, we really need more opinions about what we need to change.

Now, I'm also not saying that it should stay the way it is. Just like Linux, the ACDB world is (almost) ever-changing, but we need to change it to be the way people can agree on using/seeing it.

Anyway, I digress a bit. (Sometimes I can get long winded)

As far as making the Tutorial Rules into a "How to make a good tutorial", would you think if i changed the title to "Tutorial Rules / How To Make a Good Tutorial" that would be acceptable? I don't know if it's something that can be exactly turned into a tutorial itself (or heck, post how you think it should look like in the reveiw board).

I think that's all I have to say about all that.


-Me (OT)-

Well, right now, I'm more worried about my work situation at the moment (hence, why I haven't been around as often than I usually am). I think that I may come back every week or so to see what's going on and to go through new banners on my netbook screen (I'm slowly getting sick of the little thing, but it does the trick when I need it to).

I've been working on my AMD machine since Friday (Mar 11) fighting with openSUSE 11.4 in a couple ways (it's a bit of a win-lose situation), but I've just left it how it is, and probably use it/update it... Gah whatever, I think I'm done typing for now.


Well, I'll swing back around when I can.

New Forum is a little closer to being finished.

Forum Listing
- Layout is decent, links seem good
- Theme colors can use more tweaking

Thread listing
- Layout is getting there
- Theme can use more work
- Need to verify paging works ( ie. 20 threads per page... )

Posts and Replies
- Theme, layout, and presentation need a lot of work
- Most BBCode should work
- Polls do not work

Posting of threads with the newforum has been disabled for the time being. Hence the READ ONLY mode notice.


I've been working on a few too many things lately.
- Coding an incoming mail server in C
- Designing an outgoing email policy and framework that can work in a highly isolated chroot
- Updating mkcharacter.php to have better Moderation tools and options. ( doing this right now )
- testing and deploying our encrypted PM system - I HIGHLY recommend sending yourself a PM with this to see how cool it is. hehe. I'm also going to add a "delete on read" option... so like in mission impossible, this message will self destruct! The encryption is massively awesome too. We generate a strong Public/Private keypair for every member. Your private key can also be blowfish password encrypted. All messages are stored encrypted, no records are kept of sent messages. The messages themselves contain no information as to who it is from. All you see in your inbox is "Unread Message #2" - only after decrypting is it revealed who sent it and what time. The database table is brutally simple. Once I add in HTTPS support to our site, I'd argue our encrypted PM System will be as secure as HushMail PGP email if not MORE SECURE!


[ Edited Mar 25, 2011 ]

私は日本語を少し読むと書くをできます。あなたも？