OpenGeofiction
Hi everybody!
There’s not much news from my side currently. However, I wanted to send a sign of life that Norðurland, Liboria and Yleväkivet still aren’t abandoned and vacant.
However, I’m still quite disappointed that the User Diaries still seem to be the Nr. 1 location to get and drop information (at least, nothing else seems to be promoted on the site). For non-permanent-active members, this is - still - a massive pain… There is no thematic ordering, no way to scroll back quickly or to get back to a certain topic… For a community like this, a forum woild be a good place, albeit quite “antiqe” nowadays… I didn’t know how the chat/forum dispute at the beginning of the year was solved finally, but at a quick glance, nothing seems to have changed in the last half year.
Concerning my plans for the rest of the year, I started to (re)map parts of the region north-east of Frjálshöfn, including a new airport under construction which will replace both the international and national airports in Frálshöfn city. Currently, I’m also designing road signs for Norðurland. My main focus will be on the small country with the unspeakable name between Norðurland and Slavonia. I want to finish something here in OGF and Norðurland is too big to get this success in the next 5 to 10 years… ;-)
Greetings from Austria, Markus
Discussion
Comment from trabantemnaksiezyc on 9 August 2017 at 15:38
Forum died. In fact I belive that it died solely because those who didn’t enter that diary entry had no idea that it existed in the first place. I also think that it would be ideal (and not at all obsolete, but hell, I am used to the late ’00s/early ’10s internet so it just might be me thinking that). Chat is good for casual discussion and nothing else, it’s too short term. Apart from that - looking forward to the progress! ;)
Comment from Rustem Pasha on 9 August 2017 at 18:05
I think there should be something like forum but maybe not forum exactly. There are (well, were some years ago) some wiki extensions, which allow to communicate little bit like forum, i. e. the wikiforum has its own main page, on which we can see the threads in the last post order, the authors nick, last edit, etc. There are few advantages of this thing: changes of forum are visible on the recent changes page on the wiki and user don’t have to create separate account to write. The biggest disadvantage is… well, wiki interface, which could be awful in longer discussions (we can see it on discussion pages of some articles or even Bliki).
The other thing is if we decide to create a forum it must be promoted on the OGF. User diary entry is not a promotion, new users or experienced users, which are absent when the entry is posted never find the forum, so it must die.
Comment from EMKLI on 9 August 2017 at 18:57
Yeah, both of you pointed out the most important thing: no promotion means a slow death. If something is announced here or somebody tells stories about his/her country, most of the users probably never read because of the feed’ish structure of the user diaries.
The idea of a wiki integrated forum might be good - especially because, as you’ve already pointed out, there is no further registration or any additional infrastructure (databases etc.) neccessary. However, as i remember, the presence of admins who are able to make the final decisions and also make them come real (i.e. server access) became quite rare because they all have enough to do in their real lifes.
Nevertheless, a forum would be really good in terms of a “healthy” community which doesn’t more or less exclude “part time mappers” (from the social events and the development of everything that doesn’t happen on the map or isn’t written down on wiki howto pages), which might be the biggest part of users.
Comment from EMKLI on 12 August 2017 at 02:04
No, definately not. Don’t even try. We had a Discord Channel a few months ago and it escalated badly. Since those events, the Admin team is clearly against any form of Instant Chat, as far as I remember. And by the way, it’s at least as messy as the user diaries. ;-)