A few of us will be reviewing games, posting guides, and that kind of thing. The guides and reviews forums are locked - if you want to post a guide or a review, first of all make sure your english, grammar, and presentation (screenshots and other images are a plus!) are good. Then post it in the chat forum, and a moderator will move it to the appropriate forum.
Other changes we'll be making (or have already made):
- We're trashing all the game-specific forums - we just don't have sufficient traffic to warrant having a forum for each game.
- Some of the modules we're using (regrettably) make it almost impossible for us to keep any of the old posts, so a lot of the old crap we've posted will be disappearing.
- We're going to put the Mumble status on our portal page.
- I just today (Feb 14th) changed it so the news stuff shows up in the active topics list.
- We're going to re-enable people to embed Youtube and probably Vimeo videos using BBcode.
Some policy changes:
- Users who don't make at least one post can stand to be deleted periodically. There's a huge number of spam accounts who nobody knows and have never posted.
- We'll probably add more moderators at some point, if it becomes necessary (fun fact: A couple of people who were previously just "supporters" are now mods as well).
About Ranks, Groups and Username Colors:
Some users have different colored usernames, all of which means something. Here they are in order of precedence (that means, unless someone chooses to have their username color from a lower rank than they already possess, they'll have the bottom-most one they qualify for):
Users with a Green Username are moderators, who can edit/delete/move posts to keep the board clean and friendly. This is a default group, but it can be overridden by any of the following groups. This is the only group besides "Administrators" which carries any special privileges. Moderators are chosen at the whim of what words the gods speak when fwaggle's locked in the backyard shed with a gas leak, though folks who are already participants stand a slightly better chance. People who ask for privileges lose substantially more ground.
Users with an Orange Username are participants. That means that they took part in many group events, helped make the time we all spent together more fun, and are just in general really awesome people. At one point in time there was a points-system in place to decide how much you'd contributed, but basically now it's completely and utterly arbitrary.
Users with a Gold Username are contributors, which means they've helped the group out (usually) financially at some point. We debated not even having this, because we didn't want anyone to get the idea that certain privileges were for sale or that our favor could be bought - this isn't the case at all. We have just about everything covered at the moment from our ongoing supporters so basically it's hoped that only the people who have this honor will be the only ones to ever have it. If you're ludicrously rich and desperately in need of online friends, it can't hurt to try though. ;D
Users with a Purple Username are Forum Administrators. Enough said, really.
