New DM Encyclopedia Site :: Thoughts

[ChristopheF]

A bit off topic, but will your new site have discussion built in Christophe, or will you still direct people here?

People will be able to post comments on any page of content. In some way, you could then consider each page as a possible discussion thread. But this will be only to comment the content of the site itself, notify me of mistakes, broken links, missing information etc... I think I will strongly moderate these comments to avoid too much "noise" being posted. I think I will delete comments after the errors are fixed or new information is added directly inside the page, for example. I don't want people to use comments for real discussions or being off topic. This is to keep the site as clean as possible.

I plan to also have a single discussion forum similar to the existing "General Discussion" forum where people will be able to discuss about the site itself (so hopefully very few messages here). Maybe I will migrate the current guestbook in there, I've not decided yet what to do with it. It is currently disabled because of too many spammers.

For everything else, users will still be directed here. I still think it is good to have a single place where discussions take place.

I am currently working for the first release of the site next week, then I will try to present what I plan to do for custom dungeons management. We will discuss what we need, what we can easily do and decide how we manage them.
Some questions we'll have to answer:
Should we have a discussion forum for each dungeon?
Should we have a forum for each platform as suggested (one for RTC, one for CSBwin, one for PC, ...)?
Should we have custom dungeons stored and listed on the encyclopaedia and their associated forums/threads here? Or should we group them in the same place?
What do we do with the current content of the Custom Dungeons Upload forum that I already have? I surely don't want to keep it online in the long term. Should we migrate it over here or keep it in the encyclopaedia?

I am really open on all these topics, I don't want to impose something people will not use. I don't want either too complex solutions (we don't have that many dungeons to manage), I don't plan to code anything and only use features of the Drupal CMS that I use (possibly with an additional module if required).

For example, it is possible and simple to implement a new "content type" called "Custom Dungeon". Anyone would be able to post content of this type, attach files (dungeon file, graphics, etc...) and enter information in predefined fields (dungeon name, version, author, date, description, platform, ...)
We can assign categories to these posts (CSBwin, PC, RTC, ...)
Then we can easily have lists of dungeons by category.
Authors will be able to edit their own posts to fix mistakes, update the files,...
It is possible to allow, or disallow comments on these posts. If we want to keep all discussions here (which I would prefer, but again, I am open), we can disallow comments and just put a link to the corresponding forum/thread here.

[Zyx]

It would be great to be able to rate each dungeon on several categories, and to sort them later by these categories, so the user can quickly search for say, small dungeons, or good fights dungeons, or good overall rating, etc.
Anyway, thank you already for the efforts you're putting into this!

[Trantor]

I totally agree with Zyx here, anything that enables more ratings and/or reviews would be great, as it would keep "custom dungeoning" alive.

[ChristopheF]

We can create a second content type called "custom dungeon review".
It would contain numerical fields where users could rate several aspects of the dungeons (dungeon size, combats, puzzles, replayability, ...). Then a space where people can write their review.
The reviews of a dungeon would be posted below the main page of the dungeon (like a subfolder).
After, it is easy to display all reviews and sort them by any field you want (puzzles rating for example)
However, in order to classify dungeons, and not individual reviews, we need to have a single value for each dungeon. What happens when we have several reviews? Do we take the best or worst review? Do we use average values?
Anyway, this would require an additional development. I think it could be done, I don't know exactly how easily. I'll study that point after I'm finished with my next major site update.

It would also be possible to have a forum for each dungeon at the encyclopaedia if needed. However, users would not be able to create new forums. But as we don't have new dungeons everyday, I could easily create them each time one is required.
However, I don't think one forum per dungeon is a good idea, because we will have lots of "empty" forums with just one or two threads. But if the general consensus is to do that, know that it is possible.