Where to post questions?

I'm just wondering where to post questions. Could I just post them in this thread? Or would another place be better? Sorry if I miss something or if I make a mistake, I'm not very good at communicating sometimes.

....depends on the question, really.

Just general questions, such as those about the forum itself. For example, I'm wondering where custom campaign settings would go, as there doesn't seem to be a section for them.

And by custom campaign settings I mean settings with alternate rules and unique options that might not fit in a regular campaign, such as other places in the established world, different time periods, or whole new worlds.

Hmmm.

For now.... I'd put that in General mechanics.

Gah! What did you do!? I at least like the previous "we have specific places for specific kinds of stuff" setup as opposed to "throw it in a pile".

The problem was a lot of those categories were going to be extremely empty. I'm certainly willing to create a new category or two though. I don't think we need as many as we had though.

Any suggestions? I'm thinking about splitting the section with the official game and the suggestions. I do think all the suggestions for races, monsters, skills should most definitely be merged.

EDIT: a;sdkgha;sdgadg I should've thought that through better before I merged those. Now I gotta move the threads one by one. Suggestions and official game posts definitely shouldn't be in the same category.

Yeah, probably had more than we needed. Let's see. Well you always need a "official stuff goes here section" for the official stuff what is point of forum and questions for admins/mods, etc. (In theory forum rules and such too.)
Edit: And a place for questions like "what Cutie Mark Crusader? What are the other ranks? Do we do custom titles? Will you give me a sammich? Official like of course. Official sammich givings."

Then we need the player created content that isn't official section.

A separate section for those running games is a good idea for this place.

Then you need the good ol off topic place.

From there you can usually create sub-sections as needed and only occasionally end up really needing entire new broad sections.

Edit: And of course the two admin/moderator only visible sections of official talk and the trash (where hopefully people are not like me and create threads in it just to screw with the rest of the staff. I'm an admin on a different forum and we have masterlists of all the stuff in a lot of the sections and I made a Trash Masterlist. Of course I never actually put anything in the list.)

Edit 2: Oh right, I did actually like that we had an on topic and off topic discussion boards as separate things.

Let's see, I already split it into a "Official Stuff" and "Player Created Stuff" section. Only had to move 18 threads <_<; In retrospect, it would've been faster to create an "official stuff" forum instead of a "Player stuff" forum, and move the 4 threads instead of all 16. Oh well, live and learn.

If you think I should have both an On-Topic and Off-Topic section, I can do it. I figured a general discussion could hold all of it though pretty comfortably, but it won't hurt to separate the two, and see if they both carry traffic. I've already made the two admin/mod only sections. Both the one for deleted threads, and the dungeon for locking up lazy admins and mods and beating them until they decide to work harder. I'm not immediately certain what you mean by a masterlist.

Thus far I haven't made many ranks. Cutie Mark Crusader is just the lowest rank available. I actually have yet to come up with higher ranks. I sorta wanted to use a really awesome rank name for the lowest rank, to help prevent 6 months from now, old members looking down on new members with only a few posts.

Currently the ranks are:

Admin
Developer (For Dan only, identical an Admin)
Moderator
Beloved Lurker (0 posts)
Cutie Mark Crusader (1 post)
Pony (50 posts; Haha I lack good ideas for names)

I was trying to figure out how to give users the option to give themselves custom titles, but I've yet to find it in forumotion options (Enjoy your sammich). It's on my todo list. Another thing on my to-do list was create a semi-silly custom genders list, using stallion, mare, filly, colt, and foal, instead of male or female. Was having some difficulties with that too though. I'm not used to this specific forum software. I've had a lot of experience with forums, and have modded/admin'd on several forums over the past decade.

lol.

Hmm, well Pony works, I'd have done Generic Pony but...I'm not always all that nice. =)

From there it depends on how pony specific you want it. Because you could easily throw out things like cute bunny, bird, irate cloud, baby dragon, griffin, drake, diamond dog (though really who wants that?), minotaur, changeling, monster of the week, dragon, and at the top rank....slime. What?

Or you could do more pony specific things and have ranks like mayor, royal guard, and at the top princess (regardless of gender haha).

As for custom titles, simply having a thread where people ask for them would work. Assuming you want to pander to every tom and sally. Hurumph!

Oh but yeah, what did you mean by masterlist?

I'm still somewhat dubious about the need to separate General Discussion and Off-Topic Discussion. I've always found it a distinction that was arbitrary and somewhat difficult to maintain, but I did it for now. To some extent, I'm not even sure which of the threads I have in the General Discussion forum I should move to Off-Topic, if any.

Also I always worry that an off-topic forum encourages the discussion of religion and politics, which always turn horribly nasty. Last forum I admin'd for, we ultimately had to ban several users after a 50 page thread about why transsexualism is wrong, which eventually dragged in white supremacy, homophobia, anti-religious stuff, and every form of bigotry imaginable. Ended up having to ban people on both sides of the argument for being completely intolerant and hate filled.

I actually was considering banning the discussion of religion and politics in the forum rules, just because no matter how polite people try to be, it only goes in circles, and eventually leads to somepony getting dogpiled on, then negative feelings flow everywhere. I have no interest to ban anypony simply because of their political views, views on religion, sexism, homophobia, transphobia, racism, or bigotry of any kind. As long as they don't start flame wars by bringing it up, I can tolerate them. That doesn't mean I don't want to create an environment which discourages anypony from opening their mouth on such a subject in the first place.

And now I'm worried someone is going to respond this post and start a flame war over it. Seriously please don't discuss the moral superiority or depravity of any specific viewpoint listed in this post. I know this is like putting out that big red button labeled "Do not press" but seriously, don't.

Hmm, well the masterlist concept doesn't really apply here. That forum has a lot of uploads and stuff so each section of uploads has a thread that's a masterlist of all the uploaded stuff for that section. I suppose it could be applied here for official rulebooks and expansions or such things if people like. But, at this phase it's probably very unnecessary.

I hadn't really considered that about general/off topic. It's just something I'm used to. It also largely depends on the userbase. Some forums really need it to keep the random stuff separate from the related stuff and others it's like "what's the difference".

Hmm. I always personally found the simplest policy for religion/politics/etc. discussions is to treat any thread created for such as basically a bio-hazardous containment zone. People can say whatever horrible horrible things they like on the subject, as long as it is on the subject, in that thread, full flaming expected, as long as they leave it all in that thread and don't drag it around elsewhere. Banning those subjects outright might make it tricky if someone wants to make a setting with theocracies or a canterlot high politics game and people want to discuss the ideas. I suppose you could just ask people to use some discretion but....I'm still not 100% sure that is a thing people have more than 1% of the time (basically only enough to get annoyed at other people for not having it). In fact, any forum that has a "serious discussion" or like section, I usually view the entire section in that way.

The problem is when the emotions and anger in those threads start to spill out onto the rest of the forum. It's probably a problem which can't be prevented, but no matter how hard you try, if a person says they hate all [blank] and that all [blank] should die, it doesn't matter if the blank is republicans, democrats, blacks, whites, racists, equalilsts, atheists, christians, pro-abortion, anti-abortion, homophobes, homosexuals, women, men, feminists, chauvinists, satanists, puppy-dog kickers, transsexuals, people who think the moon landing was faked, people who believe 9/11 was a hoax, people who don't think 9/11 was a hoax, people who put their toilet paper on the roll backwards... it's going to make anybody in that category suddenly struggle to be civilized with said hateful person, and then you start having people with dirty feelings towards each other.

It always seems to be the number one reason any person gets banned on a forum, short of being a spambot. And nothing makes you feel bad like having to permaban someone who joined the forum on the first week and had 3400 posts.

EDIT: FYI, Dan seems to want the subforums, so it looks like that's what I'm going to do. With the subforums, we're back up to 9 different forums. He said the Game Mechanics Discussion felt too cluttered (I blamed it on poor topic names). Still 4 less than we started with.

Don't worry. By the end of the day we'll have twice as many as we started with and the reason this thread was made in the first place will still have no decent answer to it. =P

This thread is actually a good example of why I wanted to reorganize the forum categories. There were too many of them, and a lot were not very well defined. I wanted to try and make it more immediately clear what was the point for everything.

Too many options has a tendency to create decision paralysis.

To answer the OP: If you are wanting to discuss mechanics for a custom setting and lay down rules and stuff, that would be the Mechanics discussion. If you want to propose a custom setting and recruit people to join your campaign, that would be in the Roleplaying section. Basically the difference is whether you're wanting to discuss mechanics or not.

I do think this needs to be made more clear. I like the subforums, I think they genuinely have made this a lot less ambiguous, but it's still not perfect.

Hmmm, not sure how I feel about this new look. The new/viewed symbols and such aren't as nice but, it is nice not having it thrust all the subsections oddly at you like it was doing before.

I generally am fond of the default php theme, as I think it's very easy on the eyes, however, it's not mandatory to fix the subforum problem. Those are actually two different options. I can restore the previous one, though I do have some complaints about it. I may fiddle with some of the other skins and see if any of them particularly jump out as nice.

I think the icons in this particular skin are fairly meh looking. There's also a lot of black text on dark blue background, which I cannot approve of. But if people like this one.

Why isn't there any option to have users pick the theme they want to use? There should be something like that somewhere.