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Why this article? First and foremost rules are likely the most important thing to a potential member on your site. The rules set a precedent for how your site is run and how you as an admin will approach a subject that comes up. It seems like it should be simple, that rules are common sense and that people will just obey, however it's not so simple and I hope that this article helps you with finding the correct voice with coming up with your rules. What to think about! When you come up with your rules there are things that you should think about and then things to consider once you've written them. I never recommend writing your rules, cleaning up the text and posting them. I always recommend reflecting and having someone review them before they are posted (preferably a person that can be objective about them). Some of the things that you should consider when writing your rules: What sort of admin do I want to portray myself as? How do I want the potential members to feel? Do I really need this rule? Once you've figured out some of these (and they will likely change and alter as you read through this) then you've started your journey into having respectable rules. What the rule means to you doesn't mean that rule means the same thing to me! Just because the rule makes sense to you doesn't mean it is. Additionally, just because the rule seems funny/smart/clever etc to you doesn't make it so. Write your rules as if you plan for a teacher or parent to read them and you need to get the point across, not as if you are talking to your friend telling them about what you're expecting people to follow. The Don'ts Some of these are personal peeves, some of these are just recommendations and some are just things that you should likely avoid. I can tell you, from my experience, that if it hasn't sent me away it has likely sent someone away from your site. Don't use the rule "Don't be a dick" or any variation thereof. While Wil Wheaton has said it and god he's so awesome (sarcasm included) it doesn't mean this is a blanket term that you should use in your rules. In fact, including this rule has the affect to immediately set people off and in a bad mood.. My first reaction to such a phrase is "click the X button, this admin is a dick". While the latter is not always true it doesn't negate the negative tone that it immediately puts into the head of the reader. This coincides with rules like "be respectful" "have fun" and others. These rules mean different things to different people so word them better or don't put them in there. Don't use "not". I'm using the words don't and not in this article ironically. People hate reading the word "not" or the variations of the word "not" and so avoiding it in your rules is key. Use your awesome vocabulary (or thesaurus for those of us like me that have a terrible vocabulary) and use other words that aren't not. Prohibited, banned, forbidden are some of your best friends when writing rules. Think of your rules like talking to a rebellious teen. The more you tell them not to do it, the more likely they will WANT to do it. Don't write your rules as if you're talking to someone. Nothing looks more childish than if you talk to the person on the other end of the screen through your rules. "You're not allowed to do this and if you do we will slap you with a fish." It makes the staff seem inexperienced and, honestly, moronic. You sound like you're standing on a playground telling other kids how they have to use the monkey bars and how if they fall they fell in lava and can't get back on. It's unnecessary. Don't waffle. Waffling is the inability to make a decision. Make a decision and stand firm in it. Waffling gives people the impression you don't actually know if what you chose is the right decision and so you are trying to make it seem like it was but wasn't your decision. The most common rule that this is applied to is word count rules "This is a no word count site BUT you must post more than 1 sentence". If you have to put the word "but" in your rule then you don't have a firm rule. Using the word count example either you are "no word count" or you are a "one sentence minimum" site. You can't be both and you don't want to be both. Make a decision and stick to your guns. Don't make silly restrictions. From "Usernames must be in all caps" to "no duplicate names" to "your character must have a middle name" to "playbys real age must be within 5 years of your characters age" (note: this last one has an additional note in the "JSYK" section) these are all useless, needless restrictions that are made for no reason other than to micromanage your players. None of these rules have a real purpose and are often used as a control mechanism to see how closely people are paying attention to your rules. These sorts of things members may still join regardless of but they are annoying and frustrating and put an unnecessary hurdle in the way of a new member joining your site. Joining a site should be simple. Don't make RP feel like a chore or burdening. Requiring specific chat programs, templates, special codes, etc. These things make RP less of a hobby and more like a daily chore. Require only what is needed to make your members happy and your site flourish. Never sacrifice the happy though. Don't be too inclusive. Don't take this the wrong way but being too inclusive can be just as much as a put off as being too exclusive. There are many things that make some people feel included and a part of the site as much as push another demographic away from sites. I will state, while I have no issue with the LGBT+ community I find pronouns to be exclusive to that community which makes me feel excluded from communities that require them. However on the flip side not having those could do the reverse to someone that is LGBT+. These should be your personal preference and not influenced by the community at large. Don't threaten your members or potential members. "DO THIS AND YOU WILL BE BANNED!" it feels like living under WW2 Hitler and who wants that? Just provide the rules clearly and then from there you choose the punishments from the administrative side. Your non-staff people don't need to know how you deal with oath breakers. Rules like this often make the staff seem juvenile and inexperienced. Don't force ratios. No one likes them, good sites will balance out naturally and really they just piss people off. Restricting a type of character should be plot defining/breaking not annoying to keep numbers within a spectrum. Members that don't want to play the other type of character will fill their ratio and never create another character. The unfortunate part for you is that this player may have given you more active characters but your restriction limited them so they had to stop. Don't put silly limits on characters. This goes with the above. Restrictions on character amounts, character types (unless it's setting breaking) is just silly. I know that you're trying to mitigate the fall out if that person leaves but really, there is going to be fallout regardless. Just let them be creative, you'd be surprised at how good of a member some of those chronic character makers are. Don't require post templates. They are tedious and annoying to most. People that just want to roleplay will find it daunting and eventually just give up. Don't make rules for the possibilities. If you're thinking of all the potentially bad things that could happen if you don't add the rule then you may need to think about how you are portraying your rules to members. Your rules should cater toward the crowd you want, not the crowd that you think you might get. Now these aren't hard and fast rules to live by. If you have a don't in your rules but you like it, have at it. It's your site for a reason. The Dos Now dos are really subjective and there aren't as many because really if you avoid the don'ts then you are often in a good position with your rules. These all depend on the community you want to pull in and how you want to portray yourself to your members and your potential members. Not all of these dos will apply to every circumstance but they are a good rule of thumb. Make sure your rules are clear. Not every rule needs an explanation if it's stated correctly and elaborating too much often causes confusion. Make sure that you include the basics. While your ad may say "no word count" it doesn't mean that's how someone got to your site. Make sure you always include things like your word count, rating, your OOC account restrictions, whether you are an APP or APC site, whether you allow art for playbys etc. These things are immediate go or no-gos for potential members hiding them or making them difficult to find is a turn off. Make sure the voice in your rules is the voice you want people to hear. If you sound like a dictator people will think you're a dictator. If you sound professional people will think your professional. This is all in the wording of your rules and how you portray you and your staff. Make sure your fears of the worst are kept away from the rules. When you put your fears and start banning things without having a reason to this often can mean that you are paranoid. Paranoid staff members don't make for good staff members as they always look for what someone is doing wrong and is highly likely to push members away. When something you fear comes up, deal with it then, not in the rules. Ask for someone to read over your rules. This is important because when you write your rules you are normally happy with them, however some things may be unclear. Having a second or third set of eyes look them over will help you figure out the holes in your rules. I hope this helps you get more members and stop pushing away potentials through poorly written/conveyed rules. If you have a suggestion for a do or don't feel free to post a comment below and I will review it. JSYK Playbys can span many different ages, especially in the age of television and media. Many Playbys have been acting for most of their life so forcing a rule that disallows the use of a younger version of a playby is silly. Lets take some people that span ages: Michelle Trachtenburg (Harriette the Spy) Drew Barrymore (ET) Chloe Grace Moretz (The Amityville Horror) Leonardo Decaprio (Growing Pains) Seth Green (Big Business or My Step Mother is an Alien) Elijah Wood (The Good Son) Sean Astin (The Goonies) Sean Connery (Pretty sure he's a vampire and hasn't aged in a century since he was turned) And these are just a few actors/actresses that have went from young ages to adults in their span of acting. It should be perfectly fine to play them from any era of their life as long as the character matches the age. This sort of rule also negates classic playbys from movies older than the 80s where the actors are in their 80s-90s but their acting career was in their 30s.

To get started, set up a couple of custom profile fields. For the purposes of this exercise, we're going to use the following: Character Faction Character Age Character's Playby I strongly recommend that Character Faction is a drop down selection, the script relies on everyone using the same spelling and capitalisation. Example: Character Age and Playby does not need any special settings. Save your custom profile fields and take note of their numbers. In my case they will be: Character Faction - <!-- |field_21| --> Character Age - <!-- |field_2| --> Character Playby - <!-- |field_17| --> Go to your HTML templates. We need to edit the following: Member List Headers - this is the container that every member sits in within the member list. Member List Header variables Member List Row - this is every individual member listed in the member list. Member List Row variables Member List Header - HTML and Javascript Paste the following: <!-- START SORT BY --> <h3>Sort by:</h3> <div id="sorts" class="button-group"> <button class="button is-checked" data-sort-by="original-order">original order</button> <button class="button" data-sort-by="face">Face Claim</button> <button class="button" data-sort-by="age">Character Age</button> </div> <!-- END SORT BY --> <!-- START FILTERS --> <div class="filters"> <div class="ui-group"> <h3>Filter by Character Faction</h3> <div class="button-group js-radio-button-group" data-filter-group="species"> <button class="button is-checked" data-filter="*">show all</button> <button class="button" data-filter=".Good">The Good Guys</button> <button class="button" data-filter=".Evil">The Bad Guys</button> </div> </div> <!-- ADDITIONAL FILTER GROUPS, COPY AND PASTE THE BELOW OUTSIDE OF THE COMMENT TAGS --> <!-- <div class="ui-group"> <h3>Filter by YOUR STUFF HERE</h3> <div class="button-group js-radio-button-group" data-filter-group="UNIQUE-DATA-FILTER-GROUP"> <button class="button is-checked" data-filter="*">show all</button> <button class="button" data-filter=".YOUR_WORD_HERE">DISPLAYED WORDS</button> <button class="button" data-filter=".YOUR_WORD_HERE">DISPLAYED WORDS</button> </div> </div> --> </div> <!-- END FILTERS --> <!-- A RESET BUTTON --> <p class="resetme"><button class="button button--reset">Reset filters</button></p> <!-- END RESET BUTTON --> <!-- END FILTERS --> <div class='grid'> <% MEMBERLIST_ROWS %> </div> <!-- |pages| --> <script src="https://unpkg.com/isotope-layout@3/dist/isotope.pkgd.js"></script> <script> $(document).ready(function() { var $grid = $('.grid').isotope({ itemSelector: '.grid-item', layoutMode: 'fitRows', getSortData: { age: '.age parseInt', face: '.face', // ADD ADDITIONAL FILTERS HERE WORD CORRESPONDS WITH DATA SORT BY WORD ABOVE // IGNORE EVERYTHING BELOW HERE category: '[data-category]', weight: function( itemElem ) { // function var weight = $( itemElem ).find('.weight').text(); return parseFloat( weight.replace( /[\(\)]/g, '') ); } } }); // store filter for each group var filters = {}; $('.filters').on( 'click', '.button', function() { var $this = $(this); // get group key var $buttonGroup = $this.parents('.button-group'); var filterGroup = $buttonGroup.attr('data-filter-group'); // set filter for group filters[ filterGroup ] = $this.attr('data-filter'); // combine filters var filterValue = concatValues( filters ); $grid.isotope({ filter: filterValue }); }); // bind sort button click $('#sorts').on( 'click', 'button', function() { var sortByValue = $(this).attr('data-sort-by'); $grid.isotope({ sortBy: sortByValue }); }); // change is-checked class on buttons $('.button-group').each( function( i, buttonGroup ) { var $buttonGroup = $( buttonGroup ); $buttonGroup.on( 'click', 'button', function() { $buttonGroup.find('.is-checked').removeClass('is-checked'); $( this ).addClass('is-checked'); }); }); var $anyButtons = $('.filters').find('button[data-filter=""]'); var $buttons = $('.filters button'); $('.button--reset').on( 'click', function() { // reset filters filters = {}; $grid.isotope({ filter: '*' }); // reset buttons $buttons.removeClass('is-checked'); $anyButtons.addClass('is-checked'); }); // flatten object by concatting values function concatValues( obj ) { var value = ''; for ( var prop in obj ) { value += obj[ prop ]; } return value; } }); </script> The first section is the sort by buttons. These are what will rearrange the order in which member's are displayed. The most important thing here is data-sort-by="face" take note of the word used in the data-sort-by attribute. The second section is the filter buttons. These are what will make users vanish from view (filtered out) when they do not meet the filter requirements. The most important thing here is data-filter=".Good" take note of the word used in the data-filter attribute. The third section has a handy reset button, allowing your users to put all characters back into view. The fourth section contains the actual members and the container that they will sit within. The div class is important here because it is referred to by the script. Fifth section is the pages button and this is sadly the memberlist's biggest weakness. You can only display so many users on a page and the script will not load more that for you. All the script does is sort information that is already there, it doesn't retrieve any additional data. Infinite scroll is also not doable on Jcink due to the way it needs to be set up. I would love to be proven wrong though. I'll address a work around for that later in this guide. The Sixth and final section is the script. The following script source links directly to isotope's website, I strongly recommend downloading a version yourself and uploading it to your site. Use your site link for the script source. <script src="https://unpkg.com/isotope-layout@3/dist/isotope.pkgd.js"></script> You must have this (or the version on your site) linked before the script in order for it to run properly. I recommend just putting it on the member header template just because you don't need to run the script anywhere else. If you prefer, you can add it to your global wrapper in the usual spot. The magic is between <script> and </script> The first line is telling the script to not execute until the entire page has loaded. The next bit is telling what div to act execute the isotope on. If you have changed any of the class names in your HTML, you will need to read through the script and change to the appropriate class. If you want to save yourself the hassle, just use the same class names I use. I'll go into the script in more detail when I describe how to add more sort by buttons. Member List Row - HTML Paste the following into your member list row <div class="grid-item member <!-- |field_21| -->"> <div class='avatar'> <!-- |avatar| --> </div> <div class="name"> <!-- |name| --> </div> <ul> <li class='age'> <!-- |field_2| --> </li> <li> Faction: <!-- |field_21| --> </li> <li class='face'> Face Claim: <!-- |field_17| --> </li> </ul> </div> Substitute your custom profile field numbers as necessary. If you save the templates now and check out your member list, you'll see that it's now working! It also looks like pants, but you can fix that with a bit of CSS magic 🙂 How to Add More Filters To add a filter, do the following: Go to the member list row Add the appropriate variable to grid-item member <!-- |field_21| --> so, if you want to add another filter and it's variable is 22, you should have div class="grid-item member <!-- |field_21| --> <!-- |field_22| -->" Make sure that there are spaces between each variable! Save Go to the member list header Add the following before </div> <!-- END FILTERS --> <div class="ui-group"> <h3>Filter by YOUR STUFF HERE</h3> <div class="button-group js-radio-button-group" data-filter-group="UNIQUE-DATA-FILTER-GROUP"> <button class="button is-checked" data-filter="*">show all</button> <button class="button" data-filter=".YOUR_WORD_HERE">DISPLAYED WORDS</button> <button class="button" data-filter=".YOUR_WORD_HERE">DISPLAYED WORDS</button> </div> </div> Substitute .YOUR_WORD_HERE with what the potential input for that variable might be. For example, the Faction variable I created earlier had two potential inputs, Good and Evil (capitalisation IS important). So WORD is replaced with .Good and the next button has .Evil after data-filter= You should also rename the data-filter-group (where it says UNIQUE-DATA-FILTER-GROUP) Save! Done! How to Add More Sorts Go to the member list row Add the custom field variable to where you want it to appear, and then wrap it in an element with an unique class name. For example, if you want to add player names to the sort button, you could put them in a h3 class like so: <h3 class="playername"><!-- |field_XX| --></h3> Memorise what the class name is Save Go to member list header Add this <button class="button" data-sort-by="CLASS-NAME">WORDS TO DISPLAY</button> before </div> <!-- END SORT BY --> Using the player name example would mean you would put in: <button class="button" data-sort-by="playername">Player</button> Scroll down to the script and find the following: getSortData: { Press enter and add the following after the curly bracket CLASS-NAME: '.CLASS-NAME', Take note that there is a comma at the end of the line. Leave it off? Script stops working. Using the player name example would mean you would end up with the following: getSortData: { playername: '.playername', // rest of the stuff here Save Done! Note: use the age sort as your guide on how to set up any other sort by numbers in the sort by. If you want to sort by height, make your users use metres (1.7 rather than 5'5 because the apostrophe will spoil your script) and change parseInt to parseFloat. In saying that, making your user's type 5\'5 ought to save your script, if someone makes a mistake however you will need them to correct it in order for the script to continue functioning. Safest just to use decimal points. How to add a label to numbers If you want to sort by a number, your class to sort can only contain a number. For example, age looks like this: <li class='age'> <!-- |field_2| --> </li> We will use CSS to fix this: .age::before { content: 'Age: '; display: inline } Save and Done! A Cheat to Display More Members As noted, the biggest disadvantage of using the sort and filter script is that it can not retrieve data from another page. So when a user clicks on the member list, we want them to automatically see as many characters as possible. The most allowable by Jcink is 50. So, make your own link to the member list and make it the following URL: YOUR_BOARD_URL_HERE/index.php?&act=Members&photoonly=&name=&name_box=all&max_results=50&filter=ALL&sort_order=asc&sort_key=name&st=0 Done! Another thing to consider is using the Hide this group from the member list? option in the user group settings to your advantage. For example, consider only having accepted and active character accounts displayed on your member list, rather than having inactive and unaccepted character accounts clogging up the list. I wish there was a more elegant solution to this! If anyone has found a solution that works for them, I would love to hear about it. Even if this isn't the member list code for you, I hope that it's given you some ideas on what you can do with the member list template! Visit the isotope website to find out what else you can do with the script!

Before I go into why I think you should consider whether or not you want to continue link backing in the future, I want to touch on the ways that it does work. Active Advertiser = Active Site There is a belief within the community that a forum that is actively advertising across the stratosphere is an active forum; and that a commitment to advertising is a reflection of the admin's commitment to their community. I debate the validity of that belief - after all how many times have you gone to link back to find that the forum is dead? The belief however is out there, and you might feel that capitalising on that belief outweighs the potential drawbacks to link backing. Advertising regularly = Users remember you If you have saturated the market and continue saturating the market with your ads, users and admins are going to remember you. They'll definitely remember you if there is something about your forum that they're curious about, but maybe they don't have the time to commit to another forum at that time. Should their current forum fall under, they may go directly to your site to give it a thorough look over. It does get you members Link backing can yield some legitimate non-admin traffic, and some of that traffic can be converted into active members. In this guide, I am not claiming that link backs are completely ineffective. I am however, querying if it is effective enough. Now to the true purpose of this guide! Most of you are probably already adherents to the link back faith, so let's focus on ways that it doesn't work, and may be harmful to your site. It may harm your search result ranking The theory of link backing is this: A site that links to your site is a vote of confidence (assuming a no follow value is not used), by having numerous votes of confidence, google takes note and increases your search result ranking. This is why spam bots join a forum and create posts that are full of links. It's not so much about getting users to click through (though sweet if they do), but about using your site to increase their ranking. There are other ways to inflate your ranking using links, not just bots. They're called link schemes. In June of 2018, Google reported that they "doubled down [their] effort in removing unnatural links via ranking improvements and scalable manual actions." Source (Google) This is where you should consider what a link scheme is, as it falls under the umbrella of "unnatural links". Source (Google) Potentially therefore, the link back exchange we have going on in the roleplay world is simply be ignored when it comes to google building an impression of your site. (In 2016, link backing might have been devaluing your links) Therefore, if you are dropping links in the hopes of building your search engine ranking, rethink this. It's probably not having any effect. It may have a detrimental effect on your search engine results To demonstrate this, I googled a bunch of random sites, adding jcink on the end because none of the sites I googled would get me their forum through their name alone. If the site is not on jcink, I switched jcink to roleplay. First result is to their first link forum and is showing text describing another site. First result was to the correct site, but it was directly to someone's advertisement. As I said in the image, I was worried that I was forcing that result by putting jcink in there. So I googled [site name] roleplay. The result was a book. The site I was looking for was not on the first page of results. This time we hit the right site! Some things to note however, they're a secure site and they do not have many advertisements. Another jackpot! These guys have a unique name however, which strongly helps when searching for them. Again, searching for this site took me to another person's forum but to that particular person's ad. If I switch the search terms to [site name] roleplay, I get Dungeons and Dragons related sites. If I change it to [site name] forum roleplay, I get Dungeons and Dragons related forum topics. There were a number of sites that I simply couldn't get to display when searching for them. For many that I did get to display, the link was taking you to another site. If I google forum roleplay, the only site I get is a reddit thread with an ad for a site that is part of this community. Not a single first page result involved a link back exchange. If you have hundreds of links going to your site, and if link backing was an effective technique, wouldn't it be easier to find you? As it stands, I have to search for the site name to get close to your site, and more often than not I'm going to get someone else's forum, or people advertising on your site. Let's switch my terms to jcink roleplay. I still don't get actual sites. I get tumblr. You're advertising to people who already have a 'home' So, I have yet to find any evidence that link backing improves your search ranking results and more often than not, spoils when you might get a result. So that leaves us with the point of advertising: getting members. Except by focusing your attention on link backing, you're targeting users that already either have a 'home,' or are managing their own 'home.' Whilst I have noted that it is possible to gain a few users through link backing, you don't get many and that's because the platform you're focusing your energy on is only regularly used by admins looking for more places to drop their links. Your target audience: people who are looking for a place to roleplay. They're probably not scouring link back forums for that place to roleplay. It's inefficient Linking is tedious. Captcha is tedious. Finding the right forum to post in is tedious. Loading all of those slow sites is tedious. It's a laborious process that is only soothing in it's repetition. You spend hours farming other people's sites to drop your advertisement and for those hours you spend, you get....a handful of members? Quite simply, is the amount of time you spend doing this worth the number of people you get? Link backing is a practice that should be properly interrogated for effectiveness. The practice is a link scheme, and google ignores sites that show evidence of participating in such a thing. It spoils your search results should you get a result, often leading users to different sites or displaying information for another site. It also targets the wrong audience and finally, it's inefficient. Given all of that, is it worth it? That's entirely up to you. Resources: Moz - Link Explorer - you have to register but you can see what the spam ranking of sites linking to you are. Google Search Console - gives you some information about your google search ranking. Google Analytics - you can see what browsers and devices your users are using, and how people are getting to your site. Beginner's Guide to SEO - this guide provides some solutions to the problems I've posed. Spoiler alert: the solutions are not easy. This guide will also expand on some of the things I've touched on, such as the importance of having a secure site. Another spoiler: google actively devalues insecure links. Moz - SEO Learning Centre - same site as above, but with a few more topics for you to explore should you be interested.

So the Character Mod will likely hold all of your character's information. It's a matter of pulling that information out and being able to utilize it elsewhere to make lists. Below is the code for a Playbys list however can work for other things. With the new version of the Character Mod it is not required to do this for groups as the Character List allows you to filter by groups now. So first things first, you need to create your custom field for the plaby/faceclaim that your users will be able to edit and add their plaby into. If you already have this then skip to the next step. To do this you need to go to Community > Characters > Custom Fields > Create New > Create a Text Field. Whether you show it in the posts or profile or not is irrelevant. In our example below the key we use is "playby" so you need to use this or make sure to change it in the code. Once you have this created you need the field ID. To find this you can mouse over the field, by going to the edit page and looking at the URL or copy and pasting the URL into your favorite editor. That ID is what you'll replace the # with in the below code into an HTML block in Pages (Pages > Blocks > Create New > Custom HTML): <div class='ipsPad'> <h2 class="ipsType_sectionTitle ipsType_reset cForumTitle">Playby List</h2> <div class="ipsPad ipsBox"> {{$runit = \IPS\Db::i()->select('*', 'characters_fields_values', 'field_# != ""', 'field_# ASC');}} <ul class='ipsDataList ipsDataList_reducedSpacing playbyList ipsGrid ipsGrid_collapsePhone' data-ipsgrid data-ipsgrid-equalheights="row"> {{foreach $runit as $playbys}} {{$char = \IPS\characters\Character::load( $playbys[character_id]);}} {{if $char->approved == 1}} <li class="ipsPhotoPanel ipsPhotoPanel_small ipsAreaBackground_reset ipsClearfix ipsGrid_span4 ipsPad"> <span class="ipsUserPhoto ipsUserPhoto_small ipsPos_top"> {{if $char->photo}} <img src="{file="$char->photo"}" alt="$char->name" /> {{else}} <img src='{resource="default_photo.png" app="core" location="global"}' alt="$char->name"> {{endif}} </span> <div class=""> <strong>Playby:</strong> {$char->fields('playby')} <br /><strong>Character:</strong> {template="link" app="characters" location="front" group="character" params="$char"} <br /><strong>Played by:</strong> {$char->owner()->link()|raw} </div> </li> {{endif}} {{endforeach}} </ul> </div> </div> This code will give you a simple list with an image to the side, the playby, the character and the player that plays the character. It is in a grid view and you can edit as necessary but it's in alphabetical order by first name of the playby. To explain the code a little we first tell the code to find all characters that have a playby filled in so the field is "not blank". Then we loop through those (where the foreach starts) to show them. To get the character name and player name we first load the character then check to be sure they are approved, because we only want approved characters showing in our lists, and then we output how we want everything to look. You're free to ask questions in the IPS Staff People Coterie or get assistance. Please feel free to leave a review below.

Before we get started, this is what we're going to create: You can add as many articles as you like without needing to alter the script. Create Your Articles Go to webpage maker (under skins & templates) Click create new webpage Give it a page title, doesn't matter what, we're not going to see it. Give it a key, something memorable for you because you'll need it later. Set allow key to use board wrappers to No. Your contents need to include valid HTML, so wrap your paragraphs into paragraphs <p>I'm a paragraph!</p> and wrap the entire contents into a div with the class articles and it must have a unique ID. For IDs, I just use article_1 (number increasing for each new article) but you might prefer something more memorable. You will need to remember what it is. <div id="article_1" class='articles'> <p>Yay! First paragraph!</p> <p>I'm a middle paragraph</p> <p>I'm another paragraph!</p> </div> Rinse and repeat until you have the articles you want. Or just make two for the purposes of this tutorial. Create the Container The container is what will house the articles, it will also include our magical menu. Back in webpage maker (under skins & templates) Click Create a New Webpage Give it a page title, this one matters because it will appear in your nav strip. (ie. My Community -> lore) Set allow key to use board wrappers to Yes. Paste in the following code: <div id="welcome_articles"> <h1>Lore</h1> Welcome to our lore. Here you can bla bla bla. Click the links on the left to read the relevant articles. </div> <div id="article_container"> <aside> <ul class="article_container_list"> <h3>Lore Index</h3> <li><a class="container_links" href="#" data-showdiv="article_1">Link 1</a></li> <li><a class="container_links" href="#" data-showdiv="article_2">Link 2</a></li> </ul> </aside> <div class="article_content"> <% article_1 %> <% article_2 %> </div> </div> <script> $(".container_links").click(function(){ $(".articles:visible").hide(); $("#"+$(this).attr("data-showdiv")).show(); }); $('.container_links').click( function(){ if ( $(this).hasClass('active') ) { $(this).removeClass('active'); } else { $('.container_links.active').removeClass('active'); $(this).addClass('active'); } }); // following is purely to prevent page jump when user clicks on link $('a.container_links').click(function(e){ e.preventDefault(); }); </script> where <% article_1 %> and <% article_2 %> are the keys to the articles you created earlier. The javascript is already included and assuming that you don't replace your class names, it doesn't need to be altered. Besides the aforementioned keys, the most important part of the code for you is <li><a class="container_links" href="#" data-showdiv="article_1">Link 1</a></li> the data-showdiv attribute needs to be the same as one of the articles you created earlier. So, say you created an article about species and you gave it an id of species. Your link should look like this <li><a class="container_links" href="#" data-showdiv="species">Species</a></li> Once you have added the links and keys, save it. If you visit it now, you'll see that everything is displayed but clicking the link will make everything vanish except the for corresponding article. You'll also notice that the list sits on top of everything else. Time to hit the style sheets! Stylesheet Go to your stylesheets and paste in the following #welcome_articles { margin-bottom: 10px; padding: 5px; border-bottom: 1px solid rgba(0,0,0, .1); } #article_container { display: flex } #article_container .article_content { flex-grow: 2; padding: 0 20px 20px; border-left: 1px solid rgba(0,0,0, .1) } #article_container aside { padding: 10px; min-width: 15% } #article_container .articles { display: none } ul.article_container_list { list-style-type: none; margin: 0; padding: 0 } ul.article_container_list li { display: block; margin: 1px; } a.container_links { display: block; border-bottom: 1px solid rgba(0,0,0, .1); padding: 5px } a.container_links.active { padding-left: 15px } ul.article_container_list h3 { margin-top: 0 } The most important bits are #article_container { display: flex } this makes the aside and div.article_content sit next to each other. Sometimes however, the aside can look a little bit claustrophobic, so I add #article_container aside { padding: 10px; min-width: 15% } To ensure that the div.article_content grows to fill the entire space left over, I add #article_container .article_content { flex-grow: 2 } To hide all of the articles by default, I add #article_container .articles { display: none } if you are having problems with the script after adding this code, move #article_container .articles { display: none } to your guidebook page so that it sits above the scripts: ie <style> #article_container .articles { display: none } </style> <script> $(".container_links").click(function(){ $(".articles:visible").hide(); $("#"+$(this).attr("data-showdiv")).show(); }); $('.container_links').click( function(){ if ( $(this).hasClass('active') ) { $(this).removeClass('active'); } else { $('.container_links.active').removeClass('active'); $(this).addClass('active'); } }); // following is purely to prevent page jump when user clicks on link $('a.container_links').click(function(e){ e.preventDefault(); }); </script> Finally, it is useful if the displayed article's link is different from the others. To do this I add a.container_links.active { padding-left: 15px } Responsiveness Make sure your head (in the global wrappers) includes the following <meta name="viewport" content="width=device-width, initial-scale=1"> This will ensure the zoom is at 100%. If you have any fixed width elements in your header or footer you may find that that user now needs to scroll horizontally. I recommend fixing that so that those elements no longer include a fixed width. I've addressed the default fixed widths in the following code @media screen and (max-width: 979px) { body { font-size: 1rem } #wrapper { width: calc(100% - 20px); margin: 0 auto; } #article_container { display: block; } ul.article_container_list { text-align: center } #userlinks { width: 90% } ul.article_container_list li { margin-bottom: 10px } ul.article_container_list li:last-child { margin-bottom: 0 } } The important part (applicable to the guidebook) is as follows #article_container { display: block; } now the aside sits above the content. ul.article_container_list { text-align: center } we center the links (note that they automatically expand to fill the available space because we made the links into blocks earlier.) ul.article_container_list li { margin-bottom: 10px } we make the links easier to tap for a chunky finger. ul.article_container_list li:last-child { margin-bottom: 0 } but the last list item doesn't need a bottom margin, so we get rid of it. The end result for mobiles becomes this: Just want some copy and paste? <head> <meta name="viewport" content="width=device-width, initial-scale=1"> </head> <div id="welcome_articles"><h1>Lore</h1> Welcome to our lore. Here you can bla bla bla. Click the links on the left to read the relevant articles. </div> <div id="article_container"> <aside> <ul class="article_container_list"> <h3>Lore Index</h3> <li><a class="container_links" href="#" data-showdiv="article_1">Link 1</a></li> <li><a class="container_links" href="#" data-showdiv="article_2">Link 2</a></li> </ul> </aside> <div class="article_content"> <% article_1 %> <% article_2 %> </div> </div> <style> #welcome_articles { margin-bottom: 10px; padding: 5px; border-bottom: 1px solid rgba(0,0,0, .1); } #article_container { display: flex } #article_container .article_content { flex-grow: 2; padding: 0 20px 20px; border-left: 1px solid rgba(0,0,0, .1) } #article_container aside { padding: 10px; min-width: 15% } #article_container .articles { display: none } ul.article_container_list { list-style-type: none; margin: 0; padding: 0 } ul.article_container_list li { display: block; margin: 1px; } a.container_links { display: block; border-bottom: 1px solid rgba(0,0,0, .1); padding: 5px } a.container_links.active { padding-left: 15px } ul.article_container_list h3 { margin-top: 0 } @media screen and (max-width: 979px) { body { font-size: 1rem } #wrapper { width: calc(100% - 20px); margin: 0 auto; } #article_container { display: block; } ul.article_container_list { text-align: center } #userlinks { width: 90% } ul.article_container_list li { margin-bottom: 10px } ul.article_container_list li:last-child { margin-bottom: 0 } } </style> <script> $(".container_links").click(function(){ $(".articles:visible").hide(); $("#"+$(this).attr("data-showdiv")).show(); }); $('.container_links').click( function(){ if ( $(this).hasClass('active') ) { $(this).removeClass('active'); } else { $('.container_links.active').removeClass('active'); $(this).addClass('active'); } }); // following is purely to prevent page jump when user clicks on link $('a.container_links').click(function(e){ e.preventDefault(); }); </script> I hope that someone finds this useful! As already noted, any forum software can utilise this guide, the actual magic is the script and that is not software specific.

Before we get started, I want to say, here, really quick, that this is a short overview, of what settings are what, where they are, the good things and bad things about SMF, so if you don't want to play with it yourself, you can follow along with me as I do it. I will talk about some of the pros and cons of running an SMF site, and touch briefly on semantic things that I will cover more thoroughly later in a more focused guide. Primarily, this guide will look at, besides pros and cons, the settings and adjusting things to your liking. If you're used to Jcink and similar, there is a tiny bit of a learning curve, and this guide aims to make that curve less steep. Some things to get out of the way: I've been working with SMF since 2005 or so, and I will tell you right now, development is the slowest it has ever been. Don't expect the core software to change much. Fortunately, SMF has a very strong modding community, and anything that someone needs that doesn't exist, I may be able to do. Because of this, no two SMF sites operate the exact same way, and adding new features and expanding functionality is really just a matter of either figuring out how, or finding someone else to do it. So, this, this is what SMF's greatest strength is. It is fully and entirely customisable, top to bottom, change anything in it you like. It is licensed as open-source software, which means you really are allowed to change anything, and make the software you want it to be, if you can. You can even change it all and then re-release it under another name (provided you don't pretend SMF endorses you). I've said it a thousand times and I'll keep saying it, SMF is rude. It does not like anyone. Half the time it doesn't even like me (being fair, it breaking all the time might be how it shows affection, too), so if you get overwhelmed and give up easily, or want instant results, SMF is not for you. If you're willing to stick with it, accept that you will absolutely break it a lot, ask for help, and put in some effort, it is very rewarding, and SMF can be customised and extended in ways a large number of the competition, so to say, cannot be. SMF can also teach you a lot, too, albeit not always the kindest way. Everything I know about coding, I learned because SMF broke in a way that made me learn it. Yeah, you can be me, too, someday, if you're bullheaded stubborn enough. P= Disclaimer: I know nothing about SMF 1. I have never installed it, and I don't intend to. My guess, though, is it's not too different from 2; major versions usually are, but generally follow the same logic. However, I will not support SMF 1. Uh. Because I can't, really. Note: If you're more familiar with old ProBoards, SMF will be more familiar to you, as well. ProBoards at one time ran on SMF's predecessor, YaBB, and the influence from it remained for quite some time. Now, let's get going, rambled enough up here haha. Installing This should be fairly straight-forward. You'll first need to either follow the prompts through Softaculous, if you have access to it through cPanel, or upload and extract the SMF installer files, and then create a blank database for it. Visit the URL you extracted to, and follow the on-screen prompts there. Remember to input the correct database information. When doing installations through Softaculous, if you want it on the root URL of your domain, you'll have to change its settings, because it will try to install at /smf. Sometimes, the manual installer will fail to create a file called Settings_bak.php. To create this yourself, just make a copy of Settings.php, and rename it to Settings_bak.php (this is a backup file of your settings, or will be, and SMF wants it there as a fail-safe -- spoiler, it's really not one, but alright, we'll pet the pretty). One thing: I highly recommend having your root user #1 username something different from what it will be displayed as. As no one but admins can find that username, it makes it all the harder for a brute-force bot to try and log in as root admin #1 and tank your forum. It also makes it harder for your pissy members to try it (don't laugh, the only time any of my boards have ever been hacked, it was a member that did it). The only draw-back is you'll have to remember the username, because that's what you log in with, but ticking stay logged in will fix this (it literally never logs you back out unless you switch devices or clear cookies). Initial Configuration Quick tip: if you like sidebars better than drop menus, there's a double arrow to one side above the menus in the ACP. Click this to turn all the drop-down menus in the system into sidebars with links. (Only applicable on SMF 2.0.) There are a bunch of check boxes, text inputs, and doo-dads in the SMF configuration panels, so we're going to take this relatively slow, and take them as it comes. We'll start up here in the general configuration, so pop into SMF's ACP, and then go into Configuration => Core Features. What's this? This page allows you to turn on, or off, varying different little doosnickities. These are features or functions that are not enabled by default, quite frankly I have no bleeding idea why they did it this way, it seems so unintuitive, but here we are (if it's any consolation for anyone, this page is gone in 2.1). Click the power symbol to the right side of a feature row to turn that thingbob on. Which ones you want to turn on are entirely up to you; if you have SubAccounts installed, by the way, it will appear here, so you'll have to come here and turn on the master switch. Personally, the calendar's not worth it. Advanced Profile Fields enables admins to add custom fields and turn off most of the default ones, so I'd recommend turning that on, even if you honestly have no need of it (it still has AIM and YIM in there, come on). Moderation, Administration, and User Logs keeps a running log of any moderation, admin, or user profile edit actions that happen. If you're paranoid, this is the master switch for you. Post Moderation works in conjunction with the Warning System; with both on, you can make it so a user on moderation due to warning accumulation must have their posts approved before they're made public. Post Moderation can be used by itself by setting up permissions and group or board controls appropriately. I wouldn't bother with paid subs, report generation, or search engine tracking, they're really not helpful for most RP forums. Now we're going into Configuration => Features and Options => General. From here on out, it's all selectors, check boxes, and input fields. Most of this is pretty straight-forward, so I won't be talking about any of them in great detail, but we will touch on a couple that can be confusing. For instance, search engine friendly URLs. What's this do? It turns ?topic=1.0 into /topic,1.0.html. Personally, it looks gross, but I suppose it might make search engines like them better. On the other hand, you can do a lot better on the SEO front than that, but hey, you do you. You can also set meta keywords for search engines, but these are less important than they used to be. Further, depending on the keywords you use, you can hurt your rankings, not boost them. Anyway, this is not a SEO guide. It's up to you if you use them, do some Google-fu and see if you feel it's important, but if you don't know what you're doing, I'd leave it blank. Below that, we've got the time format, offset, and time-zone. Offset and time-zone are pretty obvious, though there's really never a reason to use offset in the ACP, offset is more of a member-specific setting, to "fix" your default board time-zone to match theirs, if it is off by over an hour. By default, it runs off server time. So if your server's time is off by several minutes, your board will be, too, and if you have to set the server time back a few minutes, nothing changes on your board until time "catches up" with itself. Who's online will stop updating until it does, for instance. Anyway, you may need to do some scrolling to find your time-zone, I believe it's all Africa first, and then the default time format. For some reason, to users, this is a drop-down selector that makes sense, but in the ACP, it's raw srftime. Lord. Why. What's srftime? It's the little percent signs and letters that PHP uses to format time stamps. If you've never seen a time stamp before, it looks like this: 1533534916 That says, August 6, 2018, 12:55 AM CDT. No, it really does. If you're curious, random aside, but time stamps in this format (PHP's time()) are based on a specific date and time, and then count the seconds that have occurred since then, to calculate the current time. It counts from the Unix Epoch (January 1, 1970, 00:00:00 GMT), when the manner of unix systems measuring time changed so that instead of having to set 0 (the epoch) to representing a recent time, it became possible to represent time with a 32-bit integer, increasing the time-span that could be stored to around 136 years. (I have no idea what the heck you just said-ese: computer nerds made computers capable of handling more numbers and time calculation got easier). From that time, the epoch was rounded down to the nearest decade, ending up with 1-1-1970, probably because it was a bit tidier than 1-1-1971. Sometime around 2106, we'll have to push the epoch value up, but by then, we may have made computers capable of handling even more numbers, so who knows. Anyway, so PHP uses these seconds to figure out time and put it into a human-readable format. I won't get into the long of it here, but you can search for srftime on Google, and find a list of the keys that will produce the time format you want. If you want a really simple, short and sweet one, I've got: Aug 6, 2018, 12:55 AM %b %d, %Y, %I:%M %p Beyond this, we've got track daily stats, what this does is it tracks daily new topics, posts, members, and, if you want it, page views (the number of pages that have been loaded for end-users in a day). You can turn on tracking page views if you want, but there's really nothing terribly useful in it. Now, in the rest of features and options, it's pretty simple, with one note: under Layout, we've got Display time taken to create every page. I would not turn this on, but if you're curious what your SMF install's page loads actually look like in seconds, then there you go. In Signatures, it allows you to restrict how much one types into their signature, the maximum number of lines, max font size, enable or disable smileys in signatures and restrict how many there can be, max image count, and restrict signature image height and width. If you intend to use signatures, I'd definitely set these in accordance with your site's rules. You should never have a reason to touch server settings, unless you need it temporarily off-line, need to update emails, or change your forum's displayed title. Beyond the General section, it gets dangerous. Don't mess with it unless you know what you're doing, you can break your board and have no idea what you did. Beyond this, everything's pretty straight-forward, or has a more detailed section below, or in another guide that's planned. Installing Modifications This sounds scary, but, it's not, it's fairly cut and dry. You can search the official SMF mod site for a mod that you like, and download it directly from SMF's servers, or you can just upload a package file. These are .zip or .tar.gz files that have installation information in them. So how do modifications work? Modifications are package installations written in a combination of XML and PHP. The XML file tells the package parser what to do to the source files; ergo, find this, replace with this, or find that, add this above it. It's actually quite brilliant. The PHP files typically hold database alterations and additions in them, if there are any. More sophisticated package mods will typically have a read me, that displays at the top when doing a test installation (clicking 'install mod' will cause it to do a test parse of the package, to see if there are any errors, first, more on that in a second). Installing package mods is legitimately just a matter of clicking install, clicking install again, and letting it do its thing. Test installations are performed first. This is to warn the admin user about potential mess ups and board breakage beforehand, so one can prepare for it, and take necessary measures. The next SMF guide I write will be about installing mods that error. Yes, there is a way to do it even if the package installer's test run errors on all the file edits. So, click install and have fun. It's really not as terrible as it sounds. If you feel better doing so, and you might, consider installing a test board and then run all your package installs on that so if you hopelessly break it, no big deal. I will mention here, if you come across a blank white screen, and it gives 500 as the error, this is called an internal server error. There are many many reasons why you may see one of these, but if you've been messing around in the templates or installing or uninstalling things, you may see this (and probably will at some point). Breathe. Don't panic. If you have cPanel, somewhere in there is something called Error Logs; you'll want to poke into that and see if it's logging an error in there when the 500 pops up. What it says there will give you more expanded information on why it's doing a 500. [Wed Sep 05 10:54:58.140527 2018] [php7:error] [pid 10357] [client 192.168.1.1:51001] PHP Fatal error: Uncaught ArgumentCountError: Too few arguments to function acmGiantCharacterLoadTumble(), 0 passed in /var/www/html/smf21/Sources/Subs-Characters.php on line 664 and exactly 1 expected in /var/www/html/smf21/Sources/Subs-Characters.php:330 You'll be looking for something like this. (Yes, this caused a 500.) This is a much better idea of what happened, where it is, and how to fix it, and honestly you might be able to figure it out yourself (but don't worry, the Initiative is full of tech masters if you can't). I highly recommend, at least early on, when you are editing the files, templates, and installing mods, do one thing at a time. This way, it is much easier for you to figure out what went wrong where, because if you do a huge mess of edits and get a 500, and the error logs, for some reason, don't give you an error output, you're blind. You have no idea what you did. It gets very frustrating very fast trying to troubleshoot that way. Love yourself. Yes, you will, at some point, be installing a mod or several. I promise you that. As I said above, SMF's power is in its modding community. There are dozens upon dozens of mods that do all kinds of things, and depending on your needs, and how you want your board to operate, you can find quite a few helpful things in the mod section of the SMF customisation site. I'd definitely recommend looking through it. Someday, you're gonna want a new feature or function SMF does not natively have; may as well make that day an early day, so you can break it without really being afraid of data loss. Spam Controls Here's a big thing, by default, SMF's spam controls are… well, they're kind of lacking. You know, kind of, like how water's kind of wet. It's got some basic who gets to post where without seeing a verification system controls, and then under it, you can set password strength requirements (I wouldn't set them ridiculously high), then the verification image style to use, and then questions. I'll warn you now, chances are, you'll be fighting spam on SMF at some point, especially if you happen to be on a TLD (top-level domain, ergo a .com, .net, etc, without another period in there [rpginitiative.com is a TLD; boardname.rpginitiative.com is a subdomain]). Bots find TLDs very fast. Very fast. You might be able to hide on a /site type URL for a while but eventually they'll get you, too. The good news is, there are ways of making it better, and SMF 2.1 paved the future in gold by building reCAPTCHA into it by default. There will be another, more in-depth guide on fighting spam and the ways I've found to do it that work on 2.0, and continue to hold up, so stay tuned if you need help with that. Member Groups and Permissions Member groups are fairly standard on SMF. It's not really easy to mess these up. Groups actually define permission groups, as well; ergo, groups can inherit permissions from each other, or standalone and be assigned permissions unique to them. This is very cool. One thing I want to say is, member group icons ("pips") must be uploaded to the images folder of the themes (yes, all of the themes you use), and then called by image name and extension. Ergo, if you upload a pip called star.gif, you need to type in star.gif. Permissions can be set per group, per board, and then we have something called a permission profile. This is a specific set of permission arrangements that can be assigned to boards. I typically make one called Guest Friendly, for instance, and this profile grants guests posting ability. Slap it on the boards I want to have guest posting enabled in, and I'm golden. SMF has the ability to assign multiple member groups to a single account (AND you can make them all display, with some file tweaking). Further, you can also set it up so that your members can sort themselves into their own group(s). The latter is extremely helpful on sites where there is no approval process, as players can just sort their own characters out of the box, if you're using SubAccounts (on the character mod, this takes care of itself when creating a character). The multiple groups thing for users can be utilised to give user accounts access to things, as well, so for instance, you can have a beta testing and world-building group that has access to a special board, but additional groups don't show by default, so other users can be left unaware of this special control group. I use it a lot to set myself as a player, and then give myself root administrator access anyway; I look like a normal player, but I still get stuff done. With SubAccounts, you can simplify even the most complex of character grouping arrangements into just assigning more than one group. (Guest: -asks a question- Me in Player Colour: -answers, apparently with something they don't like- Guest: I think I'd rather talk to the admin. Me, suddenly in Admin Colour: -cackles maniacally- Baby, I AM the manager admin! I'm joking. Sorta. It's amazing how some people talk to other members when they think the admin isn't around...) Installing a Theme This is pretty simple, but just in case anyone doesn't know, first, you'll go into Configuration => Themes and Layout. By default, clicking that takes you to Manage and Install, that's where we want to be. Scroll all the way down, and you'll find a header labelled Install a New Theme. Theme creators package their themes, and they will install themselves, so if you have one of these, just click Choose File, select the archive package for the theme, and click install. To create a theme from a directory, just type in the directory folder, and then to make a blank copy of Curve, the default theme, type a name in the last field. If you're doing the latter, which is how we make new themes on SMF and you probably will do this someday, don't use spaces, or fancy characters, in the name. Whatever you type here is what the folder in the file system will be called for the new theme. File directories just really don't like those, in short. Now, if your server runs on Japanese, to be fair, it may accept Hiragana, but most servers aren't about that life. One major drawback of SMF is that themes, good themes, are hard to come by. The good ones that exist are often very generic, and template alterations in premade SMF themes available on their site are very rare. They are also quite difficult to make, if you don't know what you're doing, as they are heavily dependent on PHP, and you can ruin your own life easily when you're getting started with it. Bonus points to, if you're running 2.1, lol that thing's got no themes. Yes, I will eventually get around to the theme guide for SMF, promise. Still doing it! I will say here, it will not be a full, how to do everything you need to know how to do tutorial, it will expect its reader to be able to use HTML, CSS, and some basic PHP, so if you haven't already and are waiting on it, read the PHP Fundamentals guides. You'll be glad you did when we all get around to the SMF theme guides, because it will assume you have some idea of what you're doing. SMF 2.1 also has a known bug where, sometimes, it won't install themes from a .zip archive. You'll have to upload it into a directory in your file manager (preferably the Themes folder), and install it by directory. Kind of rude, but easy enough to work around for now. For some reason, it was fixed, at one point, and then someone rolled it back. No clue why, but here we are. Might've been an accident to be fair. Language Support If you poke around the SMF ACP a bit, you'll find a languages section. Here, you can search up, and download/install, language packs for practically every language in the world. Practically. If you run a site in another language, or you, or some of your members, may find navigating the forum easier in their native, non-English language, you can download and install language packs for any of the languages that you or they may speak. This is, and is not, useful for role-play forums, so just know it's a thing that's there. I will tell you, there's a typo in the Vietnamese package in the admin panel language file, and many of the languages don't work so hot with UTF-8. Not sure why, but, here we are. If you're not sure which one to use, you could always install both. To uninstall a language, you need to find all the language files in the languages folder for it, and delete those, then remove all the language-related images (usually in a folder of their own in the images folder). If you are fluent in another language, mod writers almost always are interested in fluent speakers translating their mod's language files to another language, so don't be afraid to contribute these if you're interested! So if you find a mod you want to support, see if they need translations for your language. It's an easy way of helping modders out (and we love our modders). Adding Categories and Boards This is pretty easy, but! To add new categories and boards, visit the Forum => Boards section. Then, click Create New Category, to make a new category, or click the button titled Add Board under a category's board listing. Categories have a position, a name, and whether or not members can collapse that category. In SMF 2.1, categories also have a description, which show beneath their name. New boards have a category, position, name, description (and it does accept HTML!), a permission profile to use, groups that can see the board, forum moderators, redirect options, whether to count posts in it, and the theme to use for the board. You can install a mod that will give you control over the board's sort method (what order it displays threads in, and what key it uses to order). If you do not tick the box for a member group in the allowed groups list, that board will not show to users sorted into that group. Of course, post groups can be ignored, unless you want to restrict a board's access by post count (that's a thing you can do). When adding moderators, it uses a script that will look up a username as you type it, and then you can click from the drop-down; if this script does not work (a lot of the time, it will break on a theme other than the default Curve or Core), you'll need to enter a comma-separated list, no spaces. Category and board controls are pretty intuitive. They also separate themselves visually, quite clearly, so you can easily pick out what links are for what board. Quick note on how group access works for boards: say you have Board 1, and then as a child of Board 1 is Board 2. Board 2 has access ticked for Group 1, but Board 1 does not. If someone in Group 1 manages to get Board 2's link, they can still see it, but it will not show on index under Board 1 because Board 1 won't show. This means you can sort of make hidden boards. Sort of. User Avatars I'm going to be blunt; SMF 2.0's default handling of avatars is the dumbest thing I've ever seen in my life. In short, SMF uploads avatars as attachments, and then links it to a member ID instead of a topic or message ID. Then, it takes the image the user uploaded, encodes it with an image hash, and saves it in the filesystem as just a file. No extension, just a file with the image hash as its name. Only SMF 2.0's stupid avatar system can do anything with it, and people with more patience than I have. It then displays the avatar with an attachment download link instead of an image link. Now, I will say, if you really don't care about that (and it may deter hotlinking, I can't remember off-hand, hotlinking is one displaying the image with your link on a site that is not yours), you can leave it as-is and it'll work just fine. Alternatively, you can set a custom avatar location. Forum => Attachments and Avatars => Avatar Settings. Scroll all the way down, and find Upload avatars to… - change this to specific directory, and then type in a directory location, and what URL that would be accessed on. If it comes up red, you need to either create that directory in the filesystem, or, adjust the permissions so that it is writable. What this does, is, it makes SMF handle avatar images… like actual images. Ergo, it will rename the file avatar_memberidnumberhere_randomhashhere.whateverextension, and then move it to the directory you indicate it should, and not mess with it beyond that. So in your folder is an actual image. Yep, yep, much better, if you intend to do anything with avatars, such as display them somewhere they don't normally display, and don't want to play "let's decrypt image hashes!" I know I hate that game. Fortunately, while SMF 2.1 has the functionality for image hashing, it doesn't do it by default. Thank the stars for that. (Oh, 2.1 also has support for Gravatars!) Notice: I should never see someone pulling the entire $memberContext array for one thing, like avatars. It is not a good idea. There are many reasons why not, but we'll start at security concerns, because you're pulling all of your members' information right there, and end with that's a huge array loading and hitting your server's RAM/CPU every time you load it. Every single time. Arrays are resource hogs. Because they load a huge number of strings at once, the fewer strings you're pulling, the better. If you don't need an array that big, don't pull an array that big. If you need a thing somewhere and don't know how to get it there, ask me. I will gladly walk you through doing it. Gladly. Seriously. Forum Maintenance Alright, there are a few things in the Maintenance drop-down I want to look at really quick. First, let's get into Maintenance => Forum Maintenance => Routine. Here, we have some controllers for checking for file updates, finding and repairing errors, recounting totals and stats, and emptying logs and the file cache. What's all this? You can safely ignore the first one; this just checks the version of the source files that you have against the ones on SMF's official servers, and the thing here is that you're probably always going to have a few older files. That's just sort of the nature of SMF's updates. If the board works, oh well. Finding and repairing errors is a good idea to do occasionally, especially right after an account or thread clean-out. If you delete things, it breaks some database links between thing a and thing b, and it doesn't break anything on the board, not visibly, but it's still good practice to prevent the database from getting all weird, or storing data it doesn't need for members that don't exist anymore. Recounting the totals and stats will recount the board topics, replies, PMs, members, and so on, so if your board counts or stats get off, you can usually fix them with running this. Emptying the unimportant logs is really kind of obvious, as is emptying the file cache. The latter causes the board cache to be dropped; SMF will cache certain files, as well as member data and other Really Memory Intensive things. If you do something major to your member numbers or suchlike, it's not a bad idea to clear the file cache (ergo, if you go on a mass delete spree, your stuff's probably all off, clear cache and recount). From here, let's go into Forum Maintenance => Database. Here, we can optimise all our database tables (clears overhead and makes the table smaller, and run smoother), save a database backup, and convert HTML entities into UTF-8. This does what it sounds like; instead of the database storing &#945;, it will store instead α. This makes searching and sorting cleaner, and also reduces storage size in the database. Not a bad idea if you use a lot of fancy characters (and funny enough, it stores punctuation that way, because that's brilliant). Now let's go into Forum Maintenance => Members. This section has Reattribute User Posts, and what this does is it gives post ownership to a member, of guest posts made by a certain email address, or username. This is great for moving forum posts over manually, because you can name characters unique names, like nicknames, and then reattribute them, and boom, posted by them, even if that account doesn't belong to you. I've made use of this for exactly that purpose many times. You can also assign Simple Machines' introduction post to you instead of deleting it, so you can have topic ID 1. Finally, there's a remove inactive members option. This deletes all accounts that have not <insert thing they haven't done> in x days, in certain membergroups. Useful for mass inactivity purges. Root administrators (group ID #1) should be immune to these purges. Board and Moderator Logs Now, remember up there when we were doing the Core Features thingabob, and I said something about turning logs on? Well, if we've got them on, they log: administration actions; moderation actions; profile edits. You can see two of the three in the ACP, by going to Maintenance => Logs => Administration Log or Moderation Log. Administration logs will log key actions in the ACP by varying different members that have done it. These logs will display: adding, editing, and deleting boards and categories; adding, editing, and deleting member groups; pre-registering or deleting a member; installing and uninstalling package mods. It will also log IP address, so if, somehow, someone else gained access to your ACP that should not have access to it, you can see this person's IP address. But, quite frankly, if they have access to your ACP, the damage is done, you're screwed, sayonara. Now, we can also access profile edit logs! If you're super duper paranoid about it, and you have character biographies in profile, you can go to someone's profile, hover over Profile Info and click Track => Profile Edits. From here, you can see the changes to every profile field in the profile, what it was before, what it was after, when it was changed, and who by. Error Logs One more thing: your error logs. These are found in Maintenance => Logs => Error Logs. You can turn these off! Don't. These logs will pull any errors that a user generates, or that PHP or MySQL/MariaDB output that are important for you to know. Failed logins and ACP attempts are in here, as well as anything that's problematic, but not fatal. When something doesn't work, the first place to look is here. It'll give you an idea of what happened, what line it was, and if you click on the file name, it'll actually highlight the line it's talking about for you. Troubleshooting basic errors is kind of a fact of SMF life. Become one with the error logs. Be the error logs. Oooohmmmm... Joking aside, don't ignore errors in here just because you don't know how to fix them. Bring them to us. We fixes them. Modifications to Consider This is really kind of just a list-dump of modifications that I find myself, and many other SMF users, coming back to time and time again. Some could consider these something of a must-haves list for plugins, but really, it's all about what you're looking for and how you want your board to operate. Search around the SMF mod site a bit, you'll probably find something for what you want. If not, post on the board here, I might be able to do it. Listen, hey, hey listen, because I'm gonna say this once and never say it again anywhere else, listen: the Battle Suite started with a series of flat-file random generators that I said I couldn't do. Everyone else told me I couldn't make it, either. I have a very long track record of saying I can't, and then proving myself wrong. Even if it's the most harebrained, inane, off-the-wall idea you can think of, ask on the Initiative if it's possible, because it may very well be, and it may even be easy. If you can't find a mod for it, ask. I may know where one is, or be able to make one relatively easily, or be able to tell you how to do it yourself, depending on what it is. I will also say this: the general SMF community has a long track record of being really rude to its user-base, particularly role-players because they don't understand what role-playing is about and tend to be vicious toward that which they don't understand. They don't tend to be terribly helpful even in pointing people in the right direction if you've got no idea what you're doing, and I've had mod writers be unable to make alterations to their own mods before, too. So, even if you need help with a mod for SMF, I will help you. Please come to me and not them; they are not nice. BBCode With Style: Do you like doHTML? Yeah? This is the mod for you. BBCode With Style expands the base BBCode system to include div, span, and adds extra parameters to img, table, and td, so that you can more closely mimic HTML coding. This is the shizzie. I've, many, many times before, converted an HTML/CSS code into a BBCode with this mod. Bookmarks: So what this does is, it logs threads as bookmarks under a user account. It's useful, as a semi-automatic thread tracker, but unless you do expansions, they're just kinda there, and moot if you use the character mod (on subaccounts it can make a decent, basic list of threads a character's been in for you). Custom BBCode: Take the "What??" out of adding your own BBCodes. Yeah, you can use this to make like a YouTube BBCode no problem. You don't need all those stupid little mods that add in just that ONE BBCode, just add them all with this. It works in theory like Jcink's BBCode manager, but it's a bit more powerful. Custom Board Sort: This mod adds a selector in board creation and editing, where you can decide how threads are ordered in a board by default. Want it alphabetised by subject? You can do that. Menu Editor Lite: We all want to edit the navigation bar. The problem is, that navigation bar is actually kind of a pain to edit on your own. This handy mod creates a visual click and type and click affair of deleting, rearranging, editing, and adding, buttons on the main navigation menu. It doesn't recode it, sadly, it just helps you do what you want with it. SimpleColorizer: This is an easy, painless hook install that colours profile links no matter where they are or what they're named. If it links to a profile, it's coloured via member-group of the account it links to. Everywhere. I mean everywhere. SimplePortal or TinyPortal: Look, portals are frand. You can make your own custom landing splash page, or integrate it and easily add sidebar and top-bar blocks to your board, create custom pages (even PHP ones, which is how we do automatic lists on SMF, like set it and forget it face claim lists, it's fab). SimplePortal comes with a shoutbox, I don't remember off-hand if TinyPortal does, but that'll save you cbox costs. SimplePortal is the most aesthetically pleasing and interface-logical one, but TinyPortal works on 2.1. @mention Members: … this is really pretty explanatory, isn't it. Unfortunately, you'll have to mod in an alert system for it, or no one will ever see their @s. This may have changed. It may also operate on emails, I have no idea, gbh. (My server's on a dynamic IP and emails coming from it are automatically rejected before it even hits the spam folders, so I don't know if it does.) Users Online Today: Why this isn't a default feature, I don't know, but whatever. Drafts: Does what it sounds like! Allows users to save posts as drafts, and come back to them later. Order Custom Profile Fields: Drag, drop, rearrange your profile fields, into a sensible, logical order, for ease of creating profile apps/bios. ReCAPTCHA for SMF: Get it. Please. Just get it. SMF 2.0's anti-spam controls are out of date and don't work reliably anymore. reCAPTCHA requires a set of keys, but they're free to get. SMF Character Manager: You can find and download this here on the Initiative, written by me. This is an alternative to SlammedDime's SubAccount mod, more streamlined for RPG sites. Unlike SA, this mod is actively supported and will be updated in future. It's been rebranded to SMF Character Manager; 2.0 will be the last version that guaranteed works on SMF 2.0, and also the last fully featured free version. (There will still be a free version, you just won't have certain functionalities, like the status streams will be taken out of the free one.) Character Manager 2.0 comes with character journals and the ability to create auto claim lists out of any bio field in the system, no code necessary. Notable: SMFPacks Advanced Editor: Replaces the old, clunky, doesn't-even-work-anymore WYSIWYG that shipped with SMF 2.0 with SCEditor, which is grand. It is paid though. (Bet you had no idea SMF even HAD a WYSIWYG, huh. Yeah, it's okay, it took me about five years to find it.) On 2.1, SCEditor is built-in. ENotify: Ajax-powered push notifications for quite a few things, but last I checked it was a wee buggy. It's been updated since, it may be less so now. Member Awards: I actually have no idea if anyone has this on the internet anymore, I do have it though, if anyone wants it. Easy peasy member awards, many of which can be automatically awarded by the system. Things like post count and registration anniversaries can be auto. Notes About SMF 2.1: This goes against everything in me, but, I'm gonna be honest, if you're feeling brave, run 2.1, yes it's a beta but run it anyway. Why? Its core is far more robust than 2.0's, Curve2, 2.1's default theme, is mobile responsive out of the box, it has alerts built in, @mentioning, post likes, SCEditor, drafts and autosave of drafts (and both bloody work), reCAPTCHA is built in, a lot of little things in the admin-side controls are improved on, it's just better. It also supports IPv6, and runs on PHP 7.2, and … I'm gonna be straight with you. PHP 5.6 is about end-of-life. This means running PHP 5.6 on your server will become a stupid idea because PHP will not be releasing security patches. Eventually, potentially quite quickly, PHP 5.6 will become full of security holes, and make your server vulnerable. Likewise, PHP 7.1, the last version SMF 2.0 runs on cleanly, will reach end-of-life in another year and some change. With the progress pace that the SMF development team have been making with 2.1, it's not releasing anytime soon. Start using it. Get accustomed to it. Because it is SMF 2.x's future whether they release it into RC tomorrow or in another year. The only problem I've had on SMF 2.1 is guest-posting does not activate verification, the setting for that is messed up, so you'll need either a log in for ads, to set a min-post count for verification to trigger, or just to forego ads entirely, and there are some theme quirks (sometimes, installing through package does not work, you have to upload it into a folder in /Themes manually and install through a folder in the directory in ACP, and the board avatar on index feature in themes does not work out of the box). I'm here. Okay? I'm here, ask me for help, I will help you, for the love of all that's good in the world, get your server off PHP 5, run PHP 7, and you'll love SMF 2.1, I promise, give it a go. I have reached the stage where 2.1 has seriously made me hate 2.0. I hate working with 2.0 now. I really do. After ten years of 2.0 I am so ready for 2.1. Hopefully, I didn't scare anyone. Haha! As I said, SMF can be greatly rewarding if you learn to speak its language, and 2.1 is a respectable improvement on 2.0, at least, it's not like "Why did they even bother because nothing is better," it's just not quite the giant leap forward that many were expecting it to be, considering how long it's been in development. All of SMF's development team are volunteers, and make sure to take their time and get it right. You know what they say, "Cheap, fast, good: you can have cheap and fast, but it won't be good; you can have fast and good, but it won't be cheap; you can have good and cheap, but it won't be fast." SMF is like the embodiment of that. If it makes anyone feel better, they are still actively making updates and changes to 2.1 Beta 4, I've been watching it on GitHub. It is happening. I've also heard rumour that 2.1 Beta 4 may end up the RC version, and we're finally at the point we're talking RC at all. Anyway! I do have a long, long list of focused guides and tutorials specific to SMF that I will be posting, so stay tuned for more SMF guide stuff. Till next time! (Are y'all getting tired of me yet?)

Resources used: https://www.tablesgenerator.com/html_tables# https://www.w3schools.com/cssref/default.asp https://fonts.google.com

So with IPS the default avatar is small to say the least but it also must be square, which doesn't leave room for that awesome profile style that many a roleplayer loves. It is still possible but it takes a little extra work. Please note, that by doing this you must manually add each of your Profile field items to your authorPane otherwise this image will show twice. First off, you need to create a Profile Field in Members > Member Settings > Profile For me I just named it "Big Avatar" and used the following settings: The group does matter so if you intend to separate it out I recommend to do it now. But I chose not to show it on the profile, no real point to do that, but to show it in posts with the following code. This code will grab the file and add all necessary upload options to it. <img src='{file="$content" extension="members"}' /> Next we need to edit your Post template. To do that go to Themes > Themes > Click on the < / > icon next to your theme. I certainly recommend this be a test theme to start. In this first list you'll need to find postContainer. It is forums > front > topics > postContainer Here you need to find this: {template="customFieldsDisplay" group="global" app="core" params="$comment->author()"} Remove it. This removes the duplicate field bit. Next you need to find this: {template="userPhoto" app="core" group="global" params="$comment->author(), 'large', $comment->warningRef()"} And replace with this. But there will be something you will have to replace with your own variables and I'll show you how after this section: {{if $comment->author()->contentProfileFields()[core_pfieldgroups_2][core_pfield_2] != ''}} {$comment->author()->contentProfileFields()[core_pfieldgroups_2][core_pfield_2]|raw} {{else}} {template="userPhoto" app="core" group="global" params="$comment->author(), 'large', $comment->warningRef()"} {{endif}} This is the bit you need to focus on: [core_pfieldgroups_2][core_pfield_2] This first part [core_pfieldgroups_2] is the profile field group or category. The latter part [core_pfield_2] is the profile field itself. So the easiest way to find this is to go to your Members > Member Settings > Profile and look at the URL when trying to edit these: If that doesn't work go to the URL and copy and paste it into an editor or use your handy dandy inspect tool for each. Once you've done that I recommend one last bit, since not all users know how to resize images. It's always best to add a little bit of preventive CSS to your custom.css: .cAuthorPane_photo img { max-width: 250px; max-height: 400px; } This will guarantee that the avatar isn't over the size of 250px width and 400px height. There is plenty more to expanding the author pane but this will at least give you a little direction and possible help you create an awesome custom mini profile for your OOC accounts.

One of the things I find useful as both a staffer and a member is having a list of all my subscribed topics displayed on every page. This means I get an update on every thread whenever I log in and it means that I don’t need to manually keep a list updated. In jcink, we can do this with load(). This is exactly as it implies, it lets you load information from another webpage. To mitigate server load (and prevent your site from getting in trouble for resource usage), we bind load to a button. This means that your user needs to click on the button to see their subbed threads. Since this button only needs to be used by members, I hide it from guests to prevent curious visitors from making pointless requests of the server. I presume you know how to hide something based on usergroup, so I’ll focus on the code for the Auto Thread Tracker. Put the following HTML where you want it. <a href="#threads" id="button-tracker">Thread Tracker</a> <div id="threads"> <div id="thread-container"> </div> </div> Put the following script just before the closing </body> in your board wrapper. <script> $(document).ready(function(){ $("#button-tracker").click(function(){ // first we prevent the page jump that happens when you have a hashtag in your link event.preventDefault(); // now we load the good stuff $("#thread-container").load("https://kit89.jcink.net/index.php?act=UserCP&CODE=26 .tableborder > table > tbody > tr:not(:first-of-type)"); }); }); </script> Use CSS to hide the bits that you don’t want! For example: div#thread-container tr:first-child, div#thread-container tr:last-child, div#thread-container tr td:first-child, div#thread-container tr td:nth-child(3), div#thread-container tr td:nth-child(4), div#thread-container tr td:nth-child(6) { display: none } Will produce: This is how it looks on my site! I hope that this is for useful for someone! I find it very helpful for staying on top of my threads.

GDPR! A big and scary thing that has been circling and came to pass May 25th. It sounds a lot scarier than it is because of all the fines and scary talk about it and just because you are on a free host doesn't shield you from having to comply to it. This technically only applies to users in the EU however, there has already been chatter about bringing something similar to the US so it's better to be prepared then not (plus who wouldn't want to make a GDPR cake and eat it too?). So what is GDPR? It is called the "General Data Protection Regulations" and you can find out more about it here. What it does, basically, is puts in place requirements in order for users to have their privacy protected from sites that hold it. It gives users more rights in what could/should be held by an internet company, right down to the cookies. So what does that mean? Lets continue: What are the rights that GDPR provides? The right to be informed - This means that when you place a cookie on a users computer then you need to tell them that you are, including what the cookies are for. For example, when you visit the Initiative (while logged out) you will get this nifty bar: This bar links to all of the important things including our Privacy Policy (which is the important one here). When you go to this page you can see that we do set cookies on your computer but nothing that we set can identify you with. However, if you want to know exactly what we set you can visit our cookies page. With these two things you are compliant with the right to be informed. For free hosts, like Jcink, that should be setup by Jcink however if it's not we are happy to help you figure out a good way to do this. For this one, it includes things can't be auto checked (like Terms of Service or email signups on the registration page). The right to data portability - What this is, is the ability to take your information from the Initiative and take it to another site. This doesn't include posts or submitted content. Just your personal private data. The way it's explained is that it must be in a format that is importable elsewhere (like an XML file) and this is less likely to apply to roleplay users. The example that the site uses is someone getting their patient records from one doctor's office and being able to transfer it to another doctor's office. Since roleplays, in general, are not the same across the board this will only apply to their IP addresses and user account data (email, display name etc). For here at the Initiative we do allow you to request your personal information. You can do that in the Staff's Eyes Only and we provide the following: The last one and the big one for roleplays is: The right to be forgotten - This one has caused a lot of controversy because there is a debate about "what can and cannot" identify a person. The direct link here explains what GDPR believes is personal data (however these are the examples, not every possibility. I like to use myself as the example since the direct information on this is that to be "fully" removed no one can know who you are, literally fully forgotten. If someone can put it together and find the person then it is considered personal and should be removed. So, for me, if anyone can figure out my username from my posts then it means that I'm not forgotten. This can also be applied to unique character names and profiles, for example. The safest bet, even though it may ruin some stories, is to not only delete the accounts/profiles but the posts. Only do this for a GDPR specific request, as not every request for deletion will be for GDPR reasons. Another important thing to note is that when you delete a user on a site like "Jcink" it just changes the username to Guest_Username you will need to fully remove the _Username part to make it fully compliant. So the wrap up on GDPR! It's not as scary as people think but it is important to make sure that you comply with it to make sure that something bad doesn't happen because of some vindictive member. Terms of Services do not protect you from this, just because it says everything you post is forever yours doesn't mean its forever yours if it conflicts with the above. We are working on software specific guides to help you with compliance (like how to remove the auto-check for "receive emails" in MyBB. We are also looking into suggested plugins to install so that you have less to worry about as the plugin should do all or most of the work. If you have questions or concerns about GDPR, feel free to reply here and the staff will do what they can to assist. We are not lawyers so if you're super worried about it then we recommend talking to an actual lawyer.

So over the years the debate always is, should I do a dark or light theme. Some manage to think that a more medium theme is a good compromise although it isn't. High contrast themes offered in both dark and light options is optimal for not only user retention but also for getting new users in the door. In the 80s there was a study done about reading on a white background with black text and a black background with white text. The tests were overwhelmingly positive for the matter of white with black text is easier to read because of your eye dilation and it makes text clearer. Everyone seems to think that is still the same thing in this day and age. A Dark background doesn't mean "less light" with our technology as it did back in the 80s. Now, with LCDs and LEDs dark backgrounds are just as bright to the eyes as a light or white background. This also doesn't take into account degenerative eye diseases that overstimulated eyes can also be adversely affected by one version or another. With that said, it's a good move to offer not only a light version of your site (if that's your preferred) and a dark version of your site or vice versa. This gives your users the option of what feels most comfortable to them and provides them with a reason to view the site regularly without that annoying thought in the back of their head of "ugh I hate looking at this site it's too bright/dark". Of course the question is, well what if I can't make an opposite version of a theme? I don't know code! You can either request help to convert a theme from one to the other or find two themes that compliment one another that you feel will satisfy your need for an alternate theme.

As you'll note, with the character mod, everything is squished in the left column. Not particularly ideal for things that are long, like histories. So this guide is to help explain how to move it into a custom tab. For most of this you will need custom fields setup. So my personal preference, to start, is that you choose "post" and "profile separately. This way you can make a super simple adjustment and have your post related content in the left and your profile related content in it's own tab. To do this make sure you only pick one or the other in the custom field area. Then you are going to edit the profile. The template is: character > front > character > profile The first thing to find is this: {{$fields = $character->customFieldsForDisplay( 'profile' );}} Copy from that until the end of the "endif" and paste it into a notepad, you'll need it in a few. Next, change the word "profile" to "topic". You can go ahead and save and if you go and look at your character template you will see that anything that you said you wanted to show in the mini-profile is now there. Next we want to put the actual profile fields into a tab. You'll need to find this in the same template: <li> <a href="#" id="elCharacterRecentPosts" class="ipsTabs_item ipsType_center ipsTabs_activeItem" role="tab" aria-selected="true">{lang="character_recent_posts"}</a> </li> Honestly, the easiest thing to do is simply copy and paste it so their are two and then we will make alterations. First we need to change the ID so it's unique. Something like elCharacterProfile will work perfectly. Also, Change {lang="character_recent_posts"} to the word that you want this tab to be "Profile" in our case. Next you need to edit the tab that is really for the Posts. You need to remove ipsTabs_activeItem and change aria-selected="true" to aria-selected="false". This will make your new profile tab the active tab instead of Recent Posts. Last thing we need to do is actually put the content into a tab. Search and copy this part (I choose to copy this one as it's simpler to explain for our needs) for this: <div id="ipsTabs_elCharacterTabs_elCharacterOther_panel" class="ipsTabs_panel ipsAreaBackground_reset ipsPad" aria-hidden="false"> <h2 class="ipsType_sectionHead ipsSpacer_top">{lang="character_others_title"}</h2> {$table|raw} </div> Next find this: <div id="elCharacterTabs_content" class="ipsTabs_panels"> Directly below it paste what you just copied. Now we're going to replace a few things to make this work. First find the id, in this case it's "ipsTabs_elCharacterTabs_elCharacterOther_panel" we need to make it match our previously made id. So where it says: elCharacterOther we need to make this elCharacterProfile so it will end up saying "ipsTabs_elCharacterTabs_elCharacterProfile_panel" instead. You can either remove or rename the header. To remove just delete the enter h2 tag. To rename change {lang="character_others_title"} to whatever you would like at the top of your profile. Last thing to do is to replace: {$table|raw} With the code you had copied in the first step (that should be in your notepad): {{$fields = $character->customFieldsForDisplay( 'profile' );}} {{if count( $fields )}} <div class='ipsWidget ipsWidget_vertical cProfileSidebarBlock ipsBox ipsSpacer_bottom'> <h2 class='ipsWidget_title ipsType_reset'>{lang="character_custom_fields"}</h2> <div class='ipsWidget_inner ipsPad'> <ul class='ipsDataList ipsDataList_reducedSpacing cProfileFields'> {{foreach $fields as $field}} {{if !empty( $field['value'] )}} <li class='ipsDataItem ipsType_break'> <span class='ipsDataItem_generic ipsDataItem_size3 ipsType_break'><strong>{$field['title']}</strong></span> <div class='ipsDataItem_generic'><div class='ipsType_break ipsContained'>{$field['value']|raw}</div></div> </li> {{endif}} {{endforeach}} </ul> </div> </div> {{endif}} Click Save and go view your profile. It should now have a tab with all of the profile fields displayed. Enjoy!

There are a few things that I've seen people do, which undermines their attempt at promoting their site. This quick and dirty guide will (hopefully!) prevent you from shooting yourself in the foot. Don't change the colour of text. Changing the colour of your advertising text can make your ad illegible. Some sites have two versions of the same theme, one dark, one light. If you're looking at the dark theme and change the colour of the text to something bright, you're ensuring that your ad can not be read by anyone using the light version. In addition, you simply can not guarantee that the colour you selected will be legible in the future. This is particularly pertinent to roleplay directories and your signature on them. Do yourself a favour, just leave the text colour alone. Text size. Be mindful of user experience when selecting your text size. Obnoxiously large text in your signature is not eye catching, it's annoying. It's also a good way to ensure that people either turn off signatures when browsing a site, or turn off your signature. You additionally don't want to make your text smaller than the default. First off, if the font size changes it can make the font even smaller and secondly if people can't read it they won't read it. Doesn't matter how large your text is, if everyone's elected to just hide it. Image size. In megabytes, not pixels. If your image contains several megabytes worth of data, you're ensuring that those with slower internet will not see it because chances are, they're not waiting for it to load. It's awfully nice to have a high quality image, but it's no good if it takes an age to load. Decrease the quality a little. Condense the image a bit. Animations. Be wary of flashing animations. Just like text size, if your gif is obnoxiously distracting, it'll be blocked or the user's having bright lights inflicted on them will develop a grudge against your site. Be classy about it! That's it! The quick and dirty guide to formatting in your ads.

THE MOUSIE GUIDE TO Writing a Quick-Start Guide How do you help potential new members navigate your site when you (and your staff) are not around? Perhaps your site has an unusual application process, lots of information available, or perhaps new members just seem to get inexplicably lost as they find their way around for the first time. The answer: A quick-start guide! WHAT IS IT? A Quick-Start guide is essentially an index, or a pathway, of everything new members need to know in order to set themselves up to play. It's usually a short document that ties together any topic prospective members need to read, and actions they need to take, to get OOC accounts sorted (if applicable) and character accounts applied. It may also go further and provide the member with tasks they can do after approval, to avoid that "I'm a member, now what do I do?" moment. So how do you write one? Let's start from the start. STEP ONE Make a list! Start by listing all of the actions a member needs to complete from registering their first account, to applying their first character. Include any topics that they should read along the way (or topics/forums that would be super helpful). Your list may look a little something like: Read the rules Read the plot Register an OOC account Get your OOC account sorted Read what character types we have Have a look at wanted ads/needed characters Register character account Fill out the profile Post the application Link your subaccounts Look at open threads Start an open thread Create a plotting thread Join the Discord This is a very basic list that might be used for a board that has both player and character accounts. You can see how it creates a logical pathway from reading those first important documentations, to getting involved, all in the rough order you would expect it to happen. STEP TWO Divide it up! Take a look at your list and see if you can start to spot sections. You might have "Getting your OOC Account", "Character Development & Registration" and "Once You're Sorted". Think about the stages that members are in as they work through this list, and then add them in as headings. GETTING YOUR OOC ACCOUNT Read the rules Read the plot Register an OOC account Get your OOC account sorted CHARACTER DEVELOPMENT & REGISTRATION Read what character types we have Have a look at wanted ads/needed characters Register character account Fill out the profile Post the application ONCE YOU'RE SORTED Link your subaccounts Look at open threads Start an open thread Create a plotting thread Join the Discord What these sub-headings do is help prospective members see where they are at a glance, rather than having a huge list of tasks to read down. It also breaks up the list a bit and makes it easier to follow. Sub-headings are great! Use them wherever you can. STEP THREE Write it up! Using these bullet points, write a very short introduction to the link, and then post the link to where the prospective member needs to go. Don't fall into the trap of putting too much information in your Quick-Start guide, let the posts you link to do the heavy lifting. This is just an index, so try to keep your points to a sentence---two at most. Remember, you can also use a direct link to the registration page, and also to the user settings (for custom-field based applications). You want this to be short, sweet, and direct focus to the links---and make sure that your links stand out as links! If your CSS has link colour very similar to the text colour, you may want to look into changing that, or using a bit of styling in the post to make sure people know it's a link. Below I've used bold text and red to note the links (they aren't links in the example, however). GETTING YOUR OOC ACCOUNT Check out our Rules Check out our Plot Register an OOC account using the name you'd like us to know you by Post in Introductions to get your OOC account sorted. Welcome! CHARACTER DEVELOPMENT & REGISTRATION See what character types we accept Need inspiration? Have a look at our Adoptables forum for ideas! Want more information about our setting? This forum has additional setting information. Fill out the profile. You may want to keep it in a word processor while you work on it! Post the profile in our applications forum. Hold tight! Our staff will review your application within 24hrs. ONCE YOU'RE SORTED Link your OOC and IC accounts -- this guide shows you how! Check out the list of open threads! Start an open thread of your own and post it to the list! Create a plotting thread to introduce your character to the community Join our Discord for more chatting and crazy plot ideas! You can see where I've re-worded some parts to more casual phrasing. "Read X, then read Y" can be abrupt, and destroy the tone of your documentation... but it's essentially what you're saying. I also added a couple of points, because... it doesn't matter how good your initial list is, you'll always think of something more while you're re-writing! STEP FOUR Style it up! You're basically done, but this is where you would add in your own header styles and other things that make it really fit in with the board visually. SO THERE IT IS Your awesome Quick-Start guide! Congratulations! I'd love to see what amazing guides this documentation helps to create!

DON'T PANIC Let's face it. Running a roleplay is hard. Getting a new RP off the floor, whether it's your first, fifth, or forty-fifth is always going to be a struggle. The only difference is the matter of experience you have, and how you react to the bumps along the way. This documentation is here to reassure you of the reality of running a roleplay, and hopefully - to help you not give up when the going gets tough! THE TRUTH ABOUT ACTIVITY & MEMBERS There's a great misconception that more activity equals more success. It's just not true. A successful board is measured by the fun members are having, not by any number of members, posts or threads you have. My board is a week old, and so far we only have ten members. It must be failing. No, it's not. Relax. Boards take some time to get off the ground, it takes much longer than a week for you to get the word out. Many boards take three to four months to establish a normal routine. Don't be put off by that - just keep trucking. The trick is to keep playing yourself, find some members you can thread with and enjoy yourself. Guests are more likely to join boards where it looks like people are already having fun. So get in there, and make some awesome! I've posted adverts everywhere and still I'm getting no members. It must be my skin. Have a look around at other successful boards. While people are largely attracted to boards that are pretty, the majority of highly successful websites are actually not all that flashy. People will join sites that appeal to them, regardless of looks. It is always worth considering readability and load times - but it's nothing to be obsessed over. If you're truly worried about how your board looks, ask for a proper analysis before you give up. You might find out some interesting facts on how others see your forum. If I change x, that will be sure to get people here and posting more often! If there's one golden rule about administration, it's that you do not change anything you're not comfortable with changing. It's perfectly fine to grow your board, and incorporate features that members will like and appreciate, but be careful of how far you go to pander to your members. If you don't like it, don't do it - there will be people out there who appreciate the way you wish to run your board, and those are the members that will best see the visions you have for your roleplay. The minute you start creating a board that you don't believe in, the fun is sucked out - and it becomes a chore. Always keep your board true to your own visions, it's yours for a reason. My genre is too narrow - I can't advertise anywhere and my board is doomed to fail! False. General rule of the internet states that if you've thought of it, someone else wants it. If your genre/idea is so unique that it's hard to find a market for it - then it is your duty to shove your board under as many noses as possible until it gains the fanbase it deserves. Unique isn't a disability, it's an opportunity. If you believe in it, stick with it until you are genuinely bored with the idea. Don't give up because you think no one else is interested. I have advertised everywhere and still no members. This is the end. Only if you say it is. When someone says they've advertised everywhere, that's a big call. The internet is a big place, and (though it came as a shock to me) there's more than just RPG Initiative out there. It's incredibly important these days to be listed with search engines, find absolutely any directory you can, frequent the forums of your hosting provider, your software provider, get your friends, advertise on guest friendly forums of all softwares, use plugboards, yahoo groups, livejournal, heck -- make business cards and drop them in random places. If you believe, then believe it's not over. People suddenly stopped posting. I guess that's it, right? Not at all. Real life gets in the way frequently, and as anyone who has run a forum for more than a year or so will tell you, inactive periods come and go. Be conscious of exams and holidays across the world, know your audience and expect things to drag during those times. Keep in contact with your members via bulk email, let them know you're still out there and active, if it remains quiet - change things up a bit. A new skin, a new plot line, generate new interest in the board. Never take an inactive spell as a reason to close, unless (and here's the key line) you want it to. THE TRUTH ABOUT YOUR ROLEPLAY As admins, we're overly conscious about how our roleplay presents to guests and members. If there's any big message that this documentation should give, it's that what you want and what you're comfortable with is perfectly okay - but just in case you wanted it all in dot points... I should have created my roleplay on Jcink/other popular host. Then it would be popular. Hush your mouth. Jcink, while it is a fine and respectable host, is not the be all and end all of roleplay. Being on Jcink doesn't automatically make your roleplay more appealing. Like any other "physical" aspect, it is something that members can and will adjust to if they're truly interested in your game. If you're more comfortable with Proboards, stick with Proboards. If you're curious about phpBB3, SMF or anything else -- go with it! There are tonnes of successful roleplays out there on all softwares, you're guaranteed not to be alone. Never make the mistake of taking your possible membership too much into account. Too many administrators find themselves in situations they don't like that way, and at the end of the day -- members only need to be able to post to play. For all forum softwares, posting is a pretty straightforward business. So go with whatever you like. I didn't hire enough staff when I opened. That's why my board is failing. Staffing is a funny thing in boards. There seems to be a misconception that a full team is needed before a board can open is completely false. Some boards open very successfully with just one, or two staffers present. If you don't have a lot of time on your hands but are dedicated to your idea, definitely - go and find some trusted friends to help out. But a board that is crying for staff will undoubtedly be a busy one, and the best thing about busy boards is that they have a whole lot of potential staff members. Employment topics are great, but ultimately - take from your dedicated members. They're the best and most likely to stick around. I'm the administrator. I'm not allowed to relax with my members. Baha! Get over yourself. Seriously. Administrators and moderators are there to have fun just as much as the members are. Ice Administration died out in 2006 (I hope) and it's pretty well known now that a friendly atmosphere and open staff is the best way to help your members feel comfortable on the board. Get in there, and tear it up with the kids. That's why you made the place, right? To have fun? So go ahead and DO it! I'm not good at graphics and I can't skin. My board is doomed. Still with the obsessing over appearance? The best thing about the roleplay world right now is that you don't need to be good at any of that. With the amount of skins available, and the talented graphics artists around... all you need is an idea. Exercise your creativity, write to your hearts content and find the pretty that you need here. You don't need to make all of it. It certainly doesn't doom your board. THE TRUTH ABOUT THE WAY YOU PLAY It's almost sad how roleplay has become so standardised these days, with most boards doing it much the same way. Makes it pretty hard to feel comfortable with the way you choose to run your board. At the end of the day, how you want to play is perfectly fine - and you will find other people who feel the same way. I don't like play-bys. I think that's why no one's joining. If you don't like play-bys, there will be members out there who don't like, or aren't bothered by not having play-bys. Trust in the way you prefer to do things, and as I said above - don't let what you think people want sway you from what you feel comfortable with. I went with account per player, should I have gone per character? Only if that's what you wanted to do. Same as above. A lot of people prefer to be on account per player for one reason or another, and as always - people will adapt if they're interested enough in the concept your pushing. Just keep pushing it, raise awareness of the way you play here on RPG-D, educate people. There's no right or wrong way to play, so help other people understand the way you do things. You never know, they might just be curious enough to try it. I've been out of the game too long. I'm too oldschool. No one will be interested in anything I have to advertise. Pshaw. Retro is a fad. And just like 3D divs and full image maintitles - it's coming back. It's like with anything in roleplay, there are always people looking for their specific 'preferred' way to play. Some of us are oldschool, and some of us prefer the more modern style with all the new-fangled gadgets. Some of us like a mix of both. If you think something is great, make it your goal to bring it back! I like wordcounts. Is that bad? Is that why no one is joining? You have the right to stipulate any wordcount you like. This is one of those cases where I will advise that you be aware of what's realistic to expect people to type every single time, and that you be aware of how you plan on dealing with members who don't meet your requirements - but it has never been said that wordcounts are wrong. Some people thrive with them, some people struggle. Some people struggle without them. Just be careful when you start combining your 500+ wordcount with the title 'advanced', as quantity and quality are two separate things. THE TRUTH ABOUT GIVING UP So when is a board dead? When should you just cut your losses and let it go? It's a question we all face, and if you haven't come across it yet - then you're yet to pass the last test in becoming a fully qualified administrator. It's that moment where everything seems hopeless that most people turn back, close their boards and find greener pastures. But there's hope. We had a good run, but when it's over - it's over. It's not over until you say it's over. If you've had a good run, you can continue having a good run - so long as you stick with what you've created. So long as you keep that interest in it personally, it will remain interesting to other people. Yes, it's going to be hard to keep pushing something when it's dragging, when no one seems to be joining and when your board - for all intents and purposes - looks dead as a doornail. But you can bring it back, with the right amount of love and dedication. It's only over when you give up, and that's the truth. There are too many other boards of this type. We can't possibly win. Yes. You can. Writing as an administrator who opened a forum in a highly popular fandom, with a twist that gave it a lot of competition - both canon and non canon - I can tell you all about that dilemma. In my time, I've seen five or six Australian magical schools - but what is the one that everyone knows? It's mine. Why? Because I refused to be intimidated by other people's boards, and continued to push my board as something that other people would want to be a part of. You can be a success in any genre you choose, with two highly important factors. One is the drive to push when it gets hard, and the other is a love and belief in the type of roleplay you run. While some genres might be easier to dominate, if the love's not there - it's pointless. I don't have what it takes to be an admin. I'm too... Whatever you are, you have it. There are all types of admins out there. Some are relaxed and laid back, some are in control of absolutely everything - and all can run successful boards. The only trick is to not let anything get in the way of the fun. If you're not having fun, then you're doing it wrong. So relax, and let your own personal style shine through - people will respect you for it more, than if you try to pretend to be someone else for the sake of how you think an admin should behave. It's not fun anymore. This is the end. Now you're getting it! If it's not fun, if you've stopped believing, that's when it's dead. Sometimes it happens, sometimes the ideas we initially love aren't as good as we thought, sometimes things just change. Never let go if you still believe, but if you don't - it's time to move on. Never dump an active board, though - always have the consideration to leave it in the hands of someone who can look after your members. Just because you've lost interest doesn't mean your members haven't. But you don't have to chain yourself to a board you don't enjoy. Relax. Set yourself free, you can always come back later. I hope this has helped someone, every day we see more and more administrators drop promising boards for small and saddening reasons. The moral of the story, and repeated several times throughout is that there's always hope for admins who believe in the roleplays they create. It's only when you don't want to be involved anymore that your roleplay truly dies for you. So have hope, and keep on with it! There's nothing as rewarding as running a roleplay that people love, except perhaps having children. I hear that's pretty awesome. And Nandos. Until next time, keep writing!

Hello and welcome to the Initiative! We are here to help you RP! From talking about roleplay to advertising your site to helping you find the right Faceclaim/Playby for your character, guides and more! We are here to help and we know that a new site with new people can get overwhelming so we're happy to show you around. To start off your journey we'd like to make sure that you're comfortable with our layout! We offer both a dark and light layout. You can choose which version you like by doing the following: Look in the top right (near your username is) Click the the image that looks like this The site will reload to the light theme! Click it again to switch back. The other thing you can change is the forum (general site) layout from the grid format to a traditional list view. To do this go to the main forum page. At the top next to the "Start a new topic" button there are three buttons: - this button will switch the layout to the traditional forum list. - this button is default and will provide you with the grid layout. - thus button is the fluid view. This means that all topics will be listed, rather than you having to visit each forum. You can filter what forum topics you see by clicking on the relevant forums on the right hand side. Click on the forums you want to see! Now lets complete the profile! You can also follow this awesome tutorial it explains how to complete your profile. All settled? Now lets get you integrated into the community! We recommend taking a few moments and introduce yourself. Not sure what to say? That's okay! We offer up some questions for you to fill out in case you are stumped! Now you will have welcomes from members around the site! Want to join our discord community? The easiest way for you to do this is through the Discord integration. To do this: Go to your account settings. Click on discord account. Click on link your discord account. Approve everything and you're good to go! Not comfortable with linking your account to your discord? No worries! Click on the discord icon in the footer. Go the name change channel and post there with a link to your account. Wait for a staff member to change your role, granting you the ability to post in the other channels. It's a lot easier on all if you use the discord integration tool. This link does not give us or anyone else any extra information about your account, any additional access to your discord account, or any additional control over your discord account. Nor are you revoking any control or privacy that you would normally have. Next up, do you want to give us some of your insight or maybe you'd rather just confess some awesome roleplay stuff with us? Head on over to the Chat & Discussion or the RPG Confessions and tell us! Are you here to add your site to the directory? Awesome! Once you have posted around the site and earned 10 content items (this includes gallery images, guides, playbys/faceclaims, posting in the wanted section and more!) you are able to go post in our intuitive directory. In here you will be able to choose how people can find your site with the ease of filters. The filters themselves help other members find sites that they may never have considered in the past as being part of what they were looking for! It helps give all sites a lot more exposure as we don't hide the sites behind categories! We hope this helped you and that you are feeling confident about being a part of this site! We love that you're here! If you're looking how to change other site specific items, like notifications, then check out our other "Initiative Guides" here. If you have other questions feel free to ask in the Ask Us forum or Staff Contact Center we'll be happy to help you!

One of the things that can prevent people from joining your site is the level of contrast that is between the text and the background. Low contrast sites are unintelligible for some and difficult to use for others. There is no reason not to have good contrast on your site, surely you want people to be able to read the text? Thankfully, you don’t need to make any guesses as to whether or not your site has enough contrast! Accessible Colors is a useful tool that provides a contrast checker that will tell you whether or not the colour combination has sufficient contrast. When using the website, be sure to input the foreground (text) colour, the background colour and the font size. Larger text needs less contrast to be legible! Accessible Colors will analyse the colours and font size chosen to ensure that it meets W3C's web accessibility guidelines. W3C develops guidelines with an aim to remove barriers that creep into web designs. Depending on what software you use for your roleplay site (and your own know how), it can be difficult to fully meet their guidelines. Ensuring good contrast is however, an easy guideline to meet and will help to ensure that as many people as possible are able to use your site.

For this guide I'm not going to go super in depth into the how-to to get like our special gears per user group however we will explain the minimum of how to add in a group ID so that you can start to make custom items in your author pane. This won't be super in depth on how to do extra things but they are possible. This does require theme edits to accomplish: So first things first go to edit your theme, I always recommend to edit a test theme to be sure you don't break anything while users are using it. To do this go to Themes > Themes > Click the < / > icon to the right of the theme in question. You'll need to find the postContainer template. It's in forums > front > topics > postContainer In this template you need to find this line: <article {{if $comment->author()->hasHighlightedReplies()}}data-memberGroup="{$comment->author()->member_group_id}" {{endif}} id='elComment_{$comment->$idField}' class='cPost ipsBox {{if $otherClasses}}{$otherClasses}{{endif}} ipsComment {{if ( settings.reputation_enabled and settings.reputation_highlight and $comment->reactionCount() >= settings.reputation_highlight ) OR $comment->isFeatured()}}ipsComment_popular{{endif}} ipsComment_parent ipsClearfix ipsClear ipsColumns ipsColumns_noSpacing ipsColumns_collapsePhone {{if $comment->author()->hasHighlightedReplies()}}ipsComment_highlighted{{endif}} {{if $comment->isIgnored()}}ipsHide{{endif}} {{if $comment->hidden() OR $item->hidden() === -2}}ipsModerated{{endif}}'> And replace it with this: <article {{if $comment->author()->hasHighlightedReplies()}}data-memberGroup="{$comment->author()->member_group_id}" {{endif}} id='elComment_{$comment->$idField}' class='cPost ipsBox group_{$comment->author()->member_group_id} {{if $otherClasses}}{$otherClasses}{{endif}} ipsComment {{if ( settings.reputation_enabled and settings.reputation_highlight and $comment->reactionCount() >= settings.reputation_highlight ) OR $comment->isFeatured()}}ipsComment_popular{{endif}} ipsComment_parent ipsClearfix ipsClear ipsColumns ipsColumns_noSpacing ipsColumns_collapsePhone {{if $comment->author()->hasHighlightedReplies()}}ipsComment_highlighted{{endif}}{{if $comment->isIgnored()}}ipsHide{{endif}} {{if $comment->hidden() OR $item->hidden() === -2}}ipsModerated{{endif}}'> Note, that the only thing I actually added was this: group_{$comment->author()->member_group_id} What this provides to you is a styling class that identifies the group in question. You can find group IDs in the Members > Groups page by either hovering over the group, editing the group and copying the URL into a text editor or by using your handy dandy inspect element tool. From here make changes to elements to your hearts content. As a quick and added bonus. The way that the Initiative accomplishes it's borders is by adding a class to it's our bit for the avatar. Find this: <li class='cAuthorPane_photo'> Change to this: <li class='cAuthorPane_photo group_{$comment->author()->member_group_id}'> And using CSS like this: .cAuthorPane { width: 300px; } .cAuthorPane_photo { width: 265px; height: 265px; display: flex; align-items: center; justify-content:center; background-size: cover; } .cAuthorPane_photo.group_4 { background: url({resource="new_av_bg.png" app="core" location="front"}) center center no-repeat; background-size: cover; } Please note that the authorPane changes do require other moderate changes to make them both responsive and to not overlap your post.

First, set up the custom profile fields. My set up is this: Field Name: Rotating Avatar One Key: rotate1 Description: Want a rotating avatar? Upload your first image here! Leave blank and use the edit character option to upload your single avatar. You must upload an image here for it to work. Recommended image size is 300px by 300px Field Type: Upload Required: No Show on Character Profile: No Show on Character Posts: No Rinse and repeat, subsequent descriptions are the following: "Your second rotating image. Recommended image size is 300px by 300px." Make sure you change the key, so rotate1, rotate2, rotate3 etc Now the code Go to themes and click on the button with </> in it. In the Templates tab, go to characters > character > authorpane Put the following anywhere {{if $character->fields('rotate1')}} <!-- ZERO --> {{$zero = \IPS\File::get( 'core_theme', $character->avatar)->url;}} <!-- BUILD Array --> <!-- ALL THE IMAGES --> <!-- IMAGE ONE --> {{if $character->fields('rotate1')}} {{$string = ''.$character->fields('rotate1').'';}} {{$avrotate1 = explode('"',strstr($string,'https://'))[0];}} {{endif}} <!-- END ONE --> <!-- IMAGE TWO --> {{if $character->fields('rotate2')}} {{$string = ''.$character->fields('rotate2').'';}} {{$avrotate2 = explode('"',strstr($string,'https://'))[0];}} {{endif}} <!-- END TWO --> <!-- IMAGE THREE --> {{if $character->fields('rotate3')}} {{$string = ''.$character->fields('rotate3').'';}} {{$avrotate3 = explode('"',strstr($string,'https://'))[0];}} {{elseif $avrotate3 = $avrotate1}} {{endif}} <!-- END THREE --> <!-- IMAGES ABOVE THIS POINT --> <!-- RANDOM--> {{$charimages = array("{$avrotate2}", "{$avrotate1}", "{$zero}");}} {{$random_av = array_rand($charimages);}} <!-- END RANDOM --> <!-- END array --> {{endif}} Explanation So the first line says, if the player has uploaded something to the custom field with the key, rotate1, then do the following. In other words, this prevents the rest of the code from loading for players who have not uploaded any images to the custom profile fields we made earlier. zero is the normal character profile. This is how I get it into a legible string (url) for use in the array later in the code. What follows are two custom profile fields. As before, I need to get it into a legible string, not a lightbox link. Read more about that here. However, once you get to three images, it is reasonable to assume that your users might not upload an image. Say, you have set up ten custom profile fields, you may have members who only have two avatars to add to the rotation. So, fields from 3 onwards should include an else. This is why image 3 looks like this <!-- IMAGE THREE --> {{if $character->fields('rotate3')}} {{$string = ''.$character->fields('rotate3').'';}} {{$avrotate3 = explode('"',strstr($string,'https://'))[0];}} {{elseif $avrotate3 = $avrotate1}} {{endif}} <!-- END THREE --> The argument is this: IF rotate3 is uploaded, avrotate3 will equal the image URL. IF nothing is uploaded to rotate3, then avrotate3 will equal avrotate1. If you leave the above out, you will have broken images for any user who has not uploaded something for every rotating spot. So if you want to keep adding images after the third one, you should use the following code <!-- IMAGE NUMBER --> {{if $character->fields('YOUR_CUSTOM_PROFILE_FIELD_KEY')}} {{$string = ''.$character->fields('YOUR_CUSTOM_PROFILE_FIELD_KEY').'';}} {{$YOUR_VARIABLE_YOUR_CHOICE_BE_UNIQUE = explode('"',strstr($string,'https://'))[0];}} {{elseif $YOUR_VARIABLE_YOUR_CHOICE_BE_UNIQUE = $AVROTATE1_OR_ZERO_OR_AVROTATE2}} {{endif}} <!-- END NUMBER --> Enough about adding images! Let's learn about the array! <!-- RANDOM--> {{$charimages = array("{$avrotate2}", "{$avrotate1}", "{$avrotate3}", "{$zero}");}} {{$random_av = array_rand($charimages);}} <!-- END RANDOM --> I am saying, $charimages is a list of things. It is, avrotate2, avrotate1, avrotate3 and zero. Then I say, $randomav is a random selection from the charimages list. If you have added more images, you need to add them to the array: <!-- RANDOM--> {{$charimages = array("{$avrotate2}", "{$avrotate1}", "{$avrotate3}", "{$zero}", "{$ANOTHER_VARIABLE}", "{$ANOTHER_ANOTHER_VARIABLE}");}} {{$random_av = array_rand($charimages);}} <!-- END RANDOM --> Hallelujah! We finally have a variable that returns a random custom profile field. Displaying the Avatar Find the following: <li class='cAuthorPane_photo'> <a href="{$character->url()}"> <span class="ipsUserPhoto ipsUserPhoto_large"> {{if $avatar = $character->avatar()}} <img src="{$avatar->url}" alt="{$character->name}"> {{else}} <img src='{resource="default_photo.png" app="core" location="global"}' alt="{$character->name}"> {{endif}} </span> </a> </li> Delete the above and replace with the following: <li class='cAuthorPane_photo'> <a href="{$character->url()}"> <span class="ipsUserPhoto ipsUserPhoto_large"> {{if $character->fields('rotate1')}} <!-- ROTATOR --> <img src="{$charimages[$random_av]}" id="rotatorav" alt="{$character->name}"> <!-- END ROTATOR --> {{elseif $avatar = $character->avatar()}} <img src="{$avatar->url}" alt="{$character->name}"> {{else}} <img src='{resource="default_photo.png" app="core" location="global"}' alt="{$character->name}"> {{endif}} </span> </a> </li> The argument is this: IF there is something uploaded to rotate1, then display our random variable. OTHERWISE if the user has uploaded an avatar, display that. OTHERWISE if the user has done none of the above, display the default avatar. That's it! You just need to rinse and repeat in all of your other themes. Some things to note: You need to add this to the authorpanesmall for it to work on mobile Every post will have a random avatar

The applications we will cover are Traditional Application Freeform Application Shipper Application No Application Before we get into the nitty gritty, let us consider what an application at it's most basic, is. An application serves to gate your community. It is about restricting what kind of members you will accept onto your site and it implies that you have a standard you have set that you expect people to meet. People who do not meet your standards are rejected or pended with the hopes that they will lift or change their standards to meet yours. You might for example have expectations surrounding Understanding of site lore (familiarity with canon for fandom forums and how it diverges on your site for example). Ability to communicate, that is, read and write. Familiarity with play by post roleplay mechanics. Some admins do not want to introduce people to roleplay! Ability to develop a character without first roleplaying them. If someone meets your standards in an application, you would then accept them and welcome them into your roleplay. It is worth noting however, that this process is not fool proof. Writing an application is a different skill set to outright roleplay, and it is easy to write an application in such a way as to hide (or simply not mention) game breaking abilities. I have noticed that a number of administrators feel that just because a member has been accepted via application, it means that you can not ask that member to make changes to their character. You can. If a character turns out to be game breaking you can politely approach the player to make changes. Your other members will probably thank you because they wont be having fun either! No Application On the flip side are no application sites. A no application site is not a place of chaos, nor is it a place with no standards. Admins of no application sites will still pull players up for game breaking, or for writing illegible posts. To paint a fun picture: An application site can be thought of as a paddock surrounded by a fence. There is one gate and the admin will be standing there, assessing each person before they're let in. A good admin will continue to observe the people in their paddock for unsavoury behaviour, and will throw those people over the fence should they prove obstinate. A no application site can be thought of as an open paddock where the admin keeps an eye on everyone who enters the paddock. If someone is being unsavoury, that person gets tossed out too. A good no application site will still make their expectations clear. Their informational topics will cover if there is a minimum standard expected from a member's writing, if they're strict about third person and past tense and (in the case where experience in roleplay is not expected) will warn players against the three sins of roleplay: power playing, meta gaming and god modding. You might choose to run a no application site for the following reasons: You're confident in your ability to identify issues with characters as they arise and are able to address them. You do not feel that an application is an efficient use of your time. Ie. That the application process does not pick up enough bad eggs to warrant the amount of time spent on approving and pending applications. You want to provide an environment friendly to people who develop their characters through play. You want to get people into play as soon as possible. The Advantages of No App There is no barrier to roleplay, players can jump straight into the good stuff. Players whose creative process does not involve creating a detailed fully formed character without writing them, are not penalised. Furthermore, players who do prefer to create a character from the ground up before writing them can simply do so. There's nothing stopping them from following their own process. There is no pressure on staff to accept new players as soon as possible. (Accepting sooner rather than later is advantageous because you're striking as soon as the iron is hot. That is, capitalising on the initial urge that made a player sign up.) Allows the creation of minor characters, assuming that the no app site also has activity expectations that is minor character friendly. The Disadvantages of No App Players in this section of the roleplay world have been groomed to go through an application process. Erroneous statements about no application sites being chaotic and messy abounds. As an administrator of a No App site, you need to combat that misconception. You can do that with a robust beginner's guide. Because of the above, players may find it difficult to find character information (make sure you do include a place for information to be written! A place might be your character profile or the plotter). Again, a robust beginner's guide can help people find that information. Some administrators prefer simply having the peace of mind that comes with knowing what each character is about. A no application site does not provide that. Some administrators prefer that character information be laid out in a uniform manner. A no application site may not satisfy their need for uniformity. It can however, do so, if you effectively utilise custom profile fields! Traditional Application As stated earlier, an application serves to gate the community by creating a point in which an administrator assess each person and their characters for suitability. This is most commonly done through the traditional application. The traditional application is a form containing fields for the user to fill out. Examples of what those fields might be include: Character name Age Alias/nicknames Birthday Gender Occupation Birth place Face claim (if the site uses them) General appearance Clothing (can be for historical accuracy reasons, or to help other writer's visualise the character without needing the character's writer to keep on rehashing the norm) Personality Family connections History Skills/powers (weapons, magical, talents, etc) Species Sexuality Height Weight And so on. Some traditional applications might also include some fields for the player to fill out. These fields are typically: Player name Timezone/country Age Gender Roleplay limits Some traditional applications are long and involved. Some might be nice and short. Some may include silly (and fun!) little fields like astrological sign or MBTI type. What you include depends entirely on your site and what you want to be able to assess. The length and depth of the application is also reliant on what you require in order to ensure that you have all the information you need to make an informed decision on who to approve or who to deny or pend. You might choose to have a traditional application for the following reasons: You like to know exactly what kind of character is entering play. You prefer to cater to players who can create characters without playing them first. You like to be confident in the knowledge that the player has a good knowledge of your site setting. You are not afraid to pull up players for game breaking characters that may slip through your application process. The Advantages of Traditional Applications Traditional Applications are typically used throughout this section of the roleplay world. Whilst you should never do something just because everyone else does, you should consider whether or not doing something differently is worth the effort you need to put into changing user behaviour. You know exactly what kind of character is entering play. This of course, does not apply to people who write misleading applications or who lied in their applications. You are assured that the player is familiar with your site's world and has integrated their character into that world. Some players prefer to have a process in place as they are reassured that the character they have in mind is more than likely, a great fit for the site. The Disadvantages of Traditional Applications You create a barrier for members and slow down the transition from guest to engaged and active member. It is commonly understood that good web design involves a low barrier to entry, the greater the barrier, the less members you engage. (This may be the point for you, however!) You create an extra work load for staff. Life happens to everyone, even staff. If life has happened to staff, the application process can be slowed down or the stress that might already be on your mind can be heightened. Your site will not be inviting to people who find that their best characters are developed through writing. If your applications can not be amended or appended, then they become out of date. Characters grow and change! I encourage all administrators to consider providing a place for players to append their character application to keep track of those changes or to ensure that their application remains accurate. Unless your site has a system in place, people are discouraged from writing minor characters to either assist someone else's plot, or their own. Freeform Application A freeform application is just as it suggests, a place where the player can communicate whatever they want about their character in any way that they desire. It encourages a creative approach to the application and their approach might suggest more about the character than might be communicated through a traditional application. Players can also simply include what information they feel is important about their character, ignoring whatever is unimportant or irrelevant. A player might choose to approach a free form application in the following ways: Through a more traditional application. Information is laid out in dot points or under headings. By writing prose about the character's pertinent history. This may not be indepth! But should include a major and pertinent event. Through an interview, with questions being asked and the character answering in their own voice (and hopefully lies are noted!) Through poetry! A stream consciousness in the character's voice. And so on. The limitation here is only the player's imagination. I personally view freeform applications as a softer version of the traditional application, where characters may not be as fully developed as a traditional application requires, but an admin can still see that the thought is there and that the player does understand the lore of a site. You might want to run a freeform application site because: You still want the assurances that an application provides, but do not require as much detail as a traditional application might typically require. You might also relish the idea of allowing your potential members to stretch their creative juices. And you are content with allowing members to provide as much or as little information as required. You are not afraid to pull up players for game breaking characters, even after they have been approved. The Advantages of Freeform Applications You have a good idea of what kind of character is entering play. This of course, does not apply to people who write misleading applications or who lied in their applications. You are assured that the player is familiar with your site's world and has integrated their character into that world. Some players prefer to have a process in place as they are reassured that the character they have in mind is more than likely, a great fit for the site. You are a bit more friendlier towards players that create their characters through play, assuming that your freeform application does allow for shorter applications! Some players enjoy the creative freedom that Freeform Apps provide. The Disadvantages of Freeform Applications Some people think that freeform applications typically do not provide useful information about the character because they are so esoteric. You need to take steps to ensure that the freeform applications do supply some information about the character. You can do that by making it clear what information you do want from the application, or by encouraging users to provide dot point information if they write esoteric apps. When provided with total freedom, some people freeze up and don't know what to write. You can address this by containing some examples of what a player can do. Or by providing different templates. If your applications can not be amended or appended, then they become out of date. Characters grow and change! I encourage all administrators to consider providing a place for players to append their character application to keep track of those changes or to ensure that their application remains accurate. You create a barrier for members and slow down the transition from guest to engaged and active member. It is commonly understood that good web design involves a low barrier to entry, the greater the barrier, the less members you engage. (This may be the point for you, however!) You create an extra work load for staff. Life happens to everyone, even staff. If life has happened to staff, the application process can be slowed down or the stress that might already be on your mind can be heightened. Shipper Applications Shipper Applications are the hybrids of the application world and have gotten some bad press because of their name. A shipper application is essentially a traditional/freeform application rolled into a plotter. However, because of their name, there is a misunderstanding out there that shipper app sites are focused on 'shipping' that is, the romantic relationships between characters. This is not necessarily true and if this type of application does ultimately appeal to you, you might consider rebranding your application as a plotter app. On a shipper application site, a member creates their application using the form you supply. Your shipper application might include the following: Any of the things a traditional app might include. A freeform section, or only a freeform section. An "about" or an introduction to the character for the purposes of roleplay. A relationships section: lovers/enemies/friends. These sections would typically include what you're looking for or what kinds of things presses the characters good and bad buttons. Other relationships section: this would typically include information where different characters might know this character. For example, work place, school, neighbourhood. Plot points or plot hooks: these are things that the player is looking for. Or ideas for other players to run with. Once the player has submitted their form, the administrator will typically move the form (thread) into a new forum. You might choose to use a shipper application for all the same reasons you might select a traditional or freeform application. In addition, you might have a shipper application in order to give members just one thing to fill in, removing one step to roleplay. In addition, to choose a shipper app, you probably should still feel that they're relevant! The Advantages of Shipper Apps In addition to the advantages outlined in traditional and freeform apps: Users do everything they need to do to get started in one hit. The layout of shipper apps typically provide prompts for plotters, which can make writing the plotter easier for some! The Disadvantage of Shipper Apps I mentioned earlier that they can be misinterpreted as being unduly focused on relationships, but also: Some players feel that plotters are redundant or useless. This seems to be particularly true of sites that utilise discord. All the other disadvantages that come with traditional or freeform applications! As an admin, it is up to you to select the kind of application (or no application!) that works best for you and the kind of community you want to build. I wanted to touch on one more aspect of applications however: The Medium! Traditionally in this section of the roleplay world, applications have been through threads. The admin provides the user with a template that they copy and paste, and then fill in details. This isn't the only way to do an application: An Actual Form Depending on your software, you may be able to use an actual form for your application. For example, if you were an IPS user, you might use character mod. A myBB user might use the Form Creator extension. An SMF user would simply use the Arceus' Character Manager Mod. Profiles Profiles, no matter the software, contain custom profile fields. As an admin, you can simply use these fields to create an application that is visible through the profile! No more needing to hunt down the application, you just click on the character's profile and have the information there.

This week we are celebrating the lurkers of RPG communities. Most site operators hope to convert lurkers into full-fledged members of their communities. in this guide, you will see how I made my own site, Hogwarts Rebirth, lurker friendly. Guest Friendly This first point is a rather controversial decision, but my site guest friendly. That mean guests can see every single post (except for common rooms) without having to log in. That way someone who is unsure of what the site is about, and don't know if it would work for them, can see exactly how the site functions. Being guest friendly helps lurkers explore what the site has to offer. From seeing how classes run to how posts throughout the castle and surroundings work. By being guest friendly, lurkers are given to chance to preview and get ready to jump in. While this is not exactly measurable many members have commented to the staff that allowing them to read the topics before joining helped them to make the choice to join the site. Questions and Answers Many times guests and lurkers have questions, but there is not a place for them to contact the site. On the site, we made a guest friendly questions and answers forum. That anyone can ask a question, and once it has been moderated staff or members can answer and interact with the user. We have found that by offering this forum, helps lurkers become more comfortable with the community before jumping in. They can see what types of general questions other students and staff have had. It also offers a medium to voice their own questions before making a final decision to jump in. My staff site has been an increase of new member joins from people who have asked questions before joining. Discord Unlike some sites, our discord completely open to anyone who wants to join. They don't even need to be a member of the site to join. We found it is a good way to interact with users and share what is happening on the site. We have hooks that auto share some posts and a house points feed that alerts the discord whenever new house points have been awarded via staff. Discord for lurkers offers a way to interact with the members of the site and gauge if we would be a good fit for them. The discord server also helps just build the community as a whole. Conclusion In short, we love our lurkers and guests. We want to interact with them and show them what the site is about. Join the discussion, how do you encourage lurkers on your site? We'd love to hear your opinions.

How a person finds and nurtures inspiration varies and thus this guide shouldn't be taken as the be all and end all of inspiration growing. You should discard whatever doesn't ring true for you. Notice the terminology I'm using. Inspiration conceptualised as a burst of energy is not sustainable and is inconsistent. Inspiration should therefore be re-conceptualised to something that is more akin to a field that is verdant with wild flowers and thickly forested. A place that is therefore, tended to and cared for, and that you can turn to for your creative sustenance. Passion Naturally, if you are passionate about what you write, you will find writing easier and livelier simply because it is bubbling with something that you love to think about and dwell on. Identify what excites you and pursue it without shame and without worrying about what you should and shouldn't write. Nothing will kill your drive faster than writing without the fire and brimstone of passion. Curiosity The world is full of oddities, weirdness and the unexpected...if you're paying attention. Keeping yourself closed off from the world does not encourage an imagination that is rich with variety. Without variety, you have less to draw on. Therefore, be curious. Engage and be inquisitive about the world you inhabit, allowing yourself to ask questions for their own sake and for those answers to send you down rabbit holes of inquiry. Be curious about not just information, but the sights, sounds, smells and textures that you encounter. Arguably however, it is not enough to be curious if you are also not receptive to what may come back. Receptivity means to discard your assumptions and sense of right and wrong, thus to receive without judgement. Furthermore to be receptive is to dismantle the barriers you might have erected (for whatever reason) between yourself and other people's stories, beliefs and emotions. It is other people that can inspire, inform and challenge the characters in your head. Without curiosity paired with receptivity, you limit the variety of experiences, knowledge, insights, sensations and stories you can draw on to feed your own writing. Discipline A lot of writing books, guides and advice stress the importance of a daily writing schedule and a particular space. This advice however, relies on this schedule and space being consistent in order to condition you into writing. What if you're a shift worker? What if the space or the tools are unavailable to you? What if you're just fucking tired and need a break for the day? Take some pressure off of yourself. Even time spent thinking about your character and their situations is valuable time spent inhabiting your character's mind. You do not need to pressure yourself into writing every day. When I talk about discipline here, I am talking about in terms of story structure: in other words, how things happen and why. Instead of suffering for the sake of suffering, or revealing things too soon, you can think about how prolonging a reveal could have a greater impact than if you pulled the trigger too soon. You can have highs and lows, so that the lows are contrasted with the highs and both are therefore more visible - thus packing more punch. Discipline can also be found in just encouraging good lifestyle habits. Your mind is not separate from your body, it requires good habits in order to function at it's best. What those good habits mean for you might vary based on your body, career, location and living situation. Some of the things I am about to suggest might be problematic or difficult to acquire. If they are, don't focus on them and bring yourself down, or get salty over this article. Instead, embrace the creative challenge of substituting the below with something that is feasible for you. Disclaimer aside, my general good habit list: Go outside and breathe some air Eat some vegetables (frozen if you can't get fresh!) Drink some water Hang out with a non-object Feeding your Imagination Consume content! Be the voracious monster that greedily absorbs all of the content around it. Content can be anything: Books and comics Music Films Television (even trashy breakfast shows!) Photographs Art Blog, magazine or newspaper articles Environment (whether walking in nature or researching some unique animals) Dreams New and old technology Science Other hobbies Games* Dreams People By consuming a variety of content, you enrich and diversify your imagination, giving you so much more to draw on. * A note on games. Whilst some of the stories and ideas can be interesting and inspirational, I have often found that the level of stimulation that games provide can dull my imagination and writing. If you have been gaming for a while and find that your creativity is not as fertile as you would like, try taking a break for a couple of days and do anything else. Rewarding your Imagination Classic classical conditioning. Rewarding your imagination for coming up with ideas by writing them down. If you discard the majority of your ideas, images and questions as they come up, you're essentially discouraging yourself from coming up with more. So reward your imagination by writing your ideas down! Come up with an idea while you're on the train? Tap it into your phone! Prefer the tactile sensation of ink on paper? Carry around a small notebook that you can fit into your pocket. Wearing women's jeans? Buy a smaller notebook - I have a notebook that fits into my pocket. It has gotten quite bent and scuffed but that's ok! I didn't buy it to look pretty. Acknowledgements The bulk of this guide was inspired by Wonderbook: The Illustrated Guide to Creating Imaginative Fiction by Jeff Vandermeer. His chapter spent on inspiration is much more in depth and the whole book is rich with advice and ideas.

In this wee guide, I'm going to show you how to do a side by side forum layout with MYBB and Jcink. This is the only customization that this code does. Mybb Preview (select Grid Forum from the theme selector down the bottom). Jcink Preview. What we're basically going to do is this: <div class="forum-flex"> Category Header and other goodies <div class="forum no1"> Forum Header Other goodies </div> <div class="forum no2"> Forum Header Other goodies </div> <div class="forum no3"> Forum Header Other goodies </div> </div> And with the CSS that is at the bottom of this post, we will get something like this: The HTML for MyBB forumbit_depth1_cat <table border="0" cellspacing="{$theme['borderwidth']}" cellpadding="{$theme['tablespace']}" class="tborder"> <thead> <tr> <td class="thead{$expthead}" colspan="5"> <div class="expcolimage"><img src="{$theme['imgdir']}/{$expcolimage}" id="cat_{$forum['fid']}_img" class="expander" alt="{$expaltext}" title="{$expaltext}" /></div> <div><strong><a href="{$forum_url}">{$forum['name']}</a></strong><br /><div class="smalltext">{$forum['description']}</div></div> </td> </tr> </thead> <tbody style="{$expdisplay}" id="cat_{$forum['fid']}_e"> <tr> <td> <div class="forum-flex"> {$sub_forums} </div> </td> </tr> </tbody> </table> <br /> forumbit_depth2_forum <div class="forum no{$forum['fid']}"> <table style="width: 100%; height: 100%;"> <tr> <td class="{$bgcolor}" align="center" width="1"> <span class="forum_status forum_{$lightbulb['folder']} ajax_mark_read" title="{$lightbulb['altonoff']}" id="mark_read_{$forum['fid']}"></span> </td> <td class="{$bgcolor}"> <strong> <a href="{$forum_url}">{$forum['name']}</a> </strong>{$forum_viewers_text} <div class="smalltext"> {$forum['description']}{$modlist}{$subforums} </div> </td> <td class="{$bgcolor}" align="center" style="white-space: nowrap"> {$threads}{$unapproved['unapproved_threads']}<br> Threads </td> <td class="{$bgcolor}" align="center" style="white-space: nowrap"> {$posts}{$unapproved['unapproved_posts']} <br> Posts </td> <td class="{$bgcolor}" align="right" style="white-space: nowrap"> {$lastpost} </td> </tr> </table> </div> The only important part for this code is the flex is the div, you can change whatever you like within the divs. So really, all you need is this: <div class="forum no{$forum['fid']}"> <!-- your forum coding here --> </div> forumdisplay_subforums <table border="0" cellspacing="{$theme['borderwidth']}" cellpadding="{$theme['tablespace']}" class="tborder"> <tr> <td class="thead" colspan="5" align="center"><strong>{$lang->sub_forums_in}</strong></td> </tr> <tr> <td> <div class="forum-flex">{$forums}</div> </td> </tr> </table> <br /> HTML For Jcink Category Headers <div class="tableborder category" id="cat-<!-- |cat_id| -->"> <div class='maintitle<!-- |collapsed_class| -->' align='left'> <span style='float:right;'><a href='#' onclick='catcollapse("<!-- |cat_id| -->");return false;' id='main_<!-- |cat_id| -->'><!-- |collapse_img| --></a>&nbsp;&nbsp;</span> <{CAT_IMG}><a href="index.php?c=<!-- |cat_id| -->"><!-- |cat_name| --></a></div> <div id='cat_<!-- |cat_id| -->' style="<!-- |collapsed_style| -->"> <table width="100%" border="0" cellspacing="1" cellpadding="4"> <tr> <td> <div class="forum-flex"> <% FORUM_ROWS %> </div> </td> </tr> </table> </div> </div> <br class='cat-lb' /> Forum Row <div class="forum no<!-- |forum_id| -->"> <table style="width:100%;height:100%"> <tr class='forum-row'> <td class="row4" align="center"> <!-- |img_new_post| --> </td> <td class="row4"> <b><a class="tooltip" tooltip="<!-- |description_clean| -->" href="?showforum=<!-- |forum_id| -->" alt="<!-- |name| -->"><!-- |name_text| --></a></b> <br /> <span class='desc'><span class='forum-desc'><!-- |description| --></span> <!-- |subforums| --> <br /> <span class='forum-led-by'><!-- |moderators| --></span> </span> </td> <td class="row2" align="center"> <!-- |topics| --> </td> <td class="row2" align="center"> <!-- |replies| --> </td> <td class="row2" nowrap="nowrap"> <!-- |last_post| --><br /> In: <!-- |last_unread| --><!-- |last_topic| --><br /> By: <!-- |last_poster| --> </td> </tr> </table> </div> The only important part of the above code is the div class forum. You can change whatever you like within that. So all you really need is this: <div class="forum no{$forum['fid']}"> <!-- your forum coding here --> </div> CSS for both Jcink and MyBB .forum-flex { display: flex; flex-wrap: wrap; } .forum-flex .forum { flex-basis: 48%; /* not working? Try and decrease this number */ margin: 1%; flex-grow: 2; } So what's going on here? Display flex tells the coding that the children of the forum-flex are to behave flexibly. Flex-wrap tells the children of forum-flex to wrap onto a new line if need be. Flex basis is the width of the forum, if possible. I put 48% to account for the 1% margin on either side. Flex-grow tells the forum to grow to fill the entire available space. If you wanted to fit more forums on a line, just change the flex-basis! Also, so that the forums look neatly uniform, I recommend putting a height on .forum. Anyway, that's it! I hope that helps, if you need any assistance, please feel free to yell.

Want a push in sidebar for mybb (or icyboards)? Follow this guide to get your very own! A lot of the current sidebar codes rely on javascript that inserts absolute positioning. The problem with this is that it throws out a lot of the dropdown menus that are native to mybb, or breaks them completely. To avoid breaking other elements of your forum, I recommend using a CSS only solution. The sidebar we are creating will be functional for mobile users (assuming your theme is set up to be responsive), as well as for the desktop and you can see it in action here. Select Fluid or sidebar from the theme menu. First off, the HTML! Go to the theme you want to add a sidebar to, and then go to Templates > Header Templates > header Paste the following into the very top of your header template. <input type="checkbox" id="navigation" /> <label for="navigation" id="navigation"> <i class="fas fa-bars"></i> </label> <div class="sidebar trow1"> <ul class="fa-ul"> {$welcomeblock} </ul> <div class="trow1 aboutus"> <h3>About Us</h3> Prow scuttle parrel provost Sail ho shrouds spirits boom mizzenmast yardarm. Pinnace holystone mizzenmast quarter crow's nest nipperkin grog yardarm hempen halter furl. Swab barque interloper chantey doubloon starboard grog black jack gangway rutters. Deadlights jack lad schooner scallywag dance the hempen jig carouser broadside cable strike colors. Bring a spring upon her cable holystone blow the man down spanker Shiver me timbers to go on account lookout wherry doubloon chase. Belay yo-ho-ho keelhaul squiffy black spot yardarm spyglass sheet transom heave to. <p /> Trysail Sail ho Corsair red ensign hulk smartly boom jib rum gangway. Case shot Shiver me timbers gangplank crack Jennys tea cup ballast Blimey lee snow crow's nest rutters. Fluke jib scourge of the seven seas boatswain schooner gaff booty Jack Tar transom spirits. </div> </div> As you can see, I have assumed that you have the new fontawesome library installed. If you have not, replace <i class="fas fa-bars"></i> with any text or a menu image. You will also notice that I have included the welcomeblock template in the sidebar. The welcomeblock template includes guest and member links. If you are working from a theme that you have already worked on, please skip to the CSS Section. BUT If you were working from a fresh template, with no edits, you will want to do the following: Find the following in header template (the same one we just pasted into): {$welcomeblock} <!-- </div> in header_welcomeblock_member and header_welcomeblock_guest --> <!-- </div> in header_welcomeblock_member and header_welcomeblock_guest --> Replace it with </div></div> Click save and return to listing. Go to header_welcomeblock_guest Delete everything and paste in the following <span class="welcome">{$lang->welcome_guest} <a href="{$mybb->settings['bburl']}/member.php?action=login" onclick="$('#quick_login').modal({ fadeDuration: 250, keepelement: true, zIndex: (typeof modal_zindex !== 'undefined' ? modal_zindex : 9999) }); return false;" class="login">{$lang->welcome_login}</a> <a href="{$mybb->settings['bburl']}/member.php?action=register" class="register">{$lang->welcome_register}</a></span> <div class="modal" id="quick_login" style="display: none;"> <form method="post" action="{$mybb->settings['bburl']}/member.php"> <input name="action" type="hidden" value="do_login" /> <input name="url" type="hidden" value="" /> <input name="quick_login" type="hidden" value="1" /> <table width="100%" cellspacing="{$theme['borderwidth']}" cellpadding="{$theme['tablespace']}" border="0" class="tborder"> <tr> <td class="thead" colspan="2"><strong>{$lang->login}</strong></td> </tr> <tr> <td class="trow1" width="25%"><strong>{$login_username}</strong></td> <td class="trow1"><input name="quick_username" id="quick_login_username" type="text" value="" class="textbox initial_focus" /></td> </tr> <tr> <td class="trow2"><strong>{$lang->password}</strong></td> <td class="trow2"> <input name="quick_password" id="quick_login_password" type="password" value="" class="textbox" /> <a href="{$mybb->settings['bburl']}/member.php?action=lostpw" class="lost_password">{$lang->lost_password}</a> </td> </tr> <tr> <td class="trow1">&nbsp;</td> <td class="trow1 remember_me"> <input name="quick_remember" id="quick_login_remember" type="checkbox" value="yes" class="checkbox" checked="checked" /> <label for="quick_login_remember">{$lang->remember_me}</label> </td> </tr> <tr> <td class="trow2" colspan="2"> <div align="center"><input name="submit" type="submit" class="button" value="{$lang->login}" /></div> </td> </tr> </table> </form> </div> <script type="text/javascript"> $("#quick_login input[name='url']").val($(location).attr('href')); </script> Save and return to listing. Go to header_welcomeblock_member Delete everything and paste in the following: <span class="welcome">{$lang->welcome_back} <a href="{$mybb->settings['bburl']}/member.php?action=logout&amp;logoutkey={$mybb->user['logoutkey']}" class="logout">{$lang->welcome_logout}</a></span> <ul class="menu panel_links"> {$usercplink} {$modcplink} {$admincplink} </ul> <ul class="menu user_links"> <li><a href="javascript:void(0)" onclick="MyBB.popupWindow('{$mybb->settings['bburl']}/misc.php?action=buddypopup&modal=1', null, true); return false;">{$lang->welcome_open_buddy_list}</a></li> {$searchlink} {$pmslink} </ul> Save and return to listing. Now we are ready for the CSS. The CSS! Go to your theme's style sheet list. Click Add Stylesheet and call it sidebar.css Click write my own content. Paste in the following: label#navigation { position: fixed; top: 0; right: 0; display: block; font-size: 2rem; padding: 10px; background: #5f9797; color: #ffffff; z-index: 999; } body > input[type="checkbox"] { display:none; } #content { margin: 0 auto; width: 80%!important; -moz-transition:all 300ms ease-in-out; -webkit-transition:all 300ms ease-in-out; -o-transition:all 300ms ease-in-out; transition:all 300ms ease-in-out; } input[type="checkbox"]:checked ~ .sidebar { margin: 0; } input[type="checkbox"]:checked ~ #container { -webkit-transform:translate3d(15vw, 0, 0); -moz-transform:translate3d(15vw, 0, 0); -o-transform:translate3d(15vw, 0, 0); transform: translate3d(15vw, 0, 0); width: calc(100% - 15vw); -moz-transition:all 300ms ease-in-out; -webkit-transition:all 300ms ease-in-out; -o-transition:all 300ms ease-in-out; transition:all 300ms ease-in-out; } .sidebar.trow1 { padding: 0; } .sidebar { position: fixed; top: 0; left: 0; height: 100vh; width: 15vw; margin:0 0 0 -15vw; -moz-transition:all 300ms ease-in-out; -webkit-transition:all 300ms ease-in-out; -o-transition:all 300ms ease-in-out; transition:all 300ms ease-in-out; } .sidebar ul { list-style-type: none; padding: 0; margin: 0; } .trow1.aboutus { max-height: 20vh; overflow: auto; } .trow1.sidebar > ul li { padding: 10px 5px; } @media (max-width: 425px) { .sidebar { width: 70vw; margin:0 0 0 -70vw; z-index: 99; } input[type="checkbox"]:checked ~ .sidebar { box-shadow: 50vw 0 5px rgba(255,255,255, .5); } input[type="checkbox"]:checked ~ #container { -webkit-transform:translate3d(0, 0, 0); -moz-transform:translate3d(0, 0, 0); -o-transform:translate3d(0, 0, 0); transform: translate3d(0, 0, 0); width: 100vw; margin: 0 0 0 0; } } You now have a basic push in sidebar! Check it out! Change the colours as needed to suit your own theme. But wait....what did we do? Essentially, we have made a checkbox where it's label is the menu icon. Labels are used with checkboxes because they allow the user to select the text next to the checkbox in order to tick or untick it, rather than having to click on the box itself. So essentially, we are telling the sidebar to stay out of the user's screen, unless the checkbox (the menu) is checked. The breakdown: body > input[type="checkbox"] { display:none; } This hides the checkbox that is an immediate child of the body. We will use the label - the menu icon - as the clickable element. .sidebar { position: fixed; top: 0; left: 0; height: 100vh; width: 15vw; margin:0 0 0 -15vw; } This puts the sidebar outside of the screen. input[type="checkbox"]:checked ~ #container { -webkit-transform:translate3d(15vw, 0, 0); -moz-transform:translate3d(15vw, 0, 0); -o-transform:translate3d(15vw, 0, 0); transform: translate3d(15vw, 0, 0); width: calc(100% - 15vw); } Move the sidebar into view when the menu is clicked. input[type="checkbox"]:checked ~ #container { -webkit-transform:translate3d(15vw, 0, 0); -moz-transform:translate3d(15vw, 0, 0); -o-transform:translate3d(15vw, 0, 0); transform: translate3d(15vw, 0, 0); width: calc(100% - 15vw); } Make the container thinner when the menu is clicked. There are a lot of transitions in the CSS, this is to make the changes smoother. That's the basis of it! Hopefully it helps you, if you do run into any problems, please use the Coding Requests & Help forum.

When I make an image circular, I find this annoying: Circular image? Square text? Annoying. I would much rather do this: Text curving with the image? Much nicer. Thankfully, it's also super easy to pull off. <div class="container"> <img src="image" /> Lorem ipsum, your text would be here! </div> This is what your mark up will look like. A container that holds your image and text. Then your CSS: .container img { float: left; border-radius: 100%; shape-outside: circle(50%); margin: 0 5px 5px 0; height: 200px; width: 200px; } You want to float the image to the left, because it tells the text to wrap around it. You want to add in the border radius to make the image into a circle. Shape-outside is the magic. It tells the text outside of the image to make a circular shape around the image. Margin is just some spacing and the height and width are self-explanatory. And that's it! Simple and snazzy.

There is this common trend among roleplay admins, we all have unrealistic expectations for what we consider a 'successful' site. When we don't meet these unrealistic expectations we feel terrible, we think that we are failing, we feel that maybe we should just give up. This is bullshit!!! Things that we think should happen to determine that site is successful and the reasons they are BS. The moment I open a site I should have 10 members and I should just get more and more from there. Only about 25% of roleplay sites get more than 10 active members (at one time), ever, throughout their entire lifespan. It's even less as the numbers go up. Additionally, member count doesn't make a site, members do. I advertise everywhere and none of my guests join my site. It's a pretty well known fact that statistics are skewed when it comes to guests online. Spiders/bots count as guests and are most likely your biggest fans. They love when you update content so they will visit regularly. Everyone hates me. If you believe this then you shouldn't be an administrator. This isn't meant to put you down but seriously if you think people/the world is against you then you will always feel the negative and none of the positive parts of being an administrator. As an administrator you get the really shitty stuff. You have to deal with the bad things and the problem members and the problem problems, your job is already shit, if you stack that with a "nobody likes me, everybody hates me... I guess I'll go eat worms" mentality there will never be a moment that you enjoy roleplaying, enjoy your site, or enjoy being an admin. My site is failing, I should just shut it down. Yes, absolutely. If you aren't behind your site, no one else will be either. You need to be the advocate for your site and so you have to believe that it's going to be successful in order for it to be. No one else does this but you. We don't have 50 posts, hell 10 posts or even 5 per day. My members must hate me or be lazy or flaking. Not really. We all know that life comes first and even your most rapid fire posters will get burned out. Power through, continue on and keep going, that's all that you can do to get through any slump. Thinking the site is dying because of the slump? It's wrong. Every roleplay has slumps (even if they don't appear to from the outside looking in). The reality is: You choose if your site is successful! This may sound insane but it's one hundred percent accurate. Your site is as successful as you say it is. No matter the numbers, how quickly people join, how they post or really anything. If you open your site and you say "my site is successful" you've succeeded. Congratulations! You have successfully run an RP. When you start to go down a negative administrative route you actually start yourself on a very destructive path. Honestly, this path is the only path that I believe may lead to a truly unsuccessful site. Basically by being overly negative you start to run your site into the ground. The following things start to happen: You start to see fault in all of your members like they are out to get you. Your members joined your site because they like something about it. Becoming paranoid, or similar will actually push those members away. If they had a problem you would know already. You start to blame yourself for not living up to obscure, non-standardized, inaccurate, success standards. As stated above, success isn't deemed by numbers or people or characters or whatever, it's by your sheer attitude. When you blame yourself you start personifying this into places you shouldn't. Your staff, your cBox/chat room, your members, resource sites. When they see that you are losing faith they lose faith and they look for somewhere else to be. By losing faith in your site or yourself you tell your site members not to believe in too. You start to see fault in your site and it's features. Thinking that your features are the specific reason people are not joining, staying etc is a really bad way to go. Changing a lot, and often, will not only start to push away your existing member base but it will start to mix and match things that may not be overly attractive because you see things on "successful" sites that have this or that feature and that must be what makes them that way. Unless you know for sure the change you are making is a good thing it's always a good idea to at least seek advice from your existing members. While not everyone will agree you can get a more basic level of understanding from what they provide you as to what changes would help them enjoy your site more. If your existing members love your site, then new/potential members will likely love it too. All my members left to make another site, this fucking sucks. Hell yeah it does. It's often, not because of you, it's because they are fickle and they wanted something else but it seems like it's all your fault. I won't say, for sure, it's not you or your site setup but this often isn't anything that can't be corrected moving forward. Request a review and see about getting some feedback from any members that are willing to talk. You can go back and forth on features and options and shoulda dones and coulda dones but in the end? You are the reason your site is successful or not and it's all in how you see it. You see that you're successful. Then you are. I know this feels more like a "feel good" but doesn't give you any information sort of guide but that's sort of the point. The number one reason for site death is administrators losing interest in their own sites because they feel bad about it, they feel like they are doing something wrong and that's why "no one" joins. Unfortunately inspiration is a fickle thing and so is life which is what makes roleplayers so selective with the sites that they put their time into. You could run the most amazing site and still only get 3 members over the course of its history. Yeah its a bit frustrating if you had big plans for it but it shouldn't take away from your focus on the existing members, that will likely become great roleplay partners, and growing it from there. You never know, the special care that you put into those three members may get you your next ten.

*** Notice: This topic has a section for self hosted/piggy-back hosted MyBB forums that can access their core files through an FTP account for further capabilities of this function. Unfortunately the further capabilities consist of pulling thread prefixes/styled usernames to show as well and if you use Icyboards you cannot access core files to make these edits BUT you can still use Section One! [1.8] Recent/Latest Post Without A Plugin If you are anything like me you hate a long list of plugins in your ACP and you really hate uploading plugins because anything could go wrong (like accidentally placing files where they don't belong and finding them 3 weeks later thinking "how the ****?". So here is my replacement for this issue. There are two topics for this section. The first is the basic generic "pulling" and the second is a more advanced clean up for self hosted mybb forums (because unfortunately using the built in portals latest posts/threads function does not show thread prefixes (which a lot of people use for dictating whether or not a thread is Mature, Open, Private, etc.) and it also does not style a username with the color/styles attached to the usergroup) which we will fix in that section of this tutorial. Tutorial Created By: Isoldehn Tutorial Permissions: Please do not re-post this tutorial else where, instead link someone to this thread. Tutorial Needs: Overall, the ability to copy and paste. Section 1 - Knowledge Of MyBB Templates Section 2 - FTP Access & Knowledge On Editing Core Files Section One Using the script to pull the threads from the Portal! Please be sure your portal page is enabled and latest posts is enabled/settings configured. I'll let you figure this out on your own because you basically decide how many to show and from what forums/all forums. Step 1: - Open the ACP - Navigate to Templates & Styles --> Templates --> *current template set you are using* --> Portal Templates --> portal - Find: {$latestthreads} - Replace with: <div class="recent_posts">{$latestthreads}</div> Step 2: - Open up the template where ever you would like to add latest threads/posts to. Generally the option is on the index page, or a header, or even a sidebar. I cannot tell you where to place this since this is your choice. - Insert this: <script type="text/javascript"> jQuery(function(){ jQuery(".recent_posts").load("{$mybb->settings['bburl']}/portal.php .recent_posts"); }); </script> <div class="recent_posts"></div> * Credit for this coding is unnecessary as it is a simple script that can be developed by anyone. Step 3: (optional) - Style your latest posts/threads how you like. - Navigate back to Templates & Styles --> Templates --> *current template set you are using* --> Portal Templates --> portal_latestthreads - Create how you would like the div/table to be shown. You can delete everything inside, coding it to your own liking and then add the variable for the threads back in where you would like the thread/post list to show. Variable below for those that accidentally forget to save it. {$threadlist} - Navigate back to Templates & Styles --> Templates --> *current template set you are using* --> Portal Templates --> portal_latestthreads_thread - Again, create this how you would like it to be shown. Variables for things are below in case you forget to save. <a href="{$mybb->settings['bburl']}/{$thread['threadlink']}" title="{$thread['fullsubject']}">{$thread['subject']}</a> (Link to thread and name of thread) <a href="{$thread['forumlink']}">{$thread['forumname']}</a> (Link & name to the forum/board post was created in) <a href="{$thread['lastpostlink']}">Last Post</a> (Link to last post) {$lastposterlink} (Link to the last person that posted) {$lastpostdate} (Date the last post was made) {$thread['replies']} (Number of replies) {$thread['views']} (Number of views) Section Two Fixing the fact that thread prefixes do not show and usergroup styles do not work. Remember, if you continue on with section two we will be editing core files. BEFORE EVER EDITING CORE FILES YOU SHOULD ALWAYS CREATE A BACKUP OF YOUR SITE/FTP AREA (ALL FILES). Just in case anything goes wrong. This tutorial was also created for the MyBB 1.8 Series. If you use this on 1.6 things could very well go horribly wrong and support for 1.6 is no longer offered through MyBB Support. Step 1: - Open your FTP client or your file area where all core files of MyBB can be found. - Navigate to portal.php and open to edit. Step 2: - Find: $latestthreads = ''; // Latest forum discussions - This is the section/area we will be editing. Below those lines (336 & 337) will be all the edits that are being made. Step 3: - Find: $query = $db->query(" SELECT t.tid, t.fid, t.uid, t.lastpost, t.lastposteruid, t.lastposter, t.subject, t.replies, t.views, u.username - Replace with: $query = $db->query(" SELECT t.tid, t.fid, t.uid, t.lastpost, t.lastposteruid, t.lastposter, t.subject, t.replies, t.views, t.prefix, u.username, u.usergroup, u.displaygroup Step 4: - Find: LEFT JOIN ".TABLE_PREFIX."users u ON (u.uid=t.uid) - Replace with: LEFT JOIN ".TABLE_PREFIX."users u ON (u.uid=t.lastposteruid) Step 5: - Find: $lastposterlink = build_profile_link($lastposter, $thread['lastposteruid']); - Replace with: $lastposterlink = build_profile_link(format_name($thread['lastposter'], $thread['usergroup'], $thread['displaygroup']), $thread['lastposteruid']); Step 6: - Find: $thread['subject'] = htmlspecialchars_uni($thread['subject']); $thread['fullsubject'] = htmlspecialchars_uni($thread['fullsubject']); $thread['threadlink'] = get_thread_link($thread['tid']); $thread['lastpostlink'] = get_thread_link($thread['tid'], 0, "lastpost"); $thread['forumlink'] = get_forum_link($thread['fid']); $thread['forumname'] = $forum_cache[$thread['fid']]['name']; - Replace with: $prefix = build_prefixes($thread['prefix']); $prefix = $prefix['displaystyle']; $thread['subject'] = $prefix . " " . htmlspecialchars_uni($parser->parse_badwords($thread['subject'])); $thread['fullsubject'] = htmlspecialchars_uni($thread['fullsubject']); $thread['threadlink'] = get_thread_link($thread['tid']); $thread['lastpostlink'] = get_thread_link($thread['tid'], 0, "lastpost"); $thread['forumlink'] = get_forum_link($thread['fid']); $thread['forumname'] = $forum_cache[$thread['fid']]['name']; We are now finished!

So to access your notifications you: Click on your username in the top right. Click "Account Settings". On the right click on "Notifications Settings". In here you can review your notifications settings. This would be where you can choose whether you auto follow your own content or replies. How many emails you get from the "email" option and a few other minor choices. "Notification List" option is the list that comes up when you click on the "Bell" icon in the top right. "Email" is of course "email".