I bet he's a multi. But funny, nontheless.

amonkeyperson's profile:

* Points: 179
* Position: 1151
* Joined: 03 Jan 09
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lkruijsw's profile:

* Points: 100
* Position: 2602
* Joined: 27 May 08
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Want to take that back?

lol

He's not a multi, he's Lucas Kruijsw. I believe he's the one that came up with the DATC test that Kestas used to test his adjudicator. He's very active in the promotion and programming of Diplomacy.

I don't actually know how to spell his last name. =P

Lucas is a well known person and wrote the DATC, the first call of reference for anyone writing a diplomacy adjudicator.

Not sure about the petition:
If you mean "leave it as it is" then no.
If you mean "slight changes, but it's nearly there, don't go for phpBB etc" then DEFINITELY YES!

All of this is moot, though. Since when was there a chance of this forum changing?

I have been on the internet from the beginning.

The funny thing is, I have seen many forums 'to improve'. But the result was often not positive. Adding categories, might look a good idea, but one should realize that skipping uninteresting posts on a single page, is much less work, than gathering information from different pages. So, too many categories is much worse than too few categories.

Be aware, that the phpDiplomacy forum is quite active and alive. rec.games.diplomacy is dead and other diplomacy forums are less interesting. You can easily destroy things, by 'optimizing for the user'.

Lucas

haha sorry Lucas....

Never mind.

I only play FtF. I am very bad in doing 2 things at the same time. So, the idea that a game is running, while I am doing my job, makes me nervous. When I studied, we played the real time game 'Empire'. We played that twice and after that I decided never to play a game anymore, that continues when I stop.

The funny thing about this forum, is that there are all kinds of topics. Sometimes not related to Diplomacy. By improving it, you might destroy that aspect.

Sometimes you get a better social structure, in a less optimum environment. Maybe it is not 'sometimes', but 'often'.

Lucas

So.. all we really need here is pagination, and the capacity for more topics, no?

no, please, just not pagination!!

I enjoy the forum's structure, and have never seen a reason for changing it. There are categories of threads that I ignore - public press games, for example - but these do not prevent me from finding things that I am interested in reading. Separation of topics would most likely only make it more difficult to use the forum.

I would only lend support to the idea of changing the forum if the popularity of the site exceeds the capacities of the forum, and we are far from being at that point.

Just add a keyword search and keep the entire set of threads (or more of it) so we can find even older ones and search for answers to questions not found in the FAQ.

"I would only lend support to the idea of changing the forum if the popularity of the site exceeds the capacities of the forum, and we are far from being at that point."

Echo.

I don't mind pagination, but I'd like it if you couldn't reply to threads past the first page. Currently I think it's slated to be that you can't reply to threads past the third page, which isn't so bad, but I really like the turnover.

Or if you add posts to page 2 or later, a mod has to verify that it is better to have that post than, say a new thread...

I join the petition

Allow the posting of additions, the use of italics, bold and underlined, html tables of a single design, game and profile links and pagination without posting after page 1 (or posting after page 1 requiring moderator consent) and AJAX, and I'm pretty sure I am happy.

I love that so many people think it needs to be changed, but many of you are really only concerned about one particular thing (searching, pagination, text/font features, mod powers, etc. etc. etc.)

I'm not sure what that means exactly, but I guess maybe it's an indication of why the forums won't just be moved to a standard design (which includes all of the features everyone has ever asked for..)

The reason we won't move is because we like the feel (would be in Italics :P) of the forum...

I am very aware that changing the forum may just end up with something worse. In fact over at Facebook phpDip this is a major complaint; they moved over to a built-in Facebook forum with subcategories and editing, etc, but it did kill off the forum activity and is the source of a lot of complaints

I'd definitely be careful of that happenning here, but examples like that don't mean that a fully featured replacement forum will be worse.
Either way it's a long way off, but thanks for the feedback and I'm glad people like this system

"amonkeyperson's profile:

* Points: 179
* Position: 1151
* Joined: 03 Jan 09
--------------
lkruijsw's profile:

* Points: 100
* Position: 2602
* Joined: 27 May 08
============
Want to take that back?"

Hmm... That's really weird. When I click on his profile it shows the same join date (Which I admittedly didn't look at), 100 points, and no games... Really weird.

At any rate, Lucas, sorry. :-)

Oh wait. I misread. Why did you put you're profile in there AMP?

I actually like this forum format too. You can count my vote for no change unless it's purely cosmetic such as italic and perhaps bold font. Please no fancy-smancy crap like signatures and emoticons! Emoticons are just evil! Especially those animated ones!

Please don't change the forum - other than to bring in pagination. The forum is fine how it is.

I think I agree with Lucus. I am not fond of lots of categories either. I like the way it is all mixed in. You never know what you will read or what conversation you will partake in.

depth charge