User blog:LaviBookman/Forum creation possibility

I'm looking into creating a forum for this community. I am well aware of how well the last time we created a forum for this wiki, but I would also like to point out the flaws of the previous forum that were not addressed and ultimately led to its downfall:


 * 1) Ucoz was not a good host. I was told that some users had problems logging in, and I can't say whether that was technical issues or just an unfriendly setup of Ucoz. I voiced my concern of disliking Ucoz's setup when I first looked at the website, and suggested a host that I thought was better, but received a reply of "we're sticking to this host." Rather than go back to Ucoz, I'll be building a forum on the Zetaboards host. The host has everything that we would need for a forum, as well as provide functions similar to what Ucoz has offered. It also is much more user friendly, in my opinion, and I rarely used Zetaboards in the past; most of my forum experience is with vBulletin, which requires a monthly fee for server costs (I'm not paying for it). I already done some tinkering with Zetaboards and its web page feature, which you can view here or at the end of this blog post. We will not have to move to the forum for communication, since I can add a small Chatango box to the forum. A discussion section would be added too, for ease of communications.


 * 1) The old forum's purpose wasn't strongly enforced. We created the forum out of concern that Wikia would force us to move our RPs elsewhere, and Wikia, to this day, has not done anything about it. Not to say that I think Wikia would start going after us on this any time soon, but role-playing on a forum has much more benefit than on this wiki. A forum allows us to:


 * Easily monitor who posts what, as well as prevent users from editing other peoples' posts. It makes seeing what others written easier to follow.
 * Keep track of all of our role-plays with ease, as they would be all on the same site. We can also permit users to set up role-plays of series or franchises that
 * A forums are equipped with a "User Control Panel," which allows you to "subscribe" to a thread and receive a notification whenever someone writes a response to that thread. It can also give you email notifications of these responses on a basis of your choosing (every post, daily, weekly, etc.), which you can turn off if it bothers you.
 * Many forums have a "New Posts" feature, which is the equivalent of Wikia's "Recent Changes," giving regular updates of where everyone is posting or talking about.
 * Organize our content under organizations, characters, etc. for easy access. This also allows us to start up projects in a place that stands out more than sifting through recent changes to find or being told about it from a friend or another member.
 * Use an avatar and signature of your choice to customize how you look when you write your posts on the forum: this is a significant difference compared to Wikia's "signature," consisting of the name, contact link and timestamp. The forum post does all of this, while allowing members to add their own touches of creativity. The wiki doesn't do this without cluttering the signature.

To add, forums perform what wikis can perform, but better for our role-playing roots. I understand that role-playing is like story telling - I even describe writing a role-playing post as writing a passage out of a book - but role-playing in its technicality is not collaborating on a story. A writer wouldn't go back and forth between the minds of each character: he would stick to one or two on one side of the argument, to focus on developing a particular person while keeping the suspense of not knowing everything that is going on. Also, role-playing can be slightly chunky when it comes to combat: without either players auto-hitting, writing always go by "aiming to" or "directed at" in terms of where hits would be if they connected. The forum would also be a solution to our constant back-and-forth of whether users should abide by fan fiction or role-playing rules on this wiki. Fan fiction would apply to this wiki, but role-playing would apply to the forum. Characters would have to have a profile on the forum to be used on the forum, so that would allow us to get past this issue.

Links

 * Forum web page (this is a web page that can complement the forum, requiring some knowledge of HTML to create more complex stuff; luckily, I do know some HTML. The name of the forum and the like can be changed if the members feel strongly about using a different name. No work has been done on the forum, however. The sections will include Naruto and Bleach-related material)