Share our new BioWare fan forums with others

Regarding this:

Keeping those types of threads (good idea on a NSFW area) unavailable for guests will also keep Sir Google Bot out so he does not index them. That might be a very good idea

I'm finishing up my article about this mess. I wanted to give it a few days to recover from my initial, "wtf bioware" but some of the people who visit the site may not know what life rafts exist, so I'll be putting it up tonight.


Anyway.. I'll be putting this forum and Fexelea's at the top of the list. This place will appeal to those who want only BioWare games, and Fex's will appeal to those who want to talk about other ones at the same place. They're a bit different, but like myself, I think a lot of members will end up on both.

If you're not strictly promoting via our youtubers, let me know if I can help with promotion from the site. I link to our youtubers frequently already. I also have a link to here in my sig on BSN Prime.

The only thing about here that I don't like is that Cyo and Co. can't change or adjust anything. They can't make a BSN rule set or privacy policy - we're all subject to the boards.net ones and they can do whatever they please to this forum with zero notice. There are limits on other things like the ability to tweak it for SEO, the layout can't be drastically changed, can't add other things like articles that would help draw more interested posters here, etc. I'd much rather be on a real domain where real control and actual dev work could be done, and would love to hear what you all think about it. (also would like to know if I'm mistaken and they CAN do those things on here)

Sorry for the long post..

I'm very keen to engage with your promotional wisdom and help 

I'd also like to explore the concept of the 'long form' article. If for example we had an article sub-forum/thread for those, but perhaps such articles would be constructed in a drafting thread, and only articles with sufficient 'likes' would be moderator-moved to a key-note articles sub-forum. And an article would be defined with a minimum & maximum word length.

Just ideas...

On the site itself, I understand concerns about the limitations of the ProBoards platform - some can be mitigated. In many respects this is a port in a storm, and the old ship was sinking. If this forum needs to move to a bespoke platform in the long term, that is possible (and BioWare forums have moved before). If this forum can see us through MEA launch, we will be older wiser and still together.

The article idea would work pretty well, especially if the subforum was non-public and maybe even limited in scope. Would probably only take a couple times through the writing & voting phases and it would be a well-oiled article machine. Varric would approve

It would probably be a good idea to reserve final-final approval for the moderation team so that nobody could brigade an article into approval, and specify that any approved article would be subject to a final grammerz/spel check.

Port in a storm.. gotcha ME:A launch may be popcorn-worthy. 

BSN Prime does appear to be 'moderation happy' at the moment.
Ironically shouting out your temp-ban might itself merit a ban 

I'll PM you so I don't inflict my long-winded novel on everyone

Almost 1000 members.

Nice.

There was one, but it got locked during a bout of 'moderation'.
Many are using their signatures to highlight their choice of 'lifeboat'...

Sigh. This closure is still depressing me.

It's going to be a sad day when they close, but it's really good to see all of these other forums available for those who still want to participate in the forums and interact with everyone. I've really enjoyed this forum so far so hopefully it stays up and running for a while.

It's great that many threads have been saved over on fextralife, but every time I visit there's no one there.  Plus I much prefer the user experience here.

It is indeed draconian nonsense. Very frustrating, made even more frustrating since the mods were basically useless up until the news the forum would be closed, then proceeded to start handing out warnings like candy and banning left, right, up, and down for the most mundane and unfair reasons. For instance:

And this:

Wow. I also had a post deleted. A post that was ignoring some current vitriol between posters and trying to change topics. Naturally, the actual posts with personal attacks remained. So when I found out about it, I made a post calling out the mods for deleting a post without telling me, and without telling me why, and asking how they expect me not to repeat a "wrong" if I don't know what I did "wrong" in the first place. I also wanted clarification of site-rules, and since mods don't answer PMs, I had to make a forum post (not a thread). So I've been banned for 48 hours. Makes sense.

Apparently, asking for clarification on something is "discussing moderation" and ban-worthy Gah, if there is anything good about this, it's not dealing with those incompetent, unprofessional, unhelpful idiots again. Sorry, rant