A Summary of My Opinions For what it is worth The genres are pointless for all the reasons Muffin outlined in a parallel thread. They also seem to have been randomly chosen by someone with little grasp of Theory of Creative Writing. (That's not a criticism, just a plain fact.) The entire left hand column would be better used for Google ads ... which would be better served-up if they had the meat of thread titles and user defined titles/sub-titles (& descriptions) to work with. The featured story category has no defining parameters. How is the featuring determined? By a bot? Featuring (if it has a place or purpose at all) must be the perquisite of a human editor who could give attention to good quality of plotting over faulty grammar, draw attention to under-read stories with exciting, vivid reviews. Bots are soul-less morons best left to perform soul-less and stupid tasks like welding cars or counting page hits. The sub-categories within the home page should be writers. You do not need crime/horror/romance shelves like a library or a book shop until you have thousands of writers ... an eventuality which will inevitably require renewal of the whole design anyway. Of course the writers should be expected to provide some categorisation detail when filing a story ... that's just common sense for forward compatibility. To begin with the principle sub-categories need to be strictly nailed to the writer, so that all a writer's work is grouped under headline. The writer should be given enough freedom to set up their own sub-categorisations if they need more flexibilty No writer should be expected to write fiction for a universe where female dogs have no generic noun, Richards may have no diminutive. For the sake of all gods and for Al Lah/JWH/God in particular remove the curse of the mindless word censor from your library. Words are not rude or offensive in themselves. And for a site with the word World in its name, it is even odder that the rest of the world must work around the idiosyncratic prejudices of a few American prudes who run the show. sob is not censored, but by the standards of this site, it ought to be. IMHO the s-o-b expression is very offensive but I don't feel it should be banned. As a moderator I would remove it and warn the user if (and only if) it was used as an insult in relation to another member or person, living or dead in an insulting and valueless context. (eg "you sob!") wtf is not censored and da(r/m)n well ought to be. "swearing" is not censored (and not acted on by any moderators either, which is odd). Swearing is defined (by me) as using God's name vainly to add vehemence to a statement. anyone who thinks writing a word censor list, for a mindless forum bot to apply, has any point whatsoever should consult this article describing the 600 sextillion way to spell viagra. Finally censoring this word but not orgasm is the most ludicrous of all.
Just some of the stuff I can look at really quick: a) Sob also means crying. Not gonna censor that. The acronymn of it is offense, but there's no way to filter it out since the context may change from user to user. Increased sensitivity for the three letter word. Removed your censored word off the list b) It's good to start doing categories now rather than later. It seem stupid yes, but if there are thousands of writers, then that means it's gonna be a nightmare to reorganize things if and when the time comes. One might as well do things right from the get-go. Having dozens of stories laid out all together will be problematic in the long run. It becomes harder to locate things, and especially if all the book appear on the library main page. Then there is a long page of listings. c) Featured stories are chosen by moderators. I do wish this was not brought up now as it's still being field tested and not exactly ready for primetime, but moderators have the ability to feature a story. You may do so through the inline moderation or when viewing a story under Story Options. A little patience for me to explain how things work sometimes would be nice rather than drawing and creating assumptions on how something works. .
LOL you mean I can now summa cum laud ... what about Dick Cheney? I'm mystified by who the moderators are at the library. If I go off half-cock with assumptions it is only because there is no way to tell who is who, who does what (or why), who is sucking up to whom. Your readiness to adopt my mention of thousands of writers as a distinct possibility is rather naive. The membership comes and goes and even if there did a come time (round about 2018 when TS5 is released) when there are thousands of stories by hundreds of writers it would still not be difficult to re-organise. SQL is infinitely adaptable. I'm sure you do not need me to tell you what it's acronymical for, but you do seem lost in a web of confusion over how to add, find and retrieve information for a db. I repeat what I have said elsewhere in both open and less open posts and communications, both to you directly, and to anyone who will listen. If 20 people are tell you your work is fabulous and on the right lines and only one is telling you that it's not just off the rails it was never even on them to start with ... the dissenter is the one who needs the most attention. The yes-men are not likely to change their opinions because that would make them look stupid. Most people shy away from argument. They try to find something positive to say. I don't see the point of platitudes. It is a waste of time to tell someone they've done OK, with A and B and leave out any mention of the gaping holes in C, D, E and F. It's like, aw! He's a good bloke and doing his best. We shouldn't criticise. You really are in error to see me as the monster standing alone in criticism. I'm the only with both the experience and the honesty to lose friends by saying what's as obvious as a nose on a face. The library sucks, because it was made with all the wrong "materials" Finally ... as if to demonstrate another folly of management. I had to hope and pray that someone would reply and soon because I accidentally closed Firefox and couldn't find this new sub-forum again so lost was it in the Byzantine labyrinth of crap. Mind you, the time wasn't wasted. In looking for this, I found some highly amusing threads in some highly entertaining sub-forums, the majority of which had last posts more than 18 months old.
SQL is adaptable yes, but most of the adaptability comes forth when good planning is made early on and allows you to move things around based on field data. Lack of field data with everything else looking the same will cause problems For example, right now I can send a query to the database and request all posts from userid 4954. That would give me 5600+ posts right now. Why? Because there's a unique identifier in place to identify that all posts belong to Mirelly. I'll reiterate what I said in the comments. I don't care if one is in the minority or majority. Unless one hears it and notices it, changes won't happen because no one knows such suggestions actually exist. It's why there are such areas like Site Feedback to raises these issues in the first place so they can be examined and reviewed in the first place. If such tools aren't utilized, I or others will probably be spending countless hours digging and hunting for suggestions, and ideas.
That's me, I'm afraid to say. I have also avoided criticism of the library because I know nothing about programming of any kind. I don't know what's possible to do with it, or what kind of programming is available for use in constructing a library. To paraphrase what someone said around here in one of the threads, when you talk about the programming you guys make my brain hurt. I have two thoughts about the library, but I lost one of them and have to go look for it. The first one is simply that too many young people can't be bothered to read anything at all beyond txt spk and will avoid any area that has Library in the title. They might, and did (I believe), get curious about stories they stumbled across while searching through the regular forums. OK, I remembered my second thought. Worldsims.org and the forums are not attractive to look at. OK, it's hard for me to say that. I'd rather be nice. But the forum has got everything on the front page except Grandma's kitchen sink. Even I had trouble finding the library and I knew it was there. Same for the gallery. Does it have to be that way? Some of the fan sites are so beautiful.
It's like trying have a discussion with fog! I know how databases work. When the stories are filed there should be plenty of scope with radio buttons, check boxes and drop down lists to create field data items with fixed (owner designed) names. Besides, authors are crap at identifying which genre their works fits. It's editors and publishers who decide on the genre. How can you define Porta De Luca? Is it a romance or a soap-opera. It's definitely a drama, with romance thrown in. Folks weren't reading it because it was a genre, they read it cos it was flipping good. It was read by people who appreciate good stuff, not by bandwagon merchants who just rush to get the latest volume of the must have "in" genre. And as for feedback ... you only told us the other day, in reponse to someone complaining about the feedback section, that it was offline because of problems. World Sims front page is jumbled mess of components that are offline, or just on the wonk. There are two separate menu systems. The forums are a confused mess of subs and stuff so utterly unrelated to Sims, Sim City or possible offshoots it's hard to see a connection. The downloads database has been broken since forever. It's not possible to use the search facility to produce meaningless results (search for male and female is also return ... there's no gender filter). I mean wossup widdya Josh? Why try to reinvent the wheel. There are squillions of scripts out there which will set up far more complicated websites than this. You keep adding and never take away. You keep starting stuff and never finishing the projects already begun and still maudlin in "beta" when "alpha" would seem more apt. I had a friend when I was at school. Her Dad was a DIY freak, but not a very organised one. Every room in her house had floorboards missing, cables, or water pipes dangling out of walls, switch plates hanging from their wires, to be handled with caution. Once, for most a year, the toilet door was off its hinges and had to propped in the opening if you wanted to squat. Looking around WS I feel quite nostalgic ... Quite making excuses and fix stuff. I've complained about the word censor for years. I know you're read my comments! You even commented, once, I'm pretty sure. I blethered on for a dogs age about an FAQ and finally made one of my own. Not one other mod has ever seen fit to add something to it. After another age a link was finally added which after some messing around even lead (indirectly) to the FAQs. Three months later (well, it seems like 3 months ... maybe it was 4 or 5 ) the whole skin changes and the FAQ link is almost unfindable (even by me and I know where it is!) It's not enough to say it's been unchanged for the original forum skin. New visitors will see the Urban style. I've been a member here since early 2004 and in all that time I have come to realise that I don't know a single worthwhile fact about you. You answer all questions with a teasing response that is neither "mind your own business" nor helpful. I've never even tried to contact you by email or PM (other than once, maybe twice in extreme emergency) because your signature is pretty much a turn off to approachability. I guess what I am saying is that I just don't understand what makes you tick, kid. And those who know me will recoil in shock and awe, because I don't recall the last time I failed utterly to get any sort of empathic understanding of the way a person's mind ticks.
My job is often to tell Josh not to do something or tell him what he needs to do, which is often ignored hence I take on the job myself, which is why we saw the new Sim-ified skin applied to the whole forum earlier this year. The problem Josh has is that he has so many exciting ideas he just can't implement them all harmoniously, and bits don't get finished off properly. Unfortunately since I've started college I've had very little free time and the place has sort of, I don't know, gone haywire? We're in the middle of an identity crisis here. Are we WorldSims? UOEM? (Which Josh knows I really dislike with a passion.) Come on Josh, the people are speaking! Let's get this place back on its feet. Remove the intrusive ads, get a proper identifiable skin going, unleash the WorldSims brand across the board like we used to and get this place cleaned up. Sub-forums with posts nearly 2 years old is usually a sign that forum is not needed anymore. I'd love to sort of the Library section but I honestly have no idea how it works. Really, this isn't a major dig at you Josh, nobody can run a large forum like this by themselves. You need to step aside a bit so we can help you out, the more brains geared towards it the better! And Mirelly, I'll try and find a place to put your FAQ link. It has to be said though I'm using the Simmy 'WorldSims Forums' skin!
