suggestion Club owner limitations.

[JennyDK]

Hello and thanks for having this forum to allow our, sometimes, good suggestions and questions.

As you probably know, I run several clubs myself and most often they are quite comprehensive in scope and thus needs to be flexible to accomodate how I choose to set things up so my members are able to find what they need easy and quickly.

However, even owners of the clubs are not able to move topics around, delete topics and do the more large scale functions. Thus we need to ask staff members to do these tasks for us.

I would like to see club owners having more freedom in how they arrange and set up things.

[Novaer]

As discussed on Discord several months ago, perhaps with other Dreamers, I can't remember. I too would love for club owners to have these features too, after all they're your clubs and you should have the tools to administer it. However: What permissions are given to "Owners" also are given to "Leaders" or "Administrators" of the group, and the question becomes;

Should leaders/administrators of the group be given potentially destructive powers? By destructive, I mean - in the wrong hands, completely irreparable damage. And the answer to that is... Well, I don't know. I mean it is completely the Club Owner's responsibility for who they made a Leader/Admin for their group, and perhaps we should say that and add that;

"You" as a Club Owner accept full responsibility for your club and who you appoint as staff, and if a rouge Club Leader starts deleting your clubs stuff - we cannot recover it, so bear these risks in mind.

We do try to go for adult responsibility in most cases, so why should this be any different? I understand that. In any case these would require Terms of Service changes to reflect this. I'm not saying suggestion denied; but it is something that will require more looking into. If the delete function could be, or is, non-destructive, I'll make the changes in the heartbeat, but at this time I don't think it is possible.

I will look into it.

[JennyDK]

I am aware that giving moderators and leaders power can potentially lead to heavy "damage" to your club and that is also a risk I am personally willing to accept. You can do very few things in life that doesn't have any sort of risk after all.

With that said, should such a thing occur, I believe that such a person would very quickly get a very bad reputation here - and with good cause.

[Nan-Yo]

I remember suggesting this when I first started using this site and I also think it should be implemented. The owner of the club would have full power of their club and would be responsible for making back-ups. The owner would then be able to delegate and allow powers to their leaders/mods at their own leisure. Being able to fix spelling errors or remove/change posts that make no sense for the rest of the rpg would be very welcome. While it could indeed be seen as heavy-handed, anyone that joined a club would be aware of how the leadership acted and could simply chose not to join of they hated how things were being run.

Powers that I can think of at the top of my head right now are:

Ability to delete posts.

Ability to move posts. (even the placing order within a thread.)

Ability to delete threads.

Ability to move threads.

Ability to merge threads.

Ability to edit posts that were written by other users.

Ability to easily make a backup of posts.

 

 

[JennyDK]

28 minutes ago, Nan-Yo said:

Ability to delete posts.

Ability to move posts. (even the placing order within a thread.)

Ability to delete threads.

Ability to move threads.

Ability to merge threads.

Ability to edit posts that were written by other users.

Ability to easily make a backup of posts.

These would be great, though you could still make a "back up" of posts by copying the text and put it into a document.

How would merging work exactly?

[Nan-Yo]

21 minutes ago, JennyDK said:

These would be great, though you could still make a "back up" of posts by copying the text and put it into a document.

How would merging work exactly?

Yes, but the problem arises when we are talking thousands of posts. This is where it would come in handy if we could simply download whole threads as files by simply clicking on them.

As for merging, I was thinking of it something like this:

1. The ability to move posts would allow you to move posts from one thread to another and then move then around inside the thread as well.

2. The thread merge function would be similar and could be handled several ways. Either it could be automated where it simply just starts one thread where the other one begins, or the person merging the thread could manually decide exactly where every post would go before the merger. Think of it like an excel word document and every post would be 1 page. If you say it like images you could simply move the posts around and then click "ok" when you were satisfied. The alternative would be that you just went back and used the post moving tool manually and moved posts around afterwards.

Edited May 5, 2022 by Nan-Yo

[JennyDK]

2 minutes ago, Nan-Yo said:

Yes, but the problem arises when we are talking thousands of posts. This is where it would come in handy if we could simply download whole threads as files by simply clicking on them.

As for merging, I was thinking of it something like this:

1. The ability to move posts would allow you to move posts from one thread to another and then move then around inside the thread as well.

2. The thread merge function would be similar and could be handled several ways. Either it could be automated where it simply just starts one thread where the other one begins, or the person merging the thread could manually decide exactly where every post would go before the merger. Think of it like an excel word document and every post would be 1 page. If you say it like images you could simply move the posts around and then click "ok" when you were satisfied. The alternative would be that you just went back and used the post moving tool manually and moved posts around afterwards.

Ah yes, I can see that. Doing it other ways would be a full day job and more likely even more than that. I think a button like that would be handy indeed. Good idea!

I think that first one is probably beyond the scope of the software used for something like this. Do you have any idea about that?

The easiest way, though quite messy, would probably be that one whole thread would be added after the last post of the thread that it was merged into.

[Nan-Yo]

30 minutes ago, JennyDK said:

I think that first one is probably beyond the scope of the software used for something like this. Do you have any idea about that?

In the Fetish Search Function thread Tema was saying that they we're custom making their our own IPS right now but that it was only in the Alpha stage. Since they are making it from scratch, I figure that it should be doable.

30 minutes ago, JennyDK said:

The easiest way, though quite messy, would probably be that one whole thread would be added after the last post of the thread that it was merged into.

Yes, this was the alternative. Owners would then have to manually have to rearrange the posts afterwards... In the end it wouldn't really be more difficult to do it afterwards or before though... not from a coding perspective.

Edited May 5, 2022 by Nan-Yo

[Novaer]

On 05/05/2022 at 21:33, Nan-Yo said:

custom making their our own IPS right now

To be clear; we're not making our own Invision Power Suite, I'm pretty sure just ripping IPS software off would be a copyright violation. We're outright making our own software, something dedicated and designed from the ground up to serve the function that we've had to rely on heavily modifying this software to do. Unfortunately; we're hitting a limit now of how we can further customise IPS to suit our needs, and it's becoming ever more apparent that the current solution of customising IPS is woefully insufficient. We are not looking at making a forum suite; we're looking at making an entirely different kind of platform. 

There are a number of features that are already being included in the Alpha of the software we're working on for the next Alpha release that would - at least from a moderation point of view for roleplay owners - already be an improvement over what people can do here. One of the main issues here is that whilst one person might not mind such changes being made and they're happy to take responsibility for it; what I apply just for one person would apply to every club. These permission sets are too rigid and too monolithic, and I'm afraid that's apparently by design. A reasonable person would assume that owners have more power than administrators and administrators have more power than moderators.

Which is why, when we move away from this software we're going to give club owners the powers to set the permissions of their roleplay clubs. There will be a default set, but otherwise, each club owner will be able to say what an Administrator of their club can and can't do, and what a moderator can and cannot do. Essentially customise the permissions for themselves. This is roughly what we're aiming for, and is absolutely impossible with the software we're currently using here on EcchiDreams. 

Edited May 7, 2022 by Tema
Added more stuff.