I'm designing a Play-by-Post forum for my new forums (encompassing all games, not just SR) and I was just wondering:

1. What are some good, basic guidelines I should lay down?
2. I notice that you have multiple threads for some games...would only two be enough, one IC and one OoC - how necessary is it to have more than one IC thread?
3. As GMs and Players who play-by-post, would you like to have BBCode that:

a. rolls dice
b. allows you to specify IC and OoC talk
c. anything else you can think of for custom BBCode?

Thanks for the input!

another BBCode:

how about a BBCode tag that would let you type something only GMs can see?

That's a cool idea. Along with ones for all the registered players on a game. Also, how about setting things up so that a GM has limited admin privileges on their own game - like the ability to edit any posts in their game?

Note that as the most computer-ignorant person on DS, I have no idea if these are workable ideas....

Disclaimer: Not to dis this board, cause I respect all the work put into running and maintaining it and I appreciate a Shadowrun dedicated board.

That said: The functionality at alternity.net is something I miss at this board (I run a game over there as well). Each game is in its own forum, the editor works more like a text editor (highlight the text, then apply formating), a topic owner can edit/delete ANYONE's post in the topic. A topic owner can close a topic, etc..

I don't think he's suggesting, that they don't.

It just requires a setup where each game has its own subforum, since I doubt you can give moderating rights for specific threads.

But for a dedicated PbP forum, you will almost have to go that way (one subforum per game), otherwise things will be too hard to manage (assuming the site is getting some use, of course).

Dice rolling is good. Especially when there are specific dice rolling modules for the different games, which require different dice rolling methods (i.e. D&D-style, Shadowrun-style, World-of-Darkness-style). That would be pretty nifty.

Spoiler Tags are also useful.

Bye
Thanee

Uhhh - I DON'T suggest they not be able to do so, I suggest they be able to do so. I already can't do so.

Thanee - beat me to my own reply, though correctly.

The thing about spoiler tags is that everyone reads them, and people just give up and resort to PMs. Need the limited access spoilers.

PM is alright for that purpose... spoiler tags are for things that others would not know, but where it isn't really a problem if the players do. PM is the best way, when even the players should not know (because even the fact, that there is a spoilered message might already be too much information in some cases ).

On a dedicated gaming site, I also think it's best if you make one account for every character, not just one per user as normal.

Bye
Thanee

Ok, oops, I misread your post...

So you want GMs to have editing privileges for their games...I'm already all over that - sort of.

Any real complaint against all GM's having edit rights across the whole PbP forum?

GMs already have edit rights in the PbP forum only. I didn't hack their rights down to the thread level because I figured that some GMs may want to GM together, so multiple GMs would need edit rights to the same thread and so on...

The only drawback to this I could think of is if a GM wanted to jump in on a game...then he'd be a player with edit rights

That [PC logins vs. Player login] sounds like more bookkeeping than I'd want to do, personally, I like that I have one login here at DSF for any game or thread I care to participate in. It's up to me on a post level to keep it straight. Granted, I hate having a jillion logins... just feel like little digital bits of me getting left all over the place... weird and digitally aboriginal, I know, but... well, it's just a feeling. Plus, I know I'd forget.

If this was suggested as a fix to the GM-with-editing-privileges-playing-a-PC problem, I'd suggest that GM's can't edit posts. Maybe seasoned GMs could chime in on that?

What about this:

In your profile you can specify an optional field: 'Posting As'. Then, whatever name you type into that field will appear somewhere in the 'mini-profile' next to every post you make under that name.

This way, it's always your one account, but you can play as many characters as you like.

Do you think it's too easy to abuse? I figure since everything you do will still have your main username attached, most people would avoid trying to find a way to abuse this because everyone will know what's up.

Also, I don't even know if this is possible to do - but I worked all day yesterday and got my [hide] BBCode to work, so I figure most anything is possible