Lord of the Rings Fanatics Plaza

@Queen Nerwen Done

@Moriel Thankyou x

@Mojo and @Taethowen - your requests for easier-to-read colors have been fulfilled. Let us know if anything still looks funky!

Rohan polls look FANTASTIC now thank you!

Searching should be back but it might have some issues -- lemme know here or in bug reports if any of your favourite search-related features (including new posts / posts by users / etc) explodes

@Wamba_the_Fool try clicking 'Meduseld' sometime and lemme know how that goes for you :smiley10:

WD edit: Testing for @Tarawen

Huzzah! The Shire's works great too, but the rest of y'all have to try for yourselves. ;)
Thank'ee kindly sir, much obliged!

@Li. - We have not forgotten about your request. Unfortunately, there is no good way currently with phpBB to get the OP to stick on pages after the first one, and to have that functionality would mean investing a lot of time that we don't have right now into creating that extension from scratch. We will of course keep an eye out in case something does pop up that is workable for the site in future!

@Elenhir Looks like search functionality is back.

Thanks @Narv ! Hope you have a great day!

Why thank you, so far I've woken up and sat around for a bit so all indications are promising

So, I'm not sure whether this is the place to suggest it. But I have a tribute request for the Hobbit Insanity RPG in Mordor. What makes it easy for me, is that we have a Rotten Tomato point system based off of achievements that they can get in the game. So I'm going to suggest a tribute reward of 10% of their rotten tomato scores (rounded up). In other words...



Suggested point tribute for the Hobbit Insanity RPG:
DEATH- 38 points
KingODuckingham- 30 points
Fairy Nuff- 24 points
Sil- 23 points
Laintaen- 23 points
Lirimaer- 21 points
Dimcairien Luiniel- 21 points
Thalionwen- 15 points
Aerlinn- 10 points
Oro- 9 points
Moriel- 8 points
Aelita Sedryn- 7 points
Landy- 7 points
Uruva- 2 points

ok I will level with you on this: your tomato point => fanatic point conversion scheme makes sense, but the tribbing mechanism is weird and kind of awful on this plaza, especially for nonstandard amounts... so we kinda need to figure out a consistent way to handle trib requests in general. So we will get back to you on this.. I hope in the meantime your participants are ok revelling in the glory of their hard-earned tomato points. WHICH I will add are ultimately precisely as meaningful as these silly plaza point thingies anyway [in this point-impoverished troll's opinion]

Gotcha Narv! Take your time since this is no rush since yes these points are kinda worth less than a 1930's Weimar Republic mark. If it makes it easier I could round by ten if you want.

Loving the smilies, thankee-sai

Thank you Moriel! There were a couple of smilies missing that I kept wishing to use, and now they're back! (oh and for some reason I vaguely remember we used this pokey one a lot in our MSN chats together, didn't we?)

By which I mean to say, thanks @Moriel !! Some of these are bringing on a whole new wave of nostalgia. Who knew little round yellow circles could have left such a lasting impression.

@Moriel Obvsly I don't wanna be labeled as an enabler ... but you're welcome! It's largely due to @Nia's rockin' banana that I went a-lookin'! Can't believe you didn't call it 'Mo Rocks' though!

Lirimaer wrote: ↑Tue Jul 07, 2020 7:19 pm It's largely due to @Nia's rockin' banana that I went a-lookin'!

Aha! Well in that case he served his purpose and I take back all the negative thoughts I was having about him.

It's just when life gives you this: and all you really wanted in life was this ...

Yeah, he ain't got the style, has he! It's all the potassium-induced serotonin making him dad-dance.

I'm very glad we all can emote properly now - thanks @Moriel!

<- now can also be created by using : morocks: without the space

@Moriel Rocks!

Is it reasonable to ditch the Global announcements thread now that every kingdom appears to have their own announcement thread, many of them pinned to the top of the kingdom? Tbh all the plaza-wide announcement threads already feel like clutter when there's a sub-forum specifically for admin messages, but it's especially redundant clutter to have a global announcement thread right on top of a kingdom announcement thread both containing the same posts.

Perhaps relevant for members who don’t post in kingdoms, but do post in Cottage/Lore?

Eh, I find the Kingdom threads full of announcements weird when we have a global one. I am always annoyed when I mistakenly go into one.

Sil wrote: ↑Wed Jul 08, 2020 9:18 pm Perhaps relevant for members who don’t post in kingdoms, but do post in Cottage/Lore?

Seeing as how the global announcement thread is (with only one or two exceptions) exclusively kingdom activities, I'm not sure they would care much if they don't post in kingdoms.

And I agree with Lirimaer that the kingdom announcement threads are themselves weird, particularly after some talk of avoiding duplicate threads. Seems easier to de-pin one thread though.

I would rather we keep the global one and not the kingdoms ones :P If we had to chose..

I don't know if this is useful but here's the full sordid history of announcements just for fun and context

- In the beginning there were none. This was fine as nothing else existed either
- Someone (I think @Burnt Toast?) asked for a way to centralize info about what was going on in the kingdoms and we settled on the global thread as something that was a) high-visibility and b) easy to manage
- This worked pretty well IMO
- At some point people started posting announcements in kingdom OOC threads too. At first we did nudges in the direction of the Global Thread, but the tides continued to rise. We had the choice of 1) Making it a Rule not to post announcements in Kingdoms, with the accompanying enforcement that goes along with that; and 2) not doing that. I was in the Not Doing That camp and my reasons boiled down to 1) if that many people were doing it, it wasn't clear that such a rule would actually be what most people want; and 2) a voice in my soul that cries out to avoid rules for things unless/until it's clear we need them.
- People started making the announcement threads to keep the OOC threads cleaner. I forget if we admins recommended that to anyone or were just happy with the development, but in any case to me it seemed like an improvement over putting them in OOC threads.

And here we are in present day. My personal take is I think the global thread is pretty useful (including the 'global' aspect - when I was a member I rarely looked in Admin Msgs unless I had a particular reason, so would probably miss out on stuff if it was unpinned) and the kingdom ones are pretty easy to ignore if you're not into them. But I know some would say the same thing about big flashy signatures (if you don't like em ignore em) and I still find them kinda grating so I get that. I'd also say that the talk around no duplicate threads (from my POV anyway) was more so about limiting duplicate activities to avoid spreading activity out too thin - announcement bonanza is admittedly cluttery, but I don't think it has that particular deadly effect.

So anyway that's just some context for you all to direct your criticisms/ideas/whatever at. It would definitely be nice to find a method that kept things clean while still keeping people maximally in the loop on happenings.

Here's one thing I have a definite opinion on.
I prefer the global announcement thread pinned at the top. If I feel like perusing activities, that's the one place I go. I never look at the kingdom announcement threads. I find it really redundant, cluttered and repetitive to have all the kingdom threads when there is already a single thread that brings all the announcements together in one neat place right at the top, which is pretty hard to miss if people are checking it periodically/the forum even puts a nice red flag next to it when there are unread posts to key your eye into it.

Solid recap, Narv.

I totally get the redundancy gets to be a bit much-- I was hoping having one global thread would help with that, but I completely understand why people made the classic Kingdom announcement threads.

I'm similar to Lailorn; I rarely look in the individual Kingdom threads, and find it easier to glance at the global thread if I'm looking for things.

I would also agree that the global announcement thread seems to make the others redundant. Partly I think it's a function of membership: at around 200 total members (and fewer than 100 active) the kingdoms seem to me more valuable for their aesthetics than for actually creating more intimate settings beyond the total Plaza vibe. One would expect with more members their would be value in a main announcement thread (for inter-kingdom activities) and kingdom announcements (once there's a broader spectrum of kingdom-only activities).

However, I also think Narv's right that (at least under current conditions) this isn't something worth enforcing.

I'm not trying to make it a bigger deal than it is just by bringing it up, although as Windy knows I am a wacko who has turned off his notifications entirely because even that is too busy and cluttered for me so maybe even bringing it up is over-reacting on my part. *shrug*

heck no I'd much rather people bring stuff up if it's annoying them, and you aren't alone in finding all these announcements rather redundant (see Winddy for example ). It sounds like a chunk of people do like using the global one though so we'll probably keep that for the time being (based on this thread + what I gathered from a discord sample.. quality data-driven administration, i know). The kingdom threads are rather less clear though so we're definitely open to further opinions/ideas on that if people have them.

Got to admit, I would rather never see them. Keep them out of OOC threads.

I agree with @Lirimaer having an advert/banner/announcement in OOC really creates a break in the conversation that I find quite distracting. I'd be happy to go with Global and not Kingdoms. But then we are free and easy so...

From my own point of view, the reason why I opened the Bywater Bulletins thread in the Shire was for the same reason as mentioned above; that seeing announcements in the kingdom OOC threads breaking up the stream of a discussion was quite jarring. I noticed how @Burnt Toast had created the global announcements thread, and @Narv had encouraged people to use it rather than posting here there and everywhere, yet these announcements were still popping up in the kingdom OOC threads anyway (and on the odd occasion in pubs too). It looked to me like people were just going to do it anyway regardless (whether out of temptation, defiance, or simply having not seen the earlier advice). So I figured having one place in the Shire for all these was better than spread through our discussion threads and pubs.

The thing I have loved about this new Plaza is the "no rules" attitude, and how well we have governed ourselves. But in this particular aspect, I feel like we either need to have it one way or the other. Either we have only the one Global Announcements thread, and it is against the rules to post your ads elsewhere. Or we have kingdom announcement threads in whichever kingdoms wish to have them, as well as the Global Announcements thread for those who don't venture into kingdoms as much, and it is against the rules to post them anywhere else apart from these threads.

The value I see in kingdom announcement threads is that for someone like myself, my kingdom is always the first place I check when I log on to the Plaza. So if someone has posted their announcement in Bywater Bulletins, I am much more likely to notice it than I am in the global thread.

I don't feel too strongly about it either way, but I just think we should have it either one way or the other, rather than just "encouraged to do it this way, but not essential", as this just prolongs the state we're in now.

Chiming in on the announcements discussion:

Some things also may not fit in the global thread, especially if they're more geared toward a specific Kingdom (whether an event or an OOC announcement about logistical planning for kingdom things). I do *like* the global announcements, but it seems mostly geared to solely IK stuff.

Just back to the topic of smileys (or not so smileys in this case), I noticed that a couple of our old angry ones haven't been added. Perhaps this was deliberate, because why do we need to be angry? But these are the ones I'm talking about:

I do love that little blinky one.

Don't know if this is a right place to ask this question, and maybe it has already been asked and answered (if yes, can someone please show me in the right direction of the answer cliff thank you very much). I was wondering if it was possible to somehow save/export a thread as a pdf? I know there's a print view... I'm curious because I would like to read the Ages of Arda on my e-reader (because it's easier for my already bad eyesight. blind colourful bat here) and was wondering if there's a way to save the whole topic or a page by page of the topic as a pdf so I can sit anywhere and read it. Is this even possible and am I even making sense? *send help*

Nessa Saelind wrote: ↑Fri Jul 10, 2020 5:49 pm Don't know if this is a right place to ask this question, and maybe it has already been asked and answered (if yes, can someone please show me in the right direction of the answer cliff thank you very much). I was wondering if it was possible to somehow save/export a thread as a pdf? I know there's a print view... I'm curious because I would like to read the Ages of Arda on my e-reader (because it's easier for my already bad eyesight. blind colourful bat here) and was wondering if there's a way to save the whole topic or a page by page of the topic as a pdf so I can sit anywhere and read it. Is this even possible and am I even making sense? *send help*

Give this a go if you have Chrome:
Click on "View All Posts" and choose Print in Chrome. From there you can print as PDF.

Or: You can Install a "PDF PRINTER" , Avaible with Foxit or Several Free Alternatives ( Google it ). Then Print the Thread Directly to a PDF File!

@Dwarrow Elf We haven't forgotten your request, keep your eyes peeled, you will have your answer shortly ;)

So, since there's an image for pinned threads, is there any way to get an image for locked threads? I know there's not very many yet, but I can see it being a helpful feature at some point if the crazy RPs keep moving at the current rate.

Will add it to the to-do list! Thanks, Dim!