Saturday, November 17, 2012

A Forum for Our Set Design Project

We've set up a forum for our set design project. It's here.

While it requires you to register an account, it should be easier to hold discussion in this threaded forum rather than the comment section of this blog, since we tend to have parallel discussion on many topics for each set.

This is an example of how the mechanic design section for a set would look. Each mechanic would have its own thread, so it should be possible to browse through them like an idea list when you're looking for mechanic ideas to use in your pitch for this project.

The Role of the Wiki
We will be taking down the Discussion section of the wikis. Holding discussion on the wiki was awkward because it was hard to check for replies on discussion topics without opening the link to each section. It also required wiki editing. Finally, just having discussion taking place in two places may have been a source of confusion.

The wiki will be used as a place to summarize ideas that were generated in the forum and present them in an easily viewable form. We'll have to see how it works out in terms of updating the wiki. Personally, I find it satisfying to summarize ideas and discussions, and it will also be nice if the wiki remains after this project so that people who are looking for set design ideas can look through them. However, if the wiki is out of date with the forum, it won't be a big problem as long as the main discussion is taking place on the forum.

We Need Your Help
  • Try to post all idea discussion for mechanics and worldbuilding in the forum rather than the wiki or the comments section of this blog. Use the comments section of this blog for general commenting like "Wow, this is a good pitch" or "I'm surprised this world got eliminated." (That said, sometimes it's hard to resist the natural flow of conversation, and if there are stray ideas in the comments that I feel are useful, I will definitely try to collect them and paste them onto the forum.)
  • When you add a new mechanic to the mechanic section, put only one mechanic idea per thread. This way, the whole mechanic section can be viewed as an idea list.
  • When you want to comment on a mechanic that's not on the forum yet, we need you to start a thread for that mechanic and post the mechanic's text, then post your comment to it. Use this Anh-Theb section as an example. This will be less of a hassle as we go along, since most of the new ideas should be proposed directly on the forum.
  • The wiki needs to be maintained by volunteers; mainly by a) summarizing the content of the forum discussion into an easily viewable form on the wiki, b) copying comments that have already been made on the wiki to the thread and also c) setting up links from the ideas on the wiki to corresponding threads in the forum. 
Finally, it's possible that there's a better way to do this, and any feedback is welcome.

1 comment:

  1. I strongly encourage all our readers to try out the forum; threaded discussion is much better than either wiki pages or blog comments!

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