Personal Forums

[Psionicist]

I am sorry to be a pain in the *** Morrus but I am unsure if you can do this

http://www.vbulletin.com/order/license_agreement.php

The Software is licensed only to you. You may not rent, lease, sublicence, sell, assign, pledge, transfer or otherwise dispose of the Software in any form, on a temporary or permanent basis, without the prior written consent of Jelsoft.

Edit:This can be solved by installing a free board and host the personal forums there. PhpBB or PunBB are both nice alternatives to vBulletin.

 

[Morrus]

Interesting. Technically, if you're right, that would apply to community supporter accounts, too (I'm "leasing" the search function, for example).

I interpret it as leasing the software, not leasing use of the software - it's legal for me to charge people to use my messageboards (and the various functions thereof), but it's not legal for me to give you the software (for free or for profit).

 

[Macbeth]

"Funky stuff from history" forum....Yeah, I like the sound of that.

Ooooh, please, make it public.... Or at least let me in

 

[Michael Morris]

Since personal forums can have their own styleset should this be included as an option, and at an extra charge (It takes approximately 4 hours to do a styleset, sometimes more, sometimes less). $20 seems fair to me, given the time involved.

 

[BrooklynKnight]

So, as of now, personal forums are only for those that pay extra beyond the CS accounts?

 

[cybertalus]

Morrus,

After reading your idea, I wanted to mention some concerns I have. Not in the spirit of stomping on the idea, but in the spirit of trying to find problems before they happen so they can be prevented.

The idea overall seems pretty cool. And I can certainly see advantages for EN World's users as well as for you (fewer websites for the users to access, and more revenue for EN World in exchange for that convenience). However, I have some concerns about private forums.

One problem with private forums is that whether they are created for that purpose or not, they tend to become the nucleus of cliques. I've seen it happen before on other boards and in chat rooms. Someone creates a private area for themself and a few friend away from the "noisy" main area, and before long most of the activity in the private area consists of complaints about people in the main area. I think a very large part of the success of EN World has been that for the most part the mods and admins have managed to keep the board from breaking into cliques and factions so that people don't begin to think of some people on the boards as "us" and other people on the boards as "them", and I'm concerned that private forums could undermine that.

I've also seen that it's very difficult to keep conversations isolated to private areas. I think this could be of particular concern if you allow for religious, political, or other controversial discussions in private areas. If someone develops a dislike or even a grudge against someone else because of a discussion in a private forum, it is going to be extremely difficult for them to not carry that over into the main boards. This could potentially lead to closures of otherwise legitimate threads. On a related note it could also make it very difficult to stomp out flames. If users are going at each other and the topic is closed on the main boards but they're allowed to continue flaming on in a private forum, then a particular topic might never truly settle down.

I expect that there are ways to avoid all of these potential problems, but I figured they might be easier to avoid if someone mentioned them early on.

 

[Morrus]

I've also seen that it's very difficult to keep conversations isolated to private areas. I think this could be of particular concern if you allow for religious, political, or other controversial discussions in private areas. If someone develops a dislike or even a grudge against someone else because of a discussion in a private forum, it is going to be extremely difficult for them to not carry that over into the main boards. This could potentially lead to closures of otherwise legitimate threads. On a related note it could also make it very difficult to stomp out flames. If users are going at each other and the topic is closed on the main boards but they're allowed to continue flaming on in a private forum, then a particular topic might never truly settle down.

We [the mods and I] have discussed this, as we considered it something to be concerned about, too. However, we came to the conclusion that it happens anyway, but right now it just happens via messageboards found elsewhere; we figured that we'd rather it happen in sight, where we can be prepared to deal with it, than out-of-sight in a private forum on some random EZBoard.

 

[BrooklynKnight]

Err, that doesnt answer my question. Though its good you guys are aware of that.

Currently are personal forums open to any community supporters, or only those who pay specifically for them.

 

[BSF]

ArthurQ - I think that is part of what Morrus is trying to decide.

Morrus - I might be interested. It would kind of depend on a few things. I can see some nice utility for my gaming group to have threaded, searchable discussions without having the hassle of dealing with my ISP. Of course, I have also thought of getting a broadband connection at home and just running the server myself. Or, any other number of options.

So, this would be a nice alternative that I would consider. Realistically speaking, a gaming group discussing an ongoing game is not going to generate a huge amount of traffic in comparison to EN World's public forums. For the game I play in (running on the DM's copy of Vbulletin) we have generated nearly 10,000 posts in just about 2 1/2 years. Out of that, I am the most prolific poster with 2408 posts. We are a 6 person group. We are probably less chatty than some groups, and we are much more chatty than the group I DM that has 8 players and just a few hundred posts. My previous game ran for ~ 2 years and might have approached 1000 posts. So, resource wise this is not a huge addition to ENWorld. The other benefit I would see would be that I would have an easier time encouragin my players to come check EN World out. As it is, Macbeth is the only ENWorld regular in my group. (And that is hardly a surprise since we met through ENWorld.)

For my purposes, I would want a "private forum" since anything that the group wanted to make "public" could be posted in ENWorld's regualr threads. It would just give us the capability to have a little more organized board to post to.

 

[BrooklynKnight]

I just wanna run a password protected polotical discussion forum :-D