Marked

Welcome back Joseph I missed... some things? :P

Aww thanks franklin :D Hope you read the topic for the explanation of why I didn't make you a tester like I promised. Goodluck with your studies. I'm in a similar situation myself. Right now for me there's 4 very large textbooks, hundreds of pages of notes, and 36 days to save my future career :D GDU came with a bit of sacrifice -nods- We'll see you later then, when you're a graduate :)

... How on earth do you miss that? It's right there are the top of every forum page *frustration* Of course there's still a plan for the dashboard. The status updates role will be extended: dashboard, new profiles. But as for having them on the board index, they're not for advertising and they're not for support. The dashboard concept is your central place for all content that affects you. The aim is efficient distribution of content that is as relevant/interesting to you as possible.

The GDU banner is great! I wouldn't know how to animate it like that :P I'm planning a little page where I'll have some pre-made banners and some PSD files with our branding elements in case people want to use them.

One thing that is important to note is that there are going to be temporary bugs. Yesterday I did some one-off database clean-up stuff and during a log prune I must have accidentally exhausted a query limit and that took the forum offline for a while. So these temporary issues are going to go away and they arn't bugs with, for example, the chatroom. So unless it happens consistently within that component, then its not worth reporting. I really need to get an error page for these errors rather than a blank page. It's soemthing I have to code myself so it's another thing I have to find time for at some stage..

Thanks for the nomination :) It's always nice to get nominated, but there's a longstanding rule that admins can't be nominated for member of the month.

September Nominating Thats right its time for Nominating. Read the Rules to see how to Nominate. Don't use this topic for saying who your going to vote for. Congratulate the person if you would like. Nominated: -Wyzrd ------ I'm going to nominate Wyzrd, the RMXPU Legend who's come back from the dead to take his Moderator position. It seems like half of GDU's posts belong to Wyzrd, so its a no brainer. Wyzrd for activity and helpfulness. He's also playing a huge role in ironing out these GDU bugs.

Have you tried looking here? http://www.gdunlimited.net/forums/gallery/category/10-character-sprites/page__view_style__large

I haven't got this error for profiles, but Wyz has been sending me the errors and I think we just figured it out. It's something to do with the new profiles which I started but aren't ready to takeover the old ones. Just missing columns in the database. Thanks Punk :D The rebranding is more of a side-effect of a much bigger reform. It's a shame when the launch looks like a mere change in theme. The reason we're having a few issues is because the forums run through the "GDU System" which I wrote from scratch and really only was able to make progress once I figured out to integrate IPB's member systems into the gdu system. Similarly for the design, what you're seeing now is IPB's content loaded up, cut into variables, and plugged into a globally common template: perfect theme integration. I only figured out how to all this about 1 year ago, and have spent a concerning amount of time working on GDU through my studies and work. The effect of it all, aside from every single page being integrated, is breaking all the limits that we had with a CMS and forum software. We can now develop applications right into the system, very quickly (because all the UI markup and CSS classes all exist and are common everywhere). It will all be custom and unique, and specifically designed for a game development website (particularly profiles, I hope). It requires a bit of faith from the members of course, these things take time :P

The topic can't been seen without logging in to that site. Why couldn't you just repost the content from that topic to this one?

Hopefully that will help the new members but not imply that our tutorials and things are limited to those posted in forums (which they are, until proper content sections are made). Btw I stole you banner and put it in my signature :D Great job.

Le boom: So this should help some of the newbies find their way around. I guess this changes the discussion a bit. At this stage its the condensed + quick nav vs expanded.

Yeah, it seems like the "Load More" button isn't being used too much :/ so I extended them no. of posts to 12. It's really gona hurt GDU not having the "dashboard" working. Anywayz, I understand Wyz. It's all about perception. Take this forum for example Technically, all general discussion about any game dev engine could go in here. But do you think with a whole category named "RPG Maker XP" people are going to go into this forum and post RMXP stuff? They'll get confused, and just won't post. Well, that's what I think anyway, and we gotta psychologically mess with these newbies and make things clear, tidy and easy and get 'em posting stuffs. I'm not too sure about this "related" argument. On the board index right now, you have to click on the little sub-forums to get to where you want, and I've noticed that a lot of new members can't find these even though they are indeed right there. With the alternative structure you can see the actual forum for tutorials, in the tutorial category, and I think that because each forum is for a different engine, its still going to be easier to find want they want. Perhaps its less logical, more messy, but I think that's easier for new members and potential members to find exactly what they want and a lot easier. Although I prefer the current system I think its harder for users to find content than the alternate, and so perhaps potential isn't being maximized. I'm going to make something tonight to have fix this issue. You'll see it at the top of the board index :) I'm thinking right now of a quick access bar: the options will be for support, tutorials, etc. and you click them and drop down menu comes up and you select your desired engine. This is a rushed post btw.. I'm late for uni!

I think we'll have a mapping contest up sometime during the weekend. But there's one thing I've been pondering: mapping contests in the past have included rules like both RMXP and RMVX are allowed. Personally I think that's silly, I think mapping contests should be on even terms: same types of tiles. I'm thinking about holding an RMVX Ace contest, even though very few users here actually use it. I would include a download link to the trial of vx ace. Thoughts? Just go get people using different engines. Perhaps a dual contest: xp maps will judged only against XP maps and similarly to VX. I really think that's needed to preserve the integrity of a "contest". Also, (i need to amend the mission statement) a goal of GDU is to promote game making engines and get people using them. That's one of the fundamental goals. Our strength is RMXP but that's not what we're solely about anymore.

Well, that is also a planned feature, but for the new gdu profiles, which sadly arn't ready. The usergroup thing is a quick short-term solution and in terms of short-term fixes that will just be deleted anyway, the usergroup is definitely seen more (since this is all about participation incentives) and much easier to do. But I could probably find a mod that puts the awards on profiles. Just so long as I don't get caught up in a half a day's coding :P

Bump :)

Oh right. I'm going to need to put some time aside to look into this. It's not clear why that's happening.

Yeah at the moment we don't have the functionality to offer much in the way of prizes. The idea for the future is either a temporary subscription (ie for just a month, depending on how major the contest was), or points (or gems or crystals) which would be used to "purchase" actual features like unlocking customizations or a certain amount of impressions of advertising space for you stuff. Imagine this: you have a game in our projects section and you have a button in your own control panel that states (promote your game) and allows you to have your own banner in the allocated space to get you game more hits. In the meantime, people have entered these things for bragging rights. What if we created a special usergroup for contest winners so everyone can see they've won. That might be an incentive? I was also thinking of having a contest hall of fame thing where we display all of our Motm winners and we could be GDU organized event winners in there too. Their name would be there forever, perhaps another incentive. I like that idea :) Well if you miss it then I can start the topics myself.

That's two different topics :P Although, perhaps arising from another bug..

The contests forum is admittedly messy, the topics need to be archived. I also just noticed the dead "Project of the Month" forum. The thing about contests are that you need members to get involved and right now there's not enough to hold major contests, certainly not any contest that involves a project being made. I'm going to start doing Motm again since Pol isn't really around anymore (or is he? haven't seen much of him). As activity increases then that opens up the opportunity for more contests, but until then there's not much point apart from small contests that don't require much dedication. Perhaps we could do a few mapping contests? We had a contest coordinator lined up but that didn't work out. It's really challenging right now, I've got a million ideas but with uni and work it would take a million years to finish. It would be great to find someone passionate about the site who would organize contents. We have plans for prizes (eg a one month subscription which unlock a bunch of features) when GDU is expanded, and we could also be using facebook/twitter things to attract people and announcement winners/prizes, etc. Just plans for the future when the community grows.

This?

Fixed! Also closed a not so nice security gap in the process.