6. You seem to have problems with your caps lock, please do something against it.

Kudos for posting in the proper topic!

Forum Suggestions vs. Game Improvements... kinda close. Closest I think one might find on wlodb.

Still... I find it quite humorous! :D

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Scott, There is A LOT of off topic posts that aren't suppose to be there.. i kinda think it's about time you Create moderators :x kinda why i left... Too many off topic things... and no one can fix it.

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i know :P haven't had a lot of time to work on the site lately. i'll hopefully have something working this week or so. stay tuned!

Well, I'll go straight to the point:
How about a signature size limit?

Overgrown signatures lately become very annnoying. It's just absurd, seeing posts containing no more than 10 words and a half-screen signature under it. Big pictures are not the only problem here, massive text signatures are even a bigger issue- they can't be blocked by ad-blocks. Come on, it is SIGNATURE, not an essay- nobody reads those.

So my suggestions are:
1) Create a limit for letters in signature. 200-400 maybe? It will help people keep it short and sharp, not long and expressionless like toilet paper.
2) Create a pixel size limit for signature images. 100x400? 150px height on width of a post frame? I know it might be tough, especially that forum supports linking to external images. Still, worth trying.
3) Create a kilobyte size limit for signature images. 100-500kb? Some people are still using modem internet, overgrown animated signatures may be a real problem for them.
4) Create an image number limit for signature images. One image? Two images? Four images tops? I know dragoncave is fun but some people just overdo. There are sites like "Eggswillbedragons" after all.

5) It would be also nice to give a topic creator an option to allow or disallow displaying signatures in his topic. If someone's creating a guide for example, or any good knowledge topic it needs to stay as clean and watchable as it can be. Disallowing signatures could help achieving it.

6) Last but not least we could use a profile option to show or hide all signatures. It would solve it all, even without limiting signatures. Every user will decide whether he likes or dislikes watching sigs.

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bloo777 wrote:

Well, I'll go straight to the point:
How about a signature size limit?

Overgrown signatures lately become very annnoying. It's just absurd, seeing posts containing no more than 10 words and a half-screen signature under it. Big pictures are not the only problem here, massive text signatures are even a bigger issue- they can't be blocked by ad-blocks. Come on, it is SIGNATURE, not an essay- nobody reads those.

So my suggestions are:

6) Last but not least we could use a profile option to show or hide all signatures. It would solve it all, even without limiting signatures. Every user will decide whether he likes or dislikes watching sigs.

6: I'm currently working on that. i'm still getting a bit use to the way this forum runs. I'm hoping to have it done sometimes this week. And i do agree, Only put what is needed in your signature. dragon eggs are nice, but any more than 2 is just ridiculous . if your going to make long Signatures, PLEASE! PUT IT IN A SPOILER TAG! [spoilerV] [/spoilerV] without the 'V'

If anyone has a complaint about an unnecessarily long signature, PM me! leave me the name of the user. and if i do agree that it is too long, i'll put most of it in a spoiler tag.

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Thanks, for a quick reply ;)
Well, I must agree spoiler is a very good option. Pity not everybody uses it :)

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I don't think we need to put a signature size limit. I just think we need people to learn to use spoilers if their signature will be long. I just started using dragon cave and I only post here on wlodb.com. This is the only forum I use and I enjoy the dragons so I don't think it's fair to start putting up limits and then I can't use the dragons anymore. But I think people need to learn to use spoilers. I mean look at my signature. If you open up my spoilers then yeah my signature is really long. But with the spoilers my signature takes up barely any room at all. if people would just use the spoilers then I think everything would be fixed instead of putting up all these limits. If you put up all these limits you are going to have more people complaining and will cause more problems than actually fix anything.

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Sarin wrote:

I don't think we need to put a signature size limit. I just think we need people to learn to use spoilers if their signature will be long. I just started using dragon cave and I only post here on wlodb.com. This is the only forum I use and I enjoy the dragons so I don't think it's fair to start putting up limits and then I can't use the dragons anymore. But I think people need to learn to use spoilers. I mean look at my signature. If you open up my spoilers then yeah my signature is really long. But with the spoilers my signature takes up barely any room at all. if people would just use the spoilers then I think everything would be fixed instead of putting up all these limits. If you put up all these limits you are going to have more people complaining and will cause more problems than actually fix anything.

you are indeed correct. so as i said before, if you see anyone with a very long sig. let me know and i'll fix it

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I think we should give people a chance to fix their signature before admins get involved. Send them a PM and give them a week to make their signature more presentable and not so cluttered and if after a week they don't do anything then let an admin get involved.

Just a thought though. But I think maybe adult dragons from the Dragon cave should be spoilers. I mean you can only have up to 4 eggs or 4 hatchlings. So I think maybe the eggs and hachling dragons don't have to be in the spoiler but the adult dragons that don't need clicks can go in the spoiler.

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Heh, we just got caught up in an everlasting problem: suppression Vs education ;)
Sarin, sure you have a good point, yet I'm a bit too old to have faith in people ;) A great polish writer, Stanislaw Lem, once said: "I haven't knew there is so many idiots in the world, until I started using internet".
I wouldn't go so far, but... Most of the spamming users of wlodb are children. And if it comes to children (well, adults I'm afraid too...) you can "force" them to obey the rules in three ways:
-not leaveing a place for other behavior (suppression).
-giving a guidelines how to behave (simple education).
-creating a community that gives a good example how to act properly (education through good examples).

Sure, suppression ruins morale, but I'm afraid is the most effective way over a short period of time.

Simple education needs authority. Someone who don't have authority won't be listened. Children in the internet feel careless, they feel like outside their parent's influence, thus they act chaotically, disobeying guidelines. Internet, nor any forum mods or admins, nor any site guidelines are not authoritative enough to make children obey those rules. It will affect only small percent of new users.

Education through good example, as an additional way, works better than just simple education, but it needs a whole community to give a good example. I mean, most of the forum should have small signatures. So far it's unreal because most active users have overgrown sigs. If new user sees a huge siganture in every second post he just follows the trend, and makes one for himself.

I think the best idea so far would be just to make a profile option to show or hide all signatures AND start educating new and existing users how to use signatures, and how to keep them reasonable. Still it would need a massive, active AND CONSTANT education.
And because I'm an old grumpy unbeliever I just don't think anyone would keep up this Sisyphean task for a long period of time. Pople can shine like bright spark in the beginning, but all sooner or later end up burned out like an ash.

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bloo777 wrote:

Heh, we just got caught up in an everlasting problem: suppression Vs education ;)
Sarin, sure you have a good point, yet I'm a bit too old to have faith in people ;) A great polish writer, Stanislaw Lem, once said: "I haven't knew there is so many idiots in the world, until I started using internet".
I wouldn't go so far, but... Most of the spamming users of wlodb are children. And if it comes to children (well, adults I'm afraid too...) you can "force" them to obey the rules in three ways:
-not leaveing a place for other behavior (suppression).
-giving a guidelines how to behave (simple education).
-creating a community that gives a good example how to act properly (education through good examples).

Sure, suppression ruins morale, but I'm afraid is the most effective way over a short period of time.

Simple education needs authority. Someone who don't have authority won't be listened. Children in the internet feel careless, they feel like outside their parent's influence, thus they act chaotically, disobeying guidelines. Internet, nor any forum mods or admins, nor any site guidelines are not authoritative enough to make children obey those rules. It will affect only small percent of new users.

Education through good example, as an additional way, works better than just simple education, but it needs a whole community to give a good example. I mean, most of the forum should have small signatures. So far it's unreal because most active users have overgrown sigs. If new user sees a huge siganture in every second post he just follows the trend, and makes one for himself.

I think the best idea so far would be just to make a profile option to show or hide all signatures AND start educating new and existing users how to use signatures, and how to keep them reasonable. Still it would need a massive, active AND CONSTANT education.
And because I'm an old grumpy unbeliever I just don't think anyone would keep up this Sisyphean task for a long period of time. Pople can shine like bright spark in the beginning, but all sooner or later end up burned out like an ash.

.....very interesting.

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I do agree with you on most of that. Yes, most of the people that disregard forum rules are children (or adults without much maturity) But I don't really like the idea of forcing people to do things. Right when we start giving people rule after rule to follow the more topics we will see from old users talking about how strict the site has become and some might stop using the site for that reason (seems childish but it's most likely trust) I think the users on the site could do better to show more respect towards the forum. So much time and effort is put in by everyone to make the database as complete as it is and the forums are full of answers for anyone to look at. But I can't agree with suppressing the users. I don't believe in many people to actually act mature on the internet and I don't expect many of them to learn and act accordingly. If we suppress everyone we will have more complaints and some might leave the site. If we try education or good examples then I know the only people that will follow the guidelines will be those who never did anything wrong to begin with. While those who the guidelines are for will continue to ignore them.
Maybe we need to put official forum guidelines and have them posted at the top of the forum pages at all times. And when you create an account you have to agree to the forum rules. If you disregard the forum rules then you will get a warning. Continued disregard of the rules and your posts may be deleted, your account locked for periods of time from posting on the forums, you signature disabled and in worst case scenarios the account deleted. If we do something like that it still gives people the right to post whatever they want, have signatures however they want. But the admins can still punish those who disregard the rules. But we would need more admins (only admins I know of are Zero, Scott and SeaWolf) and more applications on the site that allows admins to do these things. I think something like this isn't really supression as it still allows people to post however they want to and do whatever they like. But then they know that if they do things that violate the forum rules they face these types of consequences.

(I hope I made sense. I typing this at work and I keep getting distracted by things XD)

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Sarin wrote:

I do agree with you on most of that. Yes, most of the people that disregard forum rules are children (or adults without much maturity) But I don't really like the idea of forcing people to do things. Right when we start giving people rule after rule to follow the more topics we will see from old users talking about how strict the site has become and some might stop using the site for that reason (seems childish but it's most likely trust) I think the users on the site could do better to show more respect towards the forum. So much time and effort is put in by everyone to make the database as complete as it is and the forums are full of answers for anyone to look at. But I can't agree with suppressing the users. I don't believe in many people to actually act mature on the internet and I don't expect many of them to learn and act accordingly. If we suppress everyone we will have more complaints and some might leave the site. If we try education or good examples then I know the only people that will follow the guidelines will be those who never did anything wrong to begin with. While those who the guidelines are for will continue to ignore them.
Maybe we need to put official forum guidelines and have them posted at the top of the forum pages at all times. And when you create an account you have to agree to the forum rules. If you disregard the forum rules then you will get a warning. Continued disregard of the rules and your posts may be deleted, your account locked for periods of time from posting on the forums, you signature disabled and in worst case scenarios the account deleted. If we do something like that it still gives people the right to post whatever they want, have signatures however they want. But the admins can still punish those who disregard the rules. But we would need more admins (only admins I know of are Zero, Scott and SeaWolf) and more applications on the site that allows admins to do these things. I think something like this isn't really supression as it still allows people to post however they want to and do whatever they like. But then they know that if they do things that violate the forum rules they face these types of consequences.

(I hope I made sense. I typing this at work and I keep getting distracted by things XD)

You mean need more moderators. they are the ones that usually control Topics/posts. Administrators have full control over the forum/website. generally there is only 3-4 administrators per site. and about 5-6 moderators. But the moderator feature hasn't been coded in yet. i'm working on that as well.. Pain in the butt :/ but till then, just leave us a message and we will do what we can. Thanks ^^

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oh. My bad XD didn't know the different between the 2 (I'm such a forum noob some days >_< XD) But yeah having a few moderators would be good. I hope we can have some soon. ^_^ Keep up the good work admins ^_^

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And change the PM system from looking over almost 30k usernames, to just "type it" system. It would be a lot easier for people to access PM other users here in WLODB.

Looking for a specific name on a long list takes time and a lot of patience.

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to true homer. I was thinking the same thing XD I've already sent 2 messages to person that defaults on pm XD

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HomerRugliaBeoulve wrote:

And change the PM system from looking over almost 30k usernames, to just "type it" system. It would be a lot easier for people to access PM other users here in WLODB.

Looking for a specific name on a long list takes time and a lot of patience.

http://wlodb.com/pms/newJust click on the list, then press the first letter of the person your looking for, IE: for Krovakon you could press the 'K' key. and it'll warp you to the k section

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But typing the name would be a lot easier. ^^

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just a little something that was kind of bugging me last night and on a few occasions. Do you think we could do something about the monster section to make it so you can search for monsters by lvl? You can search monsters my location by going to the locations tab and clicking on places like 'Osyla' to see all the monsters that are there and what lvl. And when you click on the monsters tab you see the monsters in order by lvl but say I'm training a pet at lvl 40 and I don't want to take the pet someplace where it's equips will be broken (like the raptors in osyla) I could search for monsters between lvl 40 - 58 since any monsters lvl 59+ will destroy my equips. Can we do anything like that?

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Zero wrote:

http://wlodb.com/pms/newJust click on the list, then press the first letter of the person your looking for, IE: for Krovakon you could press the 'K' key. and it'll warp you to the k section

HomerRugliaBeoulve wrote:

But typing the name would be a lot easier. ^^

Umm... you CAN type the whole name.
If you'll click the "recipient" block and type the full name it will choose it from the list. You just need to type it fast.
That's exactly the same way how you choose items when adding compounds and recycles. I never scroll through the whole list, I just type the name and list becomes highlited on the item automatically.

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How about cleaning up some user accounts?
There is plenty of "dead" account, who registered, logged in once, never wrote anything, or haven't added anything to the database. I think those account only slow down the database. Besides userlist would be much more viewable without all those "ghosts".
How about deleting accounts that don't have any posts/items/recycles/compounds and haven't logged in during the last half of year? Of course fake compounds/recycles/items count as zero. It's more of a question to Scott and all of the admins/mods. What do you think about it?

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How about adding Afican Villages, Yamataikoku, Sky City and Moon into the locations?

If we can get maps to the locations or some info about them I'm sure we can add them to the locations.

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I wish there was a way to extract maps from the files in the WLO folders. I haven't found anything that can read them.

bloo777 wrote:

How about cleaning up some user accounts?
There is plenty of "dead" account, who registered, logged in once, never wrote anything, or haven't added anything to the database. I think those account only slow down the database. Besides userlist would be much more viewable without all those "ghosts".
How about deleting accounts that don't have any posts/items/recycles/compounds and haven't logged in during the last half of year? Of course fake compounds/recycles/items count as zero. It's more of a question to Scott and all of the admins/mods. What do you think about it?

I spoke with Scott a while back about deleting some of the avatars because there are people that add 5 or so avatars to the site then choose 1 then a little while later they add 5 more and choose another one. I thought that was a lot of space that was wasted just to put avatars that no one is using. If I remember correctly Scott said the database is still relatively young and so we still have plenty of space that we don't need to worry about that right now.
The reason the site gets slow at times is when there is excessive searching going on. I don't remember how everything works but basically after some time there is a build up of information from all the searches and it causes the site to slow down from all the information. It's just a simple thing of emptying out all this information for the site to run smoothly again. scott said he was going to look at something to automatically dump the information after so long. I don't know if he did that yet or how that is going.
Another problem with deleteing the old users is that if someone sent a PM to a user and we delete the account the PM stays in the other users inbox and when the 2nd user goes to access their PM's the website cannot link the message with a profile so it creates an error message. Scott was going to look into editing this so if an account is deleted all of the information from that profile is deleted not just the posts.

I think it would be a good idea eventually to delete the old profiles but there are problems right now. Once we get everything fixed then I wouldn't mind it. According to Scott we have enough room on the server though. So I don't think we really need to worry about it at the moment.

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Yeah, I know about PM issue, I've been a victim of it ;)
I thought that if we clean up all of these users at once we could somehow clean PMs from them at once.

But if Scott said the database is not too heavy, then ok, no need to rush :) Thanks for the info Sarin ;)

About African Villages:
Yesterday I've been traveling to Cairo, so I took a little detour and directed my Jaylor to Africa. I'm afraid right after landing I ended up on "fight-map":

I'm kinda low level, so I didn't risked getting my ass kicked by monsters and cruising again all the way from north island. I just made a screenshot and fleed. I don't know what is deeper into African Villages :)

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hey bloo what do you think about working together to create some rules/guidelines for the forums. I don't think we have anything written down yet but it would be a good thing to do so that all of the admins know what is acceptable and not acceptable and how we can deal with it. And also the members know that if they do things like spam topics or use foul language their posts will be deleted or their account banned or whatever punishment we decide. What do you think?

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Sure, why not :)
I'm working now on doing some forum/site FAQ topic, and I'm going through forum's most usefull topics. With addition of rules/guidelines written down in one topic it would be a good introduction to forum for newbies.

About guidelines, I've already written down few, that I've noticed people have problem with:
-Title of topic should be short and one look on it should tell what is inside.
-Double posting should be allowed only after some time interval (1 day? 1 week?).
-Reviving dead threads should be discouraged in marketplace, guild help and... and in few others ;)
-Topics should be created in appropriate category

About appropriate categories:
Yesterday I spent over 3 hours moving topics from Website Announcement to appropriate categories (darn it, EVERY SINGLE TOPIC by JelandaProfile and AngieHateHackers have been created in Website Announcements -_-).
Today while looking for good topics to FAQ I continued moving topics in whole Website Discussion section, after 4 pages I gave up for today ;)
I've noticed there is a HUUUGE amount of threads about pets/monsters, leveling/bursting and game troubleshooting. So far they all fit only to WLO general discussion. What do you think about creating these 3 subsections:
-Pets & Monsters
-Leveling & Bursting
-Game troubleshooting
in WLO gameplay forum?
Would it be improvement or would it be too much of fragmentation?

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I was going to start a topic about it but I guess we could work on the guidelines here. Somet things I wrote down were

1. Do NOT spam topics punishment: All spam posts will be deleted

2. Do NOT use foul language in the forums. punishment: Post will be edited to remove foul language and a warning sent by PM to remind the member that foul language is not permited in the forum. If the member continues to use foul language the posts will be deleted and in extreme cases the account banned.

3. Do NOT revive dead topics. punishment: Unless the post is a relevant question the members post will be deleted.

that's just some things I thought about before I went to lunch and I had them written out. They seem to match with yours pretty well. But I think we need some guidelines along with some punishments that way the members know what will happen if they do certain things and also we, as admins, can give out the same punishments. It wouldn't be right or fair if someone did something and I just delete their post while someone else does the same thing and you ban them or something. It will just keep the admins on the same page which i think will be helpfull since there are 6 of us (it is 6 right?)

I'll have to spend some time thinking about other rules and punishments and such. so I'll have to post again later. -.-

If you need any help moving the topics and stuff just ask. You don't have to take everything on yourself. I was going to go through at some point and look at some of the people that I know spam topics constantly and I was going to delete the spam posts. what do you think? If you need any help moving the topics just give me a place to start and I'll help out ^_^

**EDIT**
I really wish we had a hidden forum for the admins. Or really just a hidden post that only admins can see and post in. I think it would really help so we can communicate with each other instead of send out 5 emails. But we can discuss site development or creating the rules or just give a general update on things to other admins so we can stay updated and on the same page with each other -.-

Last edited Tue, 16 Feb 2010, 7:03pm by Sarin

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