New Subforum for an MSPAFA?

Originally posted by a deleted user

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Hello friends, I'm here to float a suggestion about a new subsubforum.  What would this subforum be?

Well, there is a mspa forum adventure called 'fortuna' and it has a sort of medium sized following, and the thread for suggestions is going a little faster than is preferable.  The author, gimeurcookie, has tried setting up free forums before to organize a place for discussion and fanstuff better, but both times they've been overwhelmed by spambots. 

SO I thought, hey, why not try a subforum on eagletime? That has spambot protection. Plus, it'd act as a sort of test in making that forum more like the old Gangbunch forums (where problem sleuth started and where firman forums were) - branching out to make it wide hub for a bunch of different particular tight-knit groups, who end up coming into contact with each other all melting-pot style. And who knows, if the idea works, or if other authors want to, maybe fan subforums for other biggish established works like superego could sprout up.

The possibilities for where the subforum would go would be:

1. subforum of Forum Adventures
2. subforum of Forum Projects
3. forum under the BAWK BAWK category, next to Hawkspace but not under hawkspace. A forum of its own.
4. subforum of hawkspace. (would require going to the hawkspace rules thread and voting for establishing a subforum inside hawkspace, as per hawk rules)

For this to be a thing: 1> Pinary would have to agree to it, 2> Schazer would have to agree to it and 3> as long as a majority of other people here don't have an objection to it, then we can move forward with it.

Right now, I'm thinking it'd be moderated by the author, gime, whose character I'll vouch for as an easygoing, levelheaded person who I've never seen be angry at anyone. I'd probably throw up a style sheet for it, too.

I asked them about it and their answer was

Sure, you can ask, the Eagle Time forums seem nice. I wouldn't push it too much though as I wouldn't want to overstay my welcome anyway. Plus it'd be easy to move back to <the mspa talk thread> or just some random free forum.

so if you guys say no there's no pressure; this'd just have some of the advantages I pointed out.


So, let's hear your opinions, suggestions, questions and discussion about this! How do you feel about the possibility of a new subforum for a mspa fan adventure being hosted here?

Vampire Mansion RP subforums.

Bad anime signatures are mandatory.

Wasn't there a dedicated MSPAFA discussion forum way back when?

I wouldn't mind, it'd be nice to have new people in.
I'll have to give the adventure a read too! :D

Subforum Adventures sounds fine

Yeah, sure. Making it a subforum to Forum Adventures sounds like the most sense-make option.

Plus, it'd act as a sort of test in making that forum more like the old Gangbunch forums

this will never happen

idk i thought et isn't affiliated with mspa. Having a discussion forum here for a thread on mspa would be the equivalent of having an affiliation link with mspa. (like chocpi.)

except. Attracting more people who read/make forum adventures.

i mean am i wrong in thinking this forum is for people who have Moved On essentially from mspa.

I'm also not sure that it would be a melting pot and not, like, a weird ghetto where nobody knows anyone from that subforum and vice versa. That all said: I don't really see a good reason why not? The more the merrier, right? It's not like subforums are at a premium.

a wiki would not have spambot problems as, surprisingly enough, spambots do not want to contribute to humanity's knowledge.

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I'm tentatively down with this, and pretty cool with bringing in new folks that existing folks can vouch for.

Wheat, you know the community around that work better than me; what kind of threads were you envisioning cropping up in a hypothetical Fortuna and Fortuna Accessories subforum? (actually we just talked on IRC and there is enough hypothetical content that a subforum seems the superior choice to a single thread).

The only potential issue (that's no dealbreaker, everyone involved should just talk it out first) is that our forum doesn't have an organised or particularly involved admoderatorly system. Hell, we don't actually have any rules enforcement other than the fact everyone kind of knows each other and (for the most part) we're not scared of calling each other on our shit.

I'm not saying I'm going to reinstate my Mod Mantle and strike Adminly Fear into a group of newcomers, but these things are good to figure out.

Hi, I'm the person who runs Fortuna and like Wheat said, if there's even an inch of doubt about the whole thing do feel free to say no to it. The last thing I'd ever want to happen is for me or the adventure to feel invasive. The whole story with the old Fortuna forums is that it ran well for awhile, and then suddenly spambots spilled in. I got a better captcha system, still had tons of bots, realized that the forums were somehow 2 years out of date, then proceeded to break the whole thing by updating it. Basically it was a huge mess I had no time to handle so I quietly put it down.

Fortuna is in a really awkward teen stage where it has too many fans to be contained on a single forum topic but it is much too small to have a whole forum dedicated to it. Even as a sub forum I figure it'd be pretty slow. As for topics it would have it could just have a main discussion topic, and then a topic for each of the applications (species, planets, characters, and fauna) so that people may post them there, get feedback, and thoughts from others on them. Maybe a few other things I can't think of at this moment.

It definitely wouldn't be a sudden wave of (active) people joining. In the last 2 months 48 different people have posted in the newest Fortuna topic, and I say that out of all those people maybe 5-10 might join and post here once or more a week, thus being an active member. While that lessens the risk of anyone new being a jerk, it of course doesn't get rid of it. In all my time of running Fortuna I've only seen 2 small arguments break out and both were ended with a basic "Knock it off, this argument has nothing to do with robots and/or aliens" or by asking to take it to pms.

No one will hopefully have to take any sort of mantle and I'll try my best to keep the calm, like I said, the last thing I ever want to be is a burden.

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Welcome to the forum! From what I've heard and browsed you're doing something pretty neat with collaborative storytelling, so while I'm just one person I'd be keen to see the forum accommodate you!

If you're worried about monopolising a whole subforum for yourself and your webwork's followers/participants, Wheat and I had a proposal while talking the idea out - a Mediaworks™ General subforum (location in the existing forum structure to be determined). It'd be open to any web project that's politely asking for a place to start a discussion/organisation/character app/whatever thread, and a sticky could be made to index all threads by corresponding project. In your case:
-Fortuna General Discussion (stickied with an index in the OP while yours is the only project we're hosting?)
-Fortuna Species Apps, Planet Apps, Character apps, and Fauna apps

If other web projects (forum adventures/reader-input heavy webcomics are the main examples, but we could be a hub for podcasts or whatever else folks fancy too) wanted a community hub, a Mediaworks™ General subforum would be the place. I don't know if you were around way back when MSPAFA had a Meta/Misc subforum, but I envision something along those lines.

As for the "keeping people in line", best case scenario of course is that it's completely unnecessary (or in the case of people being offtopic, folks have free reign in General Chat and even lower-quality free reign in Hawkspace, our Premier Shitposting Subforum).

I'm well aware that leading a creative project is quite a different beast from leading a community that gathers around a creative project, so as an Ostensible Leadery Type on this forum I'd like to help out with the latter where I can. It seems the kind of discussion though that we can play by ear as we see how the incoming community interacts.

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Eagle Timers, how do y'all feel about a Mediaworks General subforum? Where would be the logical spot for it? (I'm thinking Projects but will totes take user input). Does my suggested name suck eggs? (Y'all can send me your opinions privately if you'd rather as well, obviously).

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I do in fact know about that misc subforum and something like that seems pretty great and definitely breaks the awkwardness of having a whole subforum for one thing. It also allows the whole thing to grow all by itself instead of being dictated by one factor that could fail at any time. I noticed having a strange forum ghetto was brought up and that should at least ease things by a bit. If I'm able to put the discussion topic here I definitely would look into placing a few links to other places in EagleTime such as the introduction topic, that will hopefully nudge a few people into using the forums for more then one or two topics.

I myself need to break my shyness streak anyway.

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fort-una! four-tuna!

Is it possible to start it as a subforum of projects or forum adventures then move it out if we feel it fits better there? I don't have a preference I'm just curious :>

Hell, when we get right down to it we have a subforum for Grand Battles. There's kiiinda precedent?

On the other hand one thing I'm a little less comfortable with is that I have some pretty personal biz I talk about here and would be less comfortable talking about it with a whole pile of strangers available to see it, but that's a privilege I have no right to complain about. I'm sure I'd warm up in time.

/me judiciously begins deleting posts

I want a subforum for ikimashou, vampaia huntah.

A Mediaworks subforum could work, though I think it'd make more sense to have a fortuna subforum under Forum Adventures, similar to how we've got Grand Battles archived under Forum Games (and lord knows fortuna's going to see a lot more activity than those <.<).

However we do decide to go about it I'm all for lending gimeurcookie a hand here assuming folks are comfortable with it. As for new people jumping into the forum I find it hard to see that as a bad thing? Especially when as gimeurcookie mentioned it's probably not going to be more than 5-10 peeps, and who knows how many of those are going to venture out of the fortuna subforum.

Anyway, it's not like the forum wasn't publicly accessible before this or that we haven't gotten new folks in in the past year or two (who've turned out to be p. neat I'd say). And if anyone does end up being a huge jerk enough to deserve the long arm of the caw Pines or OTTO can still deal with 'em.

(Not sure if this forum has subforum mod-enabling functionality but if that's a possibility could consider giving gime mod powers in the fortuna subforum specifically just to make keeping threads clean etc. simpler for them).

long arm of the caw

mirdini

By all means, do it

I'm game to do such a thing if it's The Will Of The People, so I'll sit down over the weekend (on a day when I'm not braindead) and get this set up.

Thanks again for even just the consideration. If there's anything I should do do tell.