Tema

Hello fellow Dreamers, We have some more information on the clubs thus far and we're very keen to share these ideas with you, as well as keep you up-to-date on what's going on around the forums, as well as the future direction of the Roleplay suite, which was updated only a year ago. This is a' follow on' from the Summer Update news article we posted a few weeks ago. Thanks to the feedback we got on the article itself, in EcchiTexts and the Chatbar, and though internal discussions between @Neptune and I, we have both come to the conclusion that the clubs will indeed be kind of a multi-use feature on our community. For example, we spoke about the clubs different "Genre's" if you will, of clubs which is filterable in the actual application (We've attached some pictures below) these genres, are: EcchiDreams Specific Community Club - For things that are highly specific to EcchiDreams; such as "Poke War Warriors" for people who take part in Poke Wars, or for "American Dreamers", "British Dreamers" etc... Fan Club - Specific to a certain fandom, such as the Nekomimi Fan Club, Kitsunetsuki Fan Club, Startrek Fanclub, or I don't know: PHP Fan Club. RP Club - What was once either a public or premium RP, something we're going to talk about in a moment. Social Club - A good example would be general interest or product clubs, such as the Hentai Connoisseur Club, PS Gamers Club, or PC Master Race, Headphone/Audiophile, Anime Junkies, etc... - Other - - If your club doesn't fit into the above categories it'd fall under other. Although we will be listening out for suggestions and adapting as time goes on. We'll look at how this useful feature evolves on our community, going forward and try to improve it based on real world use of it. There will have to be some changes however to the Premium Membership feature; that is, it's been two years waiting for a reliable Credits system; that allows you to earn Credits on EcchiDreams through contributing, (Posting, getting likes and leaving likes, coming on once a day, etc). Since the Big Update however this functionality has never materialised, and the developer of it seems to have attracted a lot of real life priorities that has left him unable to develop the next version. The one we have in place, the Basic Points that still lets to accumulate EcchiCredits has not received any feature updates either and thus has become remarkably useless and unusable. Less than 1% of our members are premium members, and a lot of that has something to do with points not being added to people's accounts (According to some reports I've gotten and are looking into) despite posting, liking and getting likes. So it's very on the rails at the moment as to what is going on in this area and I can only apologise. Premium members have next to no benefits of being a premium member other than a sparkling tag and increased Gallery Bandwidth limits. We're also going to go into the process of moving all the Public and Premium Roleplays over to the Clubs system; luckily this affects absolutely no one, other than staff because Staff are the only ones with these in the first place, and no one has posted in there, yet. Premium members will still have some benefits over this; such as an option to have their own Articles System but there isn't much else. We will have to update our Roleplay Guides to reflect this change before it's released, but the Public Roleplay Forums and Premium Roleplay Forums are pretty much closed at the moment. We will also need to re-write parts of the Terms of Service; and fix things on the site as well as Ecchia's welcome EcchiText to reflect these changes. So please bear with us as this will take some time. That said we hope to have it online and running by the end of the weekend, with all the changes made too. (Sunday the 13th of August, or Sunday the 20th of August 2017 at the latest). Now that's out of the way, here are some screenshots of the Clubs feature and I hope to explain them as I go along. When you first go into the clubs you'll arrive to the front page as you can see in the image (Click to Expand). You can of course filter these, say for example you only want to see certain types of clubs, well with the button next to "Sort By" which in this picture above, is above the EcchiTown (RP), club, this will allow you to sort and filter the clubs so you can display only the ones that fit what you're looking for, we're thinking on having it that the Public Roleplay Link on the forums will redirect to a filtered page that shows only RP Clubs, but you can view all with exceptional ease. Making a Club, is exceptionally easy, and open for you to play around with, as follows: Obviously the name; is the title you want to use for your club, your clubs name, if you will, the "Privacy" is the type of club you want, as you can see it lets you know what each setting means. The Description is the brief introduction which is seen on the Clubs Frontpage, the Icon (Although I recommend making the club first then setting an icon, although nothing stops you from doing the icon again) as it's like a profile picture. The reason I say that is because it squashes the picture where as if you change it after, you can crop the icon to fit what you're looking for. This way around works very well. The type of club, which as I stated earlier is the "Genre" if you will, and what features do you want to automatically create. I'll show you them in a moment. Managing your club is exceptionally easy; there is a "Manage Club" button that club owners can use to modify the club structure itself. Such as adding Topics, Images and Calendar features. You can edit the club settings, invite members, activate and edit the homepage (Which will split Home and Activity up and allow you to customise your clubs homepage), add members *Maybe*, change/transfer the owner of the club to another dreamer, change it's type or manage it's features, such as disabling sections, deleting them, or just re-organizing them, to put them into a new order (I will touch on in a moment). The Topics are useful for creating sections in your club roleplay, for example such as OOC, Roleplay, Extra Information and so on, as you can see you can again customise how you want the page to be displayed as if it was a normal post or topic on EcchiDreams. This allows a great number of options such as displaying the rules of your roleplay, or club, in this case the images above is showing it in an RP situation. In the previous news article, I discussed how moderators and even the club owner themselves can "Hide" content, this will appear as what you can see with "Rulebreaking Topic" in the second picture. As owners you should be able to pin any topic you want to the top of this, that will mean they will always appear on the top of the list above all other topics below regardless as to which topic is newer or more recently posted in, unless that is also a sticky... When you create the forum section of your club you can select one of two options "Discussions" which as featured above, or "Questions" where people can ask questions, and you - or other members of your club can respond. This doesn't have to be used for giving support to your members for your RP or club, but it could be used in a tech club for example as a place for people to ask tech related questions. What you choose to do with it, is on you. A club homepage is a great way of telling Dreamers who come to check out your club, what your club is, is it a RP club, and so on. I've, for this example, have shown the first page to the EcchiTown RP visible here, which tells people it's a Club RP, as would '(RP)' in the title, and as much information as I can for them to read and decide if being apart of that club is for them. You'll want to impress prospective users if you want them in your club, so making it look sleek, and awesome is the best way of doing this, as an ugly, janky and messy homepage will probably put people off. As you can see above, if you choose to turn the homepage on; you'll get an Activity Tab, which separates it from your club homepage (Which is default). The Activity Tab will also show a small "About the Club" for your club. Similar to adding forums, Image Areas are created for storing images in albums, or as is depending on your set up. For example if you have people who have multiple characters, in the above examples; of making an image area you have a few options. In the description you can pretty much do anything again, as well as set a standard as to how you want images to be posted for character IDs in your club. If you don't want people to post up a character ID with their images and you think it'll be fine to dump the images straight into the directory then you are more than happy to do so, you might not need albums for your needs so you can turn it off. You can also turn comments and reviews off; depending on your needs. For the above example. I have made character ID's non-requiring of Albums (that split up who's characters are who's) because EcchiTown will probably only see one character per person, due to design choices I made. For something like Blackberry Falls however, you might see a system where people have to make an album for all their characters in your RP club and character ID's are posted with the images themselves - which is indeed possible for everyone under this system. For something like Extra Informations though; that's typically something that will be used for an Extra Information Topic so you might just make it a dumping place (and put it on the end of the club) and allow people to use it to upload the images they need for their threads - again that's completely up to you and how you organise your club. So make your club your own. This is an example of changing the order; disabling or deleting any sections that you don't require; this makes editing your clubs no matter what the type of club you're hosting, easy. In "Closed" Club scenarios The first image above; is a request notification that I spoke about in the last update topic, once you click it you can choose to accept or reject. Accepting or Rejecting is as simple as a sweet short click, and is honestly as easy as it can be. As you can see above. If you're trying to join a club that is closed, you're told on the home page of that club, that it's closed and are given the option (Twice) to join the club. If you've clicked that, but the request is pending, you'll be told on the club page (Above image) that you're request is still pending. As the message says if you're accepted - or rejected (Trying to say positive, lol) then you'll get a notification, that looks like this: In other news... We are aware of a number of bugs that have been present in our update; we hope that most of them are addressed as of today, such as the Leaderboards Bug when trying to filter by content type. We're also looking at making the help section more intuitive, as well as putting in a process where people can appeal their infractions, and so on, so this is something we're looking at doing after sorting out the clubs and RP sections which are going to require some migration time. I wanted to keep you all up-to-date and hopefully by this or next weekend we'll have a better RP section on EcchiDreams, with something easier to understand, use and is much more controllable, by YOU the club owner. Finally I'd like to remind all dreamers; to please DOUBLE CHECK what images you are uploading, before you upload them, far too many people got their accounts banned or given infractions last week over major terms of service violations. We do not allow Beastility, Lolicon or Shotacon (Child/Minor in Nude or Sexual Situations). Thank you. As always please leave comments, suggestions and feedback relating to this article below, I read every single comment posted and it's my pleasure to. Article Image Artist: Wolp Links: Deviantart There is no reason I chose this image, its not related to the article in anyway shape or form. I purely chose it because I like the picture and I think the artwork, something I'm not usually a fan of, but it's actually very well done. Such simplicity of detail oddly suits it, and I think the Artist has managed (with this and a few other pieces) of getting me to like a kind of style that not many can seem to do very well. It's a very stunning image, and I highly recommend checking his work out if you like it. It's in my opinion one of the best I've seen from this artist.

Hello fellow EcchiDreamers! We've just completed an update, so our site now uses Invision Power Suite 4.2, which has added a lot of new features and improved already existing features such as the like system. I've also updated quite a number of EcchiDreams Specific Modifications (with some big ones still to come) as well as the applications and plugins we use to provide our service. Over the next few weeks I hope to have the bugs ironed out, but if you do find any please, let me know! Even if you're not sure, I can let you know and it doesn't bother me in the slightest, because it allows me to help you out. You can contact me via the contact form, EcchiTexts, or if I'm online, over the chatbar. There is no bug tracker anymore, that was referenced in the Halloween Update (2016) because it was a feature only enabled during the Beta of the big update, but the same bounties apply. To highlight some of the changes made to EcchiDreams: Clubs (Coming Soon) Complete Your Profile! Device Management Gallery Improvements Leaderboard Enhancements Richer Embeds "Our Picks" Reactions Clubs The clubs application (New in IPS4.2) is a way of supporting sub-communities within our site, it's a kind of social group function. However EcchiDreams being EcchiDreams; this could be used to replace the public roleplaying suite because it's exceptionally powerful at what it does and lets club leaders control what goes on in their clubs or roleplays. But it could also be used for the intended purpose, such as a Tech-Geeks club or Steam Gamers club, or even Pokémon Fan Club or Bible Black Fan Club (You get the point). We're currently not entirely sure how to implement it for our site because there are a load of options and not much in the way of clear answers (So we'd appreciate your feedback!) There are four types of clubs: Public - Anyone can see it, and post in it without even joining the club. Open - Anyone can see, and join but they can't post unless they're a member of the club. Closed - Clubs that anyone can see in the directory but joining must be approved by a Club Leader or a Club Moderator. Non-Club Members who view the club will only see the member list - not the recent activity or content areas. Private - Clubs that do not show in public and users must be invited by a Club Leader or a Club Moderator. (Staff can still see them, obviously) For closed clubs there is an approval process, that is exceptionally simple and straightforward "Accept" (Tick) or "Reject" (Cross). Leaders (And I think Moderators) get a notification when a Dreamer requests to join and the Dreamer gets a notification if they've been accepted or rejected. Club Users: Each club has three levels of user, this is why we think it is exceptionally powerful for the roleplay suites, because it allows the Club Leader to moderate the content, and the roleplays they'd run under this system, as well as appoint a single or a few club moderator(s) to do the same. However I do not believe that you can have more than one leader, the "Club Administrator" if you will. Leader - A leader has all of the permissions of a moderator, and can add other moderators. They can also add content areas, which I'll get into shortly. The club owner is automatically the leader of it. Moderators - As the name implies, Club Moderators have the ability to moderate content posted within the club. The actual permissions of the moderator is currently not set at this time, and can only be done from a Site Administrator level (Read below). Users - Anyone else that joins the clubs. The Moderator permissions feature would be perfect for large roleplays as this is currently not possible with the current format of doing it on the forums (As the topic starter is required to send an EcchiText to a staff member to deal with problem Dreamers) This why we're going to have to think about how this is implemented because what we set has to be universal across all clubs for (as far as I can tell) Club Administrators and Club Moderators. A follow up announcement will be posted explaining in detail (In the interests of transparency) what the permission sets are for Club Moderation. The current permission settings are as follows: None of these permissions are currently active, but this is what we have to work with, so any feedback is appreciated, as a Club Leader cannot pick and choose, as I said it's universal across all clubs. If you'd like more information please ask in the comments below, I will endevour to answer them. I will add my personal recommendations, and explain why I think this way. Club Leaders should be extremely careful about picking Club Moderators, if it's someone you can't trust - they shouldn't be a moderator, at this time there is no way of distinguishing permissions between the two as far as I am aware. The only difference is the Leader can appoint and fire moderators of their club, not the other way around, and a moderator can't do that to other moderators of the same club. Pin Content - This makes a topic within the club appear at the top of the topic listings, much like how pinning content works on the Forums. Perfect for rules and such. Unpin Content - Self explanatory. Edit Content - Ability to edit other people's posts. I wholly recommend that this is left off for obvious reasons. Hide Content - Hiding something doesn't mean deleting, it's more of a shadowban of that post. Hidden posts would flag the Community's Senior Staff Member, if asked or required to delete said content. Unhide Content - Unhiding hidden content. View Hidden Content - This allows the moderator to see content they've hidden. I think this should be turned on, it will allow the Club Leaders and Moderators to view the hidden content inline (As it appears, and it should obvious when it's hidden). Set Future Publishing Dates - Content that will remain hidden until a set time/date. I'm not sure at all what this should be set to, because I cannot currently think of a reason why this is needed - at all. Perhaps for special events? Even then I'd assume that the club leader should be responsible for that. View Content with a Future Publish Date - Basically it'll be visible to the Club Leader, and Moderator if enabled. If you can do the above, I think you should be able to see it otherwise it'll vanish until the date set, thus not giving you time to re-proofread your content. Move Content - To move something from one area of the club to somewhere else within the club. I personally don't think this should be enabled, because it can be quite destructive, but this is why I want to hear your feedback. Lock Content - The ability to lock a topic within the Club. I think this should be enabled. Unlock Content - The ability to unlock a locked topic. Likewise I think this should be enabled. Reply to Locked Content - So you can lock immediately, and worry about adding a reply later. Perfect for situations where it's so heated that there is a new post every second or something. Or to add rules, or something. I wish we could separate the two permissions of Club Leader and Club Moderator, because I think that should be up to the Club Leader but I'd love to hear feedback. Delete Content - To make content within the club disappear, forever. I do not believe this should be enabled because in a "Rogue Moderator" scenario they would be able to effectively destroy your club. Hiding content, is in my opinion the best way to go, that and if it's something serious (ToS violating, such as someone posting someone else's dox) then Community Staff need to see that for evidence to take appropriate action, as we do not accept screenshots due to the fact that tech savvy individuals can alter things on a page using a browser console, which can be used to frame someone. We act on hard evidence. Split and Merge Content - If someone double posts, or makes a similar topic then it allows one to merge them together. I do not believe this should be enabled because it is destructive if used by a Club Moderator who's gone rogue, this is why I recommended hide content rather than deleting content because I don't think Moderators should have access to potentially destructive tools, Community Moderators don't even have this ability. Hidden content can be made visible again, merged content on the other hand -- not so much. What is "Club Content" and why do you keep saying it?! Club Leaders can add a varity of content areas to their club(s). Forums, Calendars and Images (Exactly like the Gallery). They will appear in search results and activity streams*, users can follow them, embed links to them and so on. If a user has permission to see a forum (For example) within a club it will behave exactly like other forums they see, and the same for all kinds of content. Each content area a leader adds can have a custom title and will appear in the club's navigation menu. This means you can have multiple forums within a club and give each a different name. * Depending on type of club. I believe we can indeed do both Social Clubs and Roleplay Clubs, and have them searchable/filterable, and the club owner can select what kind of club it is. For example "General Club" for Social Clubs, "Fan Club" for well, fan clubs and "Roleplay Clubs" for Roleplays. I think this is the best way of doing it, honestly. But I am very interested in hearing ideas, and if you have a different kind of club in mind - then by all means talk to us, lets see what we can do. Complete Your Profile! In an effort to make registration quicker and easier, we now offer a stripped down registration form that only asks for required information. You can either sign in with Google+, Facebook or Twitter which is exceptionally quick and should be painless. Or fill out: Display Name Email Address Password (And Confirm Password) Birthday (Because you have to be over 18). Then check a box that says "I'm not a robot", and that you agree to the Terms of Service, then that's it. You're in*. What it will then do is allow you to use EcchiDreams as normal, and you'll be asked to make a signature, upload a profile cover and avatar which you can do whenever you like. Simple! You even get a little progress bar in your Account Settings control panel. *Email Validation Required. Depending on SpamScore, Administrator Verification may be required. Terms of Service apply. Device Management When you sign in to EcchiDreams for the first time a special "Key", a Cookie (Not the editable kind, sadly), is created to recognise your browser on subsequent logins. Which allows you to say logged into EcchiDreams without having to put in your username and password every single time you come to EcchiDreams (because that would be annoying as fuck). This then stores said information for you to see in your "Recently Used Devices" under your account settings that allows you to do a few things. Firstly you can disable automatic login from the device you're on or - say if you've left your phone somewhere, you can use your computer to sign out. It also allows you to see if your account has been compromised, if strange devices from strange locations start appearing you can sign them out. -> Then change your password, and set up Two-Factor Authorisation, which we provide through Google's Authenticator application. If someone does log into your account with an unknown device (or in an unknown location) then you'll get an be notified via Email - immediately. Please note: "Disable Automatic Login" does not disable the device from using the account, it merely means you have to log back in when you're logged out. Gallery Improvements The gallery has had some major improvements that should make using it much clearer to understand, such as picking an already existing album of yours to add images to. As is adding information to the images rather than copy and pasting information to every image, in a specific batch. To quote IPS directly, In addition to this a number of features have been added to the actual albums rather than per image, such as: Commenting Reviews Reactions Messages Featuring (Mod feature) Hiding (Mod feature) Locking (Mod feature) Reporting Searching Also - if someone uploads (for example) 50+ images to the same album rather than getting 50+ different entries in the Activity Feed they'll all be grouped into one entry, reducing the clutter. Leaderboard Enhancements Our Leaderboard just got a lot more powerful, it's well worth checking out. There are daily, weekly, monthly, yearly and even all time leaderboards, and for different sections. Getting on this leaderboard gives you a trophy in your profile that all logged in Dreamers can see. Yep we're competitive now, deal with it. You can easily search through the different categories and such within the system to see who's the top Dreamer. Richer Embeds I'll just show with some examples, because it's amazing! Time for some shilling. (Might not show if you're not logged in): A Gallery Image: A Gallery Album: A Topic: A specific post: Rules: News: YouTube (Not me, just a random video): Twitter: Facebook: And you get the point, although at the time of posting this, I do not know why there are black boxes around it. That's a bug and it'll be fixed, if you don't see that then it's been fixed already. Moving on: Our Picks This is another useful and new feature with IPS4 that can be found in the menu under "Explore", Our Picks. It is content we've hand picked by the Community Administrators. It allows us to promote content, which is consistent, an advantage that community platforms like EcchiDreams have over social media platforms. The content on our community is generally speaking, going to always be here where as a social network is all about the right here and right now, if you blink you miss it and miss out. This will mean content put in Our Picks is posted on our Facebook Fanpage and Twitter as well (I will be testing it with this article). Reactions Gone are the days of simply "Liking" posts, now you can react to them, we've always had requests such as "I wish I could love this" (I got that earlier before the update actually), and with this system you'll be able to do that. We hope to expand it but keep it manageable (IE: Not a million different reactions). It is also touch friendly (For our Mobile Dreamers). There are currently five reactions that play a part in reputation scores, they are: Standard Like - Adds 1 point to the receiver's reputation. Thanks - Adds 1 point to the receiver's reputation. Haha - Adds 1 point to the receiver's reputation. Confused - Doesn't add reputation. Sad - Doesn't add reputation. I am thinking about changing the standard like to a thumbs up, and making the like icon to "Love" which will add 2 points to the receiver's reputation. There is some talk amongst @Neptune and I about adding negative reputation but we've not used this since 2010/2011 when it was abused to bully other Dreamers by a particularly nasty piece of work that racked up hundreds of fake accounts, as well as mass down-rep'ing a lot of people's posts using bot/scripts, and pretty much successfully managed to give nearly everyone that ever posted negative reputation for no reason. So I'd love to hear your feedback on that especially. And that's it, there are many fixes and tweaks all over the place, and probably many new bugs (Because this update went way too smoothly) so be sure to check them out and let us know what you think in the comments below. I do read all of them and if it warrants it I will reply or at least leave a reaction, to show I've read it. ------------------ Article Image Artist: qbspdl (Yes, really) Links: Pixiv I chose this image because it's an artist we've never covered before and they have some very good art. You should, if you like this picture, check out their other work on the above Pixiv link. It's got great attention to detail and makes a good use of the colours, with it being quite vivid and bright, and yet it's not over saturated. It also has a very 'picture' look, as if someone was taking a picture with a camera, as it's nicely framed by the foliage of the trees and flowers. Despite some details looking simplistic (such as the birds) it's still quite nicely done, and the use of multi-toned colours for the ocean is, in my opinion perfect for this picture. Thank you for reading. We're EcchiDreams, wishing you a very Ecchi Summer.