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Post by old squirmydad on Jun 8, 2013 21:57:02 GMT -9
wait what's wrong with Politically religious naked minis holding guns? those are my favorite kind. I see another mini in your future.  Thanks for the kind words folks, however, I've never seen a "Donate" button that was either popular or effective. Ask me about the last days of Paperworlds.com sometime. I do promise to spend any donation money you do send me on beer. I promise to drink it all away and not spend one cent on forum maintenance. |
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Post by bravesirkevin on Jun 8, 2013 23:33:01 GMT -9
First up... it took me a while to find the page controls to flip to the next page. I'm used to seeing them at the bottom of the page under the last post so it didn't occur to me that they'd be docked at the top of the page and I didn't see them so for a few days I've been scrolling up to the top just to change to the next page. Is it possible to make that a little more obvious?
Secondly, I don't think donations in the traditional sense are the right way to go about it.
I do have two alternative suggestions that I think might be a little better.
Suggestion, the first: We get all the willing designers together and they contribute an item or two to a special edition set which gets bundled together and sold on RPGnow for a very reasonable price, in the same vein as the free monthly hauls, but not free this time around. All profits from this sale go directly to a Cardboard Warriors treasury, managed by the admins. As a policy, money in the treasury is used to pay for the maintenance and if there is a surplus we can use the money to fund promotional efforts like contests and paying for professional services, if need be. Everyone benefits in that the forum is improved, participation is voluntary and is rewarded directly in the form of a special haul of stuff, and the designers benefit in that they've gotten some exposure that they otherwise might not have. Someone with the right negotiation power might convince the OBS crew to give us a slightly better royalty deal on this particular pack, and future ones like it based on the amount of business that this site has generated for them over the years.
Suggestion, the second: We calculate projected expenses for a given year, including things that would be nice to have but that have so far been beyond our budget. We take that budget, divide it by 12 and charge that amount to willing designers and studios to rent the header image for a month allowing them to showcase any of their relevant products and a very clear stamp to say "this month Cardboard Warriors is brought to you by:____________" Along with a link to their relevant shop.
Just my two cents worth.
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Post by Parduz on Jun 9, 2013 1:07:13 GMT -9
wait what's wrong with Politically religious naked minis holding guns? those are my favorite kind.  really though I don't see the problem with the money going to the owners pocket if there is superfluous. after all they create , edit and mod the forums so a little compensation shouldn't be a bad thing. I don't think it will get out of control with this group? do you? Secondly, I don't think donations in the traditional sense are the right way to go about it. I do have two alternative suggestions that I think might be a little better. Suggestion, the first: We get all the willing designers together and they contribute an item or two to a special edition set which gets bundled together and sold on RPGnow for a very reasonable price, in the same vein as the free monthly hauls, but not free this time around. All profits from this sale go directly to a Cardboard Warriors treasury, managed by the admins. As a policy, money in the treasury is used to pay for the maintenance and if there is a surplus we can use the money to fund promotional efforts like contests and paying for professional services, if need be. Everyone benefits in that the forum is improved, participation is voluntary and is rewarded directly in the form of a special haul of stuff, and the designers benefit in that they've gotten some exposure that they otherwise might not have. Someone with the right negotiation power might convince the OBS crew to give us a slightly better royalty deal on this particular pack, and future ones like it based on the amount of business that this site has generated for them over the years. Suggestion, the second: We calculate projected expenses for a given year, including things that would be nice to have but that have so far been beyond our budget. We take that budget, divide it by 12 and charge that amount to willing designers and studios to rent the header image for a month allowing them to showcase any of their relevant products and a very clear stamp to say "this month Cardboard Warriors is brought to you by:____________" Along with a link to their relevant shop. My suggestion comes from the fact that Squirmydad/Mayhem in Paper just paid $35.00 to get us a copper membership and therefore our attachments back but we are already at 90% of our limit. I don't know what the next step up is, but we have more than 1700 members. Only a small percentage of us would have to give a dollar to afford Platinum or whatever and we could continue to enjoy the forum as we always have. I don't want to reward pro-boards for this poorly implemented "upgrade" but we have been using their services for years without paying anything and I don't want Squirmydad to shoulder more financial costs as well as donating his administrative time. I suggest a donation rather than a membership fee to avoid excluding anyone who does not have a credit card or who just doesn't feel they have the money. I'm thinking of it as crowd sourcing for forum expenses. I reply to all of you in the same manner, marking out that i'm not talkinf for myself, but that i'm just trying to figure out how someone else could complain or protest: Our group, while stable, nice, and somewhat "historically" for this forum, is not a fixed, non mutable things. Ppl will come, ppl will go. So how much trust we (the users all) have on admins and owners is not "fixed". When a person will like to donate money FOR THE FORUM (which is not the same as give money to the author for a product.... or for nothing) then that person should be able to control that his money is IN THE FORUM (and not, for example, in the new cutting machine the author bought for testing his models faster). The forum admins and owners are then in charge of being "transparent" about the money donated to the forum. Trace a line from a completly free forum (i mean, like it was before) and a completly transparent funded forum. Each point of the line between the two ends is a hook for anyone wanting to complain and start flaming about money steal. And about anything else than donation (so memberships forms or publisher fees), i have seen this also again: someone then based his "weight" on the forum "governement" on the amount of money he gave to the forum. The result was really sad (well, THAT forum was meant to be "not owned by anyone", which is different from this one...). It is true there is no way to know that Squirmydad won't spend some of the money we send him on beer, but after paying out of his own pocket as well as putting in the work to keep this forum running I would be happy to buy him a pint and since he now has a "history" of paying the fees for this forum I figure it is a pretty good bet he would do it again if we could figure out a way to get him the money. Oh, i've no doubt me neither. But we should think "in general", as the forum is open, and not for us only: as i said, we can always pay 10 times a set and send a PM with "that was for the forum, mate". I repeat: i've seen this fire before, it burned me (lost forums, lost -virtual- friends, and i was not the one that donated and neither the one that got the money) so i could be "overreacting". Be patient with me in this case: i can't parduz myself  |
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Post by aaron on Jun 9, 2013 5:45:53 GMT -9
wait what's wrong with Politically religious naked minis holding guns? those are my favorite kind. I see another mini in your future. Thanks for the kind words folks, however, I've never seen a "Donate" button that was either popular or effective. Ask me about the last days of Paperworlds.com sometime. I do promise to spend any donation money you do send me on beer. I promise to drink it all away and not spend one cent on forum maintenance. LOL can you imagine explaining that one to the missis ... " ya well you see it's uh ... well it's... ya , I'll just get my bedding and be on the couch if you need me... " OK I got it why not sell advertizing! there is some add spaces on here and I think at a certain level Pro boards gives you control over them? it's worth looking into. |
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Post by hackbarth on Jun 10, 2013 4:13:21 GMT -9
I do promise to spend any donation money you do send me on beer. I promise to drink it all away and not spend one cent on forum maintenance. Show me the donation button please. |
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Post by glennwilliams on Jun 10, 2013 6:50:08 GMT -9
I do promise to spend any donation money you do send me on beer. I promise to drink it all away and not spend one cent on forum maintenance. Show me the donation button please. Not good enough. Didn't your 3rd grade teacher tell you not to bring it unless you brought enough for all to share? Make the beer downloadable and I'm in. Seriously, advertising might work. I know I'd do it. |
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Post by wyvern on Jun 12, 2013 8:31:34 GMT -9
There seem to have been a few fresh changes to the CWF today, presumably as work in the background proceeds to straighten things out properly. Not sure these are all advantageous, however, though I appreciate some things may be only temporarily out of action, or simply mislaid. One boon is that the long drop-down contents list that flashed up every time you tried to click the "Carboard Warriors Forum" link to take you back to the Forum homepage seems to have vanished. Less useful is the disappearance of the "floating" page number link, which now only features at the top of the page, leading to yet more scrolling. Shouldn't this button also be available at the end of each page too? That's where it's really needed if you're reading through the posts in sequence, certainly. Also, I seem to have lost the bars with all the editing function buttons when adding a Reply - so font colour, size and justification changing, adding smileys, etc., are no longer practical unless you can remember the right codes -  (that one I know!). And also . Still can't add multiple quotes easily in a Reply either; it remains a copy & paste task for each separate one after the first. Maybe try hitting it with a different size of HTML wrench? |
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Post by old squirmydad on Jun 12, 2013 9:39:58 GMT -9
It'd help if I knew anything at all about HTML, besides what the letters stand for.  |
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Post by ChuckConroy on Jun 12, 2013 9:43:24 GMT -9
Also, I seem to have lost the bars with all the editing function buttons when adding a Reply - so font colour, size and justification changing, adding smileys, etc., are no longer practical unless you can remember the right codes - (that one I know!). The editing functions don't appear in the Quick Reply box but are available in the standard Reply or Quote text box. |
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Post by cowboyleland on Jun 12, 2013 19:08:54 GMT -9
OK, I have a minor request. I'm using the "recently updated threads" as my "go to" page here and I am finding that instead of clicking on the small post time that would take me to where I want to go, I often click on the big red posters name which takes me to their profile. I'm sure I'll get used to it in time, but all the same, could the font on the post time be enlarged so I don't have to click with quite as much accuracy? Just asking.
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Post by old squirmydad on Jun 12, 2013 19:51:17 GMT -9
I'll see what I can do.
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Post by wyvern on Jun 13, 2013 4:49:03 GMT -9
The editing functions don't appear in the Quick Reply box but are available in the standard Reply or Quote text box. No they aren't! At least, not when I go there they're not, in the same way that the "Quote" doesn't appear anywhere except on the main topic page, on each separate posting. Weird thing is, the editing functions at least were there until yesterday, which presumably makes it less likely it's purely a browser thing, unless some technical alteration's gone on behind the scenes. Or just that the gremlins have crawled in from somewhere else... Intriguingly, I am now being treated to the whole first page of this Topic as a "Thread Summary" when I go to Reply, but none of the subsequent pages (at least, I think not, but, unsurprisingly, I can't remember exactly where the pages started and ended)! |
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Post by Brave Adventures on Jun 13, 2013 5:32:38 GMT -9
Squirmydad, if you have access to the backend settings, you should be able to re-create a "New" button by doing the following. 1) Go to Forum Settings. 2) Click the Navigation Tab. 3) Click the Add Custom button at the bottom. 4) Enter the name as "New" and the URL as cardboard-warriors.proboards.com/threads/recentI haven't been online for a while. I got married in May and I've been very busy. I am just catching up with everything now and was surprised like everyone else to find the forum different. It might be possible for the owners of the forum to re-create it on their server as a PHPBB forum instead of using proboards. It would be cheaper and you wouldn't have to worry about not having enough space or mysteryious powers forcing upgrades on you. The biggest problem would be that it is very difficult to transfer old posts out of proboards. They apparently don't allow exports so you'd have to do something tricky to save/copy all the old posts. |
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Post by kiladecus on Jun 13, 2013 6:06:56 GMT -9
Honestly, having that banner image back makes a big difference in the feel of the board I TOTALLY agree! Thank you, Squirmydad! That was very generous of you, and GREATLY appreciated. |
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Post by old squirmydad on Jun 13, 2013 8:26:31 GMT -9
Squirmydad, if you have access to the backend settings, you should be able to re-create a "New" button by doing the following. 1) Go to Forum Settings. 2) Click the Navigation Tab. 3) Click the Add Custom button at the bottom. 4) Enter the name as "New" and the URL as cardboard-warriors.proboards.com/threads/recentWinner! I had to change the look of the admin panel (4 different versions of it) to find those buttons and then it was easy. Thanks. |
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Post by aaron on Jun 13, 2013 8:36:45 GMT -9
It'd help if I knew anything at all about HTML, besides what the letters stand for. I'm pretty good with HTML but I'm pretty sure you don't need that you need PHP, probably Mysql and most importantly CSS. being old school I can handle HTML and CSS so if you need code for that shoot it at me and I can probably hammer out something , but again I think were in PHP country and that's way out of my league. |
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Post by Parduz on Jun 13, 2013 11:14:10 GMT -9
Well, PHP is a C-like language... i once was able to help at Papermakeit, so if you need something (and have no better choices) tell me: i'll take a look and see if i can sort something out. That "New" button is great |
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Post by mesper on Jun 13, 2013 11:51:13 GMT -9
That "New" button is great Agreed - THANKS! |
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(that one I know!). And also 
