Forum Restructuring

[Gambit37]

Hi everyone!

Over the next few days I'll be changing the forum structure a bit to make things a little cleaner and more streamlined.

The main areas affected will be the News section, the Clones section and the Creative section. Custom Dungeons will move to the creative section and some of these new sections may receive sub-forums for better organisation. We may end up with more sub-forums overall, but fewer main sections on the forum index page.

This is a work in progress and I'll update everyone when it's done. If you can't find a post because it's been moved, you may need to use the forum search.

We'll also listen to suggestions for improvements, but reserve the right to ignore any or all of them

[Gambit37]

Update: Most of the restructuring is now done, although we are tinkering with the position of some forums, and some Custom Dungeon threads are still unsorted.

Please don't be alarmed if you see things moving around....

I'll post a full summary of what's changed when it's all complete.

[Gambit37]

Hi everyone, the forum restructuring is now complete.

Given that no-one has commented on it, and there have been no shouts of "I can't find anything", I shall assume that everyone is happy with the new structure.

Just for information, here's a quick summary of the changes and where you should now post things:

1) The Welcome forum is now for (a) people to say Hi, (b) announcement type posts within the community (eg, when there's a new update to a DM site for example) (c) Happy Birthday style messages and (d) a few "general chat" posts.
2) All other chat should happen in one of the sub-forums attached to the "News & Chat" section. Please select an appropriate forum for new posts. Posts about stuff going on in your own life should go in the "Other topics" sub-forum.
3) Custom Dungeons are now moved into a new "Community Creations" category, which also contains the old Creative forums: "Creative Endeavours", the D&D forums and the private developers forum. Custom Dungeons are also now split into sub-forums for each engine/platform.
4) All the clones forums have been tidied up and in some cases now also have sub-forums.

It should all be pretty straight-forward. However please do let me know if you have any problems or suggestions.

[beowuuf]

Just in case people didn't appreciate a short cut:

As you can see mostly any forum with sub-forums displays those sub-forum names on the main page. When a forum has a new message indicated, if it is in a sub-forum, the little graphic beside the sub-forum name will be rimmed in red.

So that will save you a single click, or let you avoid clicking if it's not a sub-forum you are interested in

[Seriously Unserious]

Could you add a list of subforums for the "news and management" section?
They all have quite a few subforums but none are listed on the main page so right now it takes a lot of searching around to see if there's any new replies/topics of interest.

[Gambit37]

I don't understand why you need more subforums? There are 5 sub forums listed within the "News & Chat" section. The double-book icon on the left shows that there are unread posts in that section, and if you hover over each sub forum, you'll get a small tooltip showing "Unread Posts" or "No Unread posts".

An easier way of using the forum however, is simply to use the "View New Posts" link above the list of forums -- that will show you all the new stuff since your last visit, across all the various forums/sub forums.

[Seriously Unserious]

The News and chat forum has numerous sub-forums that weren't listed on the main page when I posted that, they are now...

[Gambit37]

You must have had an old cached copy, the subforums have been there for a few days.
Always remember to refresh your frequently visited pages to ensure you get the latest content.

[Seriously Unserious]

Actually, I was using a different computer last time I was online...

I recently (1 week ago) bought a new computer with windows 8 and the forum looked a bit different on that computer. That's strange because I'd expect an old cached version to be more of a problem on this computer, which is about 5 or 6 years old.

[beowuuf]

Interesting, I've been having a problem on this new win 8 laptop where occasionally the caching will mess up and i need to flush it to see things like yahoo and twitter correctly. This forum loses the large picture at the top, i'm now so fast to correct for it i don't know if other formatting like the sub-menus gets ditched too...

Thought it was a firefox/ad blocker situation, could it be win 8 somehow? Anyway, flush your cache and it's good again. Let me know if you have similar problems in the future so i know it's not just me!

[Lord_BoNes]

I use Firefox on WinXP, and I never having any kind of caching issues (except that it occasionally forgets my login details, and I have to login again ). I'm also running Win7 with dual boot (but I run XP 99.9% of the time), and Firefox runs just the same.
Opera however has plenty of problems (I used to use Opera, but in recent versions it's turned to crap ) like the images not displaying until I right click and tell it the "show image"... on EVERY image
And then there's the good-ol' crappy IE... that just runs like it's usual crappy-ol' self... taking all day to load any page, and it also suffers the same "occasionally forgetting login details" issue that Firefox does

[beowuuf]

Yeah, I have had no issues like this on XP/Win 7, but then again they also didn't have the latest firefox and ad-blocker, which this laptop has.

[Lord_BoNes]

I've got the latest Firefox. I downloaded it just 3 days ago. And I've not had a single hiccup... it's awesome!

[Seriously Unserious]

I've been using the 64 bits version of Firefox on my new laptop, not sure if that has anything to do with it, but for some reason I'm not having any problems seeing any of the forum features now (that I'm aware of) and I'm on my win8 computer.

Yeah, I've not been impressed with Win8 so far. I tried to install win 7 on my new laptop but it rejected it, even though, according to the manufacturer's web site it has all the needed drivers to support win 7. It's probably the BIOS that's forcing win 8 on my, so I'd probably have to flash the BIOS to get a Win 7 compliant version before attempting to install.

[Lord_BoNes]

My PC is running WinXP and it's an Intel I-5 3470... it's meant to be running Win7 (which I have able to dual-boot... but I prefer XP... using 32-bit memory pointers, being 1/2 the size, definitely improves system performance... especially for games, where memory pointers can be used quite a lot).

[Gambit37]

Please don't clog up forum maintenance threads with unrelated tech discussions thanks! There's a new "Science & Technology" forum for that