Lucid
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Ya'll be stuntin'.
AMA About PC5 @ The Treehouse
- Thread starter Alexander Nicholi
- Start date
Salzorrah
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Hope is lost Gunner.
maccrash
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I mean at least just tell us if you don't plan on answering any of these. (0;
right
So this has been sat here for a while and nothing has been answered yet. It's not really fair to keep you guys waiting, especially since there are a lot of questions from a lot of people who obviously care about and are interested in the inner workings of / future of PC.
Therefore, when I get a moment over the next couple of days I am going to alleviate some of the workload and answer as many of these questions as I can. As I am not part of the development team for PC5 I won't be able to answer all of them so apologies if your question gets missed - but a lot of these aren't strictly about PC5 anyway, so a good lot of them should get done. Also some of them aren't PC5-related but are things that we simply don't have an answer for right now, so again, sorry if I miss those out.
It's likely that I'll only be doing this once and not answering any subsequent questions (the others can do that) - so if you've got any last-minute things you want to ask I'd encourage you to do that now.
So this has been sat here for a while and nothing has been answered yet. It's not really fair to keep you guys waiting, especially since there are a lot of questions from a lot of people who obviously care about and are interested in the inner workings of / future of PC.
Therefore, when I get a moment over the next couple of days I am going to alleviate some of the workload and answer as many of these questions as I can. As I am not part of the development team for PC5 I won't be able to answer all of them so apologies if your question gets missed - but a lot of these aren't strictly about PC5 anyway, so a good lot of them should get done. Also some of them aren't PC5-related but are things that we simply don't have an answer for right now, so again, sorry if I miss those out.
It's likely that I'll only be doing this once and not answering any subsequent questions (the others can do that) - so if you've got any last-minute things you want to ask I'd encourage you to do that now.
I want to quickly note before you read any of this that if I give a personal opinion of mine then that's literally all it is - don't read into it like it's going to happen / has been discussed / is being discussed / is going to be discussed. It's more than likely just a thought bouncing around in my head.
No plans to right now. Recent "candidates" have been your suggestions in that one thread and assistant admin green for smods.
I personally do want to merge together the supporter group colours though. We've got too many colours right now and it's a mess. Also doesn't give us any room to introduce any more as and when we might need them. Supporters really don't need four colours anyway.
Since you posted this we've obviously done D&D -> The Round Table and Forum Games -> The Playground + The Underground. The other day Roleplay Corner got an overhaul too and a couple more things have been under some discussion. I believe Fan Fiction & Writing has had something in the works for quite a while now, and we also recently looked at Culture & Media too. For the most part though the direction of forums is in the hands of its moderators.
Right now, a lot of it is left over from vB3, but we're modifying a lot of it and making it much more modern. Eventually we want vB to still be the base of the forum but to operate very differently and more intuitively. It's a sort of massive project that people (mostly Audy) is undertaking to re-write a lot of what the forum's based on, if my understanding's correct.
There are loads of things we've got going for us that we could capitalise on. Right now we're working towards expanding our social media presence for example but in the whole "outside the scope of the forums" thing, I would personally quite like to work more on PC's ROM Hacking userbase. As it stands we're probably the best place there is for showcasing / finding hacks but making them is still very much down offline tools. With things like Jake's Movie tool that went up a while ago (and never really got the attention that it deserved) we could become a hub for both showcasing and developing hacks, for example. This is just something that I'd personally like to see though - I don't know anyone else's thoughts on this. We have a lot going on here that we could expand on beyond just "talk about this thing".
As I said above, we're working on getting a better social media presence. Gavin explained this one well:
There's also some stuff on branding which we'll be working on. You can find the blog and read up on it for yourself.
Evidently, me.
While I wasn't around for all of its creation and whatnot, I can see the amount of work in it and the only thing I can imagine saying here is... pretty hard. We have a ton of styles and hundreds upon hundreds of plugins to make PC tick as it does, plus more edits to PC's code itself along with all the minor things like prefixes, BBCodes, etc. In the time that it's been around a lot of modification has been made to PC and it's been a lot of work to get it to where it's at now, with a lot of work still going on.
Definitely not.
"Wrong" isn't the word I'd use exactly. Forums as a medium for communication are becoming quite tired and outdated. vB3 (the software we use now) is old but later releases have been outright disgusting to use and work with. While PC ticks along just fine and has a great community, good features and design, etc. the issue is that it isn't keeping up with modern communication on the internet. To stay on the map we need to come up with something new and exciting that you can't find in any old Pokémon forum not just in terms of community but in terms of the entire user experience. The PC5 developers (from what I've heard from them anyway) very much intend to make PC a forum that's hardly even recognisable as something on vBulletin any more - something more modern and in-line with what people actually want to use. For people like you and I who are really comfortable using a forum and whatnot the necessity isn't clear, but to pool in new users (especially younger ones) we need to be modernising PC with a lot of the social tools that people who don't use forums are used to.
We're definitely intending on integrating our newer features into them. The blog platform we use right now is absolutely horrible to work with so it's taking a while to get stuff like Likes, notifications, and even the really simple things like multi-quoting enabled in them. Also better, easier customisation (not like tumblr-level but you get the picture) and more interactivity between blogs. I would personally quite like to just come up with our own system built from the ground-up, although that's a big job. As for actually improving their visibility and activity, hopefully that'll come with modernising them in general.
Nah.
That's a massive question, haha. Each staff admin seems to be moving towards doing something different to the others in my mind. Audy and Jake are very much on the development and design side of things right now, while Sheep, Morkula and I are much more involved in the actual running of the forum. Staff admins, in general, are the only people with the actual ability to implement things and make changes to the forum, so it's a big job. Years ago it was considered one of the lighter jobs on the forum but that was more because back then the admins never did anything as opposed to had nothing to do. It's definitely not the case now - in my experience being an admin is much more work than any other position on PC because you're expected to be overseeing everything.
Not sure what you mean. We've got The Playground if that's it?
No particular reason that I can recall. Just didn't end up being discussed.
Definitely. There's actually a lot of planning towards this going on right now (or rather, was going on recently). We aren't exactly going to be dropping it but we are looking at something very different.
This is a really arbitrary question, haha. Obviously we'll aim for 10 but as experienced forum users we may not see things in the same way as newcomers might, so we'll be needing a lot of feedback etc. before we can actually hit that target.
The Treehouse is a very self-sustained forum which you guys are doing a good job of as it is, so no, not to my knowledge.
Not PC5's problem. You'd want to take this one up with Livewire or whoever is modding The Round Table in future.
I'll decline to answer this one since there are a lot of different thoughts on Fan Clubs and I don't want to represent any one of them.
With the whole thing getting a revamp it's hard to say with this one but probably not.
We opened one up just the other day, so definitely. We regularly have proposals of new sections and every now and then one of them makes it through.
See above.
On rare occasion, maybe. The Member Encyclopaedia is a good example of this, and the sort of experimental thing that we might try out using supporters in the future. In general though most forums can just be rolled out to everyone.
Done.
See above. We're sticking with it and heavily modifying it.
I won't say too much on this at the moment but it's very likely, and possibly coming soon, that we'll be adding more non-forum staff usergroups. I touched on this a little earlier in the post.
None planned as of right now.
Definitely.
Not planned right now and very unlikely. For hashtags to be effective you need a much bigger, more active, less content-focussed base. Twitter and facebook are fine but they've got no place on a forum.
People found "General Chat" a bit awkward and bland so wanted something a little more relaxed and fun. "The Treehouse" seemed as good a way as any to achieve that.
As far as I can recall this was never really expanded upon, although I was on leave a while back and still haven't caught up everything I missed out. I quite like the sound of it though.
Recently discussed and rejected.
See above, for the most part. Compared to those forums we're absolutely miles ahead of them already in terms of features (Serebii is on virtually the base version of vB if I remember rightly) - we just need to capitalise on what our community's able to do to make ourselves more than "just a forum". We're not really looking to compete with other forums though.
Pokémon focus comes and goes with the franchise, for the most part. It's extremely difficult to push interest in a video game when the franchise isn't making releases. I can't think of that much we could do that we don't already try to do on this front.
Sorry if some of these got brief after the first few, I noticed that time's getting on. If you've got more questions or want elaboration then post them and I might be able to get to them at some point, not making any promises. Anything I left out you'll have to wait for Jake and Audy for.
No plans to right now. Recent "candidates" have been your suggestions in that one thread and assistant admin green for smods.
I personally do want to merge together the supporter group colours though. We've got too many colours right now and it's a mess. Also doesn't give us any room to introduce any more as and when we might need them. Supporters really don't need four colours anyway.
Since you posted this we've obviously done D&D -> The Round Table and Forum Games -> The Playground + The Underground. The other day Roleplay Corner got an overhaul too and a couple more things have been under some discussion. I believe Fan Fiction & Writing has had something in the works for quite a while now, and we also recently looked at Culture & Media too. For the most part though the direction of forums is in the hands of its moderators.
Right now, a lot of it is left over from vB3, but we're modifying a lot of it and making it much more modern. Eventually we want vB to still be the base of the forum but to operate very differently and more intuitively. It's a sort of massive project that people (mostly Audy) is undertaking to re-write a lot of what the forum's based on, if my understanding's correct.
There are loads of things we've got going for us that we could capitalise on. Right now we're working towards expanding our social media presence for example but in the whole "outside the scope of the forums" thing, I would personally quite like to work more on PC's ROM Hacking userbase. As it stands we're probably the best place there is for showcasing / finding hacks but making them is still very much down offline tools. With things like Jake's Movie tool that went up a while ago (and never really got the attention that it deserved) we could become a hub for both showcasing and developing hacks, for example. This is just something that I'd personally like to see though - I don't know anyone else's thoughts on this. We have a lot going on here that we could expand on beyond just "talk about this thing".
As I said above, we're working on getting a better social media presence. Gavin explained this one well:
There's also some stuff on branding which we'll be working on. You can find the blog and read up on it for yourself.
Evidently, me.
While I wasn't around for all of its creation and whatnot, I can see the amount of work in it and the only thing I can imagine saying here is... pretty hard. We have a ton of styles and hundreds upon hundreds of plugins to make PC tick as it does, plus more edits to PC's code itself along with all the minor things like prefixes, BBCodes, etc. In the time that it's been around a lot of modification has been made to PC and it's been a lot of work to get it to where it's at now, with a lot of work still going on.
Definitely not.
"Wrong" isn't the word I'd use exactly. Forums as a medium for communication are becoming quite tired and outdated. vB3 (the software we use now) is old but later releases have been outright disgusting to use and work with. While PC ticks along just fine and has a great community, good features and design, etc. the issue is that it isn't keeping up with modern communication on the internet. To stay on the map we need to come up with something new and exciting that you can't find in any old Pokémon forum not just in terms of community but in terms of the entire user experience. The PC5 developers (from what I've heard from them anyway) very much intend to make PC a forum that's hardly even recognisable as something on vBulletin any more - something more modern and in-line with what people actually want to use. For people like you and I who are really comfortable using a forum and whatnot the necessity isn't clear, but to pool in new users (especially younger ones) we need to be modernising PC with a lot of the social tools that people who don't use forums are used to.
We're definitely intending on integrating our newer features into them. The blog platform we use right now is absolutely horrible to work with so it's taking a while to get stuff like Likes, notifications, and even the really simple things like multi-quoting enabled in them. Also better, easier customisation (not like tumblr-level but you get the picture) and more interactivity between blogs. I would personally quite like to just come up with our own system built from the ground-up, although that's a big job. As for actually improving their visibility and activity, hopefully that'll come with modernising them in general.
Nah.
That's a massive question, haha. Each staff admin seems to be moving towards doing something different to the others in my mind. Audy and Jake are very much on the development and design side of things right now, while Sheep, Morkula and I are much more involved in the actual running of the forum. Staff admins, in general, are the only people with the actual ability to implement things and make changes to the forum, so it's a big job. Years ago it was considered one of the lighter jobs on the forum but that was more because back then the admins never did anything as opposed to had nothing to do. It's definitely not the case now - in my experience being an admin is much more work than any other position on PC because you're expected to be overseeing everything.
Not sure what you mean. We've got The Playground if that's it?
No particular reason that I can recall. Just didn't end up being discussed.
Definitely. There's actually a lot of planning towards this going on right now (or rather, was going on recently). We aren't exactly going to be dropping it but we are looking at something very different.
This is a really arbitrary question, haha. Obviously we'll aim for 10 but as experienced forum users we may not see things in the same way as newcomers might, so we'll be needing a lot of feedback etc. before we can actually hit that target.
The Treehouse is a very self-sustained forum which you guys are doing a good job of as it is, so no, not to my knowledge.
Not PC5's problem. You'd want to take this one up with Livewire or whoever is modding The Round Table in future.
I'll decline to answer this one since there are a lot of different thoughts on Fan Clubs and I don't want to represent any one of them.
With the whole thing getting a revamp it's hard to say with this one but probably not.
We opened one up just the other day, so definitely. We regularly have proposals of new sections and every now and then one of them makes it through.
See above.
On rare occasion, maybe. The Member Encyclopaedia is a good example of this, and the sort of experimental thing that we might try out using supporters in the future. In general though most forums can just be rolled out to everyone.
Done.
See above. We're sticking with it and heavily modifying it.
I won't say too much on this at the moment but it's very likely, and possibly coming soon, that we'll be adding more non-forum staff usergroups. I touched on this a little earlier in the post.
None planned as of right now.
Definitely.
Not planned right now and very unlikely. For hashtags to be effective you need a much bigger, more active, less content-focussed base. Twitter and facebook are fine but they've got no place on a forum.
People found "General Chat" a bit awkward and bland so wanted something a little more relaxed and fun. "The Treehouse" seemed as good a way as any to achieve that.
As far as I can recall this was never really expanded upon, although I was on leave a while back and still haven't caught up everything I missed out. I quite like the sound of it though.
Recently discussed and rejected.
See above, for the most part. Compared to those forums we're absolutely miles ahead of them already in terms of features (Serebii is on virtually the base version of vB if I remember rightly) - we just need to capitalise on what our community's able to do to make ourselves more than "just a forum". We're not really looking to compete with other forums though.
Pokémon focus comes and goes with the franchise, for the most part. It's extremely difficult to push interest in a video game when the franchise isn't making releases. I can't think of that much we could do that we don't already try to do on this front.
Sorry if some of these got brief after the first few, I noticed that time's getting on. If you've got more questions or want elaboration then post them and I might be able to get to them at some point, not making any promises. Anything I left out you'll have to wait for Jake and Audy for.