VGRP 3: Staff Lineup

    posted by CtrlAltDestroy on March 29, 2006, at 12:25 PM

    Welcome, one and all, to the third incarnation of the Video Game Role Playing community: RP Haven! From the ashes of the error-filled, lag-ridden MyFreeBB board, we have risen to the glory of our own server. With this power comes the possibility of unlimited forum functionality with MODs, as well as the possibility of our very own website to accompany the forum. Our hope is that this new board and site will welcome more users to our community, allowing it to grow to never-before-imagined sizes.
    So, sit back and enjoy your new board! If more users start showing up, you can be assured that this site won't do anything but grow!
    Now, let me introduce for you the members of our beloved staff:
    GeminiSaint, Ricky, and Thalzon are the forum admins. Ricky and Thalzon were originally voted as GeminiSaint's initial two staff members when the MyFreeBB board was created, and they've been promoted from "super mods" to forum admins. Basically, these guys can mold the entire forum to their will. They have full access to the entire admin panel, which allows them to delete and create forums, edit user profiles, create usergroups, set permissions, set attachment options, and basically do anything they want. Whatever you do, don't get on the bad side of either of these guys- you'll be sorry!
    Matthias and Elec are the moderators. Once mods only of selected forums, they now have power over all the forums on the entire board- and they're here to make sure you all play nice. They have the ability to lock threads, delete posts, and sticky topics. I'm going to install a "mini-admin" mod that will also allow the mods to edit user profiles, so they will be able to remove offending avatars and signatures, ban users, and that kind of thing.
    I, CtrlAltDestroy, give myself the title of Tech Admin. I'm paying for the space this server resides on, and thus, I have full control over forum and site functionality.
    Please note that, although I'm the admin of this board, I will not be a moderator. My role here is to manage the technical aspects of the board (such as installation of MODs) and the future web site that will accompany this board- I will not be in charge of locking topics, deleting posts, banning members, etc. This is mainly because I'd feel a bit guilty "appointing myself" as a moderator, when the 5 people who are in charge now were voted into their positions by the rest of the community. (Heck, after all, I'm only here today because of my pocketbook...)
    If this site becomes a great success and we eventually get many new members, I may be inclined to help out. But, as of now, the staff lineup will remain the same.
    Well, what are you waiting for? Go and make yourself at home in your new forum! Enjoy the site, and don't be afraid to tell the staff how we're doing. After all, most of us are doing this for the very first time.
    See you in some alternate dimension!

April Fools Day- or, according to Matthias, Happy Tree Friends Day

    posted by Ricky on April 01, 2006, at 11:21 PM

    The forum's only two days old (it was officially opened Thursday night), and we've already celebrated an April Fools Day. It's very pleasant to see that almost everybody took to our games quite readily, and that there was very little animosity (except for a couple mild things regarding spamming and the pranks)- unlike some other forums that kinda erupted over their respective pranks.
    To give credit where credit is due:
    - CtrlAltDestroy came up with the Mature Board idea, and he set them up (though I helped set up the "Armadox" usergroup to give Armadox mod privileges of the three boards). This idea had actually been a serious proposition from Armadox, but it's been decided not to make an actual Mature Board at this time.
    - Matthias and I screwed with the word censor. Matthias had been going through posts, editing them (turning "April Fools Day" into "Happy Tree Friends Day" and "joke" into "accident"). When he commented on this, I went into the word censor and added these. My attempt to make "L" turn into "R" and vice versa (suggested by Thalzon to poke fun at a common Japanese mistranslation) didn't go very well at all- you guys may have noticed for a short period of time that all words containing an L suddenly became "R"... the word censor won't change letters, just words. Not to be daunted, I decided to screw with the words instead. Thus, "April" became "December", "prank" became "apology" (while "pranks" became "apologies"), "joking" became "crying", "Twist" became "Sex" (sorry, Gate and Esca ^_^;), "a" became "the", and "the" became "a" (at least, that's what I put- I don't think it worked since I heard reports of "The" becoming "the" instead).
    My assumption, based on the article count, is that we made about two hundred posts today. CtrlAltDestroy says that this morning, our monthly bandwidth report reset (it being the first of the month), and our current report is at 300 MB. Yikes!
    As for the April Fools! boards, they have been locked. They will stay up for perusal for a week, and then they'll be deleted. When they are deleted, our post counts (at least, the post counts of those who posted in those boards) will drop accordingly.
    Again, thank you for making this April Fools quite enjoyable for everyone involved, and we'll look forward to next year!

Quote Glitch

    posted by CtrlAltDestroy on April 06, 2006, at 6:21 PM

    Due to a glitch in the forum software (probably a conflict with some of the BBCode mods I have installed), quotes in signatures will tend to not display properly if you provide a source (quote="source"). We don't know exactly why this happens, or under what conditions this happens, but we're still looking.

Logo contest

    posted by GeminiSaint on April 06, 2006, at 8:05 PM

    We need a logo to put at the top of the forum page, as well as in the future web site.
    Requirements:
    - Anyone may participate.
    - The image must include the words "RP Haven" on it.
    - The image should not be smaller than 300 x 150, and not larger than 640 x 480 (we will resize it as needed).
    - We accept GIF, JPG, and PNG submissions.
    - We are willing to accept zipped BMP files too, or just plain BMP files, if for some reason you can't handle any of the other formats.
    - You may send as many entries as you want.
    - Send your entries to me (GeminiSaint) via PM.
    - The contest ends in a month from now, that is May 7th.
    - Unlike last time, the winning submission will be determined by the mods and admins via a secret poll, instead of a public poll.
    - Good luck!

A year ago today...

    posted by Ricky on May 10, 2006, at 4:31 PM

    A year ago today, Forteblast, who was then one of the administrators of the VGMusic forums and an updater of the archives (and is now the webmaster of the whole site), created the Video Game Role-Playing forum on the MyFreeBB server. The purpose was to remove the Role-Playing and Fiction Board from VGMusic's forum, because it was too much of a hassle (due to the high amount of posts it received), and because the board had become a small community of its own that had little to do with the rest of the forum.

    As a result, we spent nearly eleven months on VGRP.
    For some reason, whenever we think of something, the bad tends to stick out more than the good. Personally, I think it's because humans are, by nature, supposed to be happy. It's what we spend our lives trying to achieve, after all- happiness. It's, essentially, normal. So, when something happens that makes us unhappy, or "out of the norm" as it would be, it tends to stick out like a sore thumb.
    The server we used, MyFreeBB, was free of charge, at least, in terms of money. However, some might say we paid a lot more in terms of frustration. Now, we all know what the problems were- the server was slow, it was frequently down, and there was only so much we could do with it, since mods were not allowed to be installed to the forum. Talk about moving to a new server started within four months, though action wasn't taken for quite some time. And who can forget the ten days of almost constant downtime that forced our hand?
    However, just for this post, I'd like to focus on the positive... the accomplishments we made on VGRP.
    From July 22 (which is when I started keeping track with the Top RPs Chart) to March 24th, we made 2954 posts to the RP Board. Based on this information, I'm projecting a total post count (from May 10 to March 31) of 3400 posts. That averages to about ten posts a day.
    In general, the RP Board only had about twelve stories going at the same time. However, in the eleven months we spent there, we had eighty-five RPs. Yes, that's right. Eighty-five. Just fifteen short of one hundred. About a dozen of these were continuations of RPs that had begun on VGMusic... and most of those ended up dying, unfortunately. Sadly, this is also the case for many of the RPs that were born and bred on VGRP's boards. In all, fourteen RPs were completed on the boards. It's a pretty bad ratio, I admit, but that was normal on the VGMusic boards as well.
    While we had created a small sub-community on VGMusic's boards, the VGRP board allowed us to flourish. Separating the Role-Playing and Fiction Board into two separate boards allowed fictions to finally get a piece of the spotlight, and RP-to-fiction conversions happened from time to time (most notably with Matthias' The Legend of the Saints: Tales of the Old West, which was finished with style, and Armageddan's Conspiracy, which is still running and is being co-written by Armageddan and Matthias). Though the completion ratio of fictions was very similar to the role-play ratio, the few fictions that did finish are excellent works, worthy of being recommended as a good read to any visitor.
    For those of you who are curious, the thirteen completed role-plays were VGRP Quest, Geowalkers, Destiny Dreams 5: The Programmer's Tower, Remnants of the Arena, Fallout: The Fate of the Wasteland, A You-Make-The-Choices Story, The Saga of the Stars: Arden's Blessing, Void of Illusions II: Shadows of the Heart, History of Venishe, RP Breakroom Complex: Grand Re-Opening, the two VGRP Awards shows, and the VGRP Razzies.
    The few completed fictions (that I have record of) are The Legend of the Saints: Tales of the Old West, by Matthias (the very first RP-to-fiction conversion to occur on the boards); Super Luigi, by Nutcase71733; and Gene, by Armageddan, all of which were viewed very highly by their readers.
    As part of our growth on VGRP, the Hall of Fame was created in early August 2005 to display and recognize the role-plays (and, later, fictions) that got created. A month later, we created the General Message Board (giving everyone a place to chat), the Art Board (giving our artists a place to display their work), and a Video Game Reviews Board (giving everyone a place to voice their opinions on video games). Matthias continued to host his Awards Show, which he had started on VGMusic, having two successful installments plus a parody version created by Thalzon.
    And now, we are here, on our own webspace, at RP Haven. How will this place look twelve months from now? Only time will tell...
    So, this thread is dedicated to the old VGRP board's first birthday. Feel free to talk about your favorite memories, most annoying memories, etc.

RP Haven Logo

    posted by CtrlAltDestroy on May 15, 2006, at 6:46 PM

    Well, turns out that all this time I was planning a surprise: There was no "private poll" at all. Here I was all ready to come out and say "The winner is: Everyone!" and dump all the logos into a rotator.
    Well, this all would have been good and well, except for the fact that nobody submitted anything!
    Yeah, unfortunately, not even my n00b art was enough to inspire anyone to create a better logo for the forum. There are currently five logos up, all of which have been created by the staff.
    If you'd like to create a logo for the forum, we'll gladly add it to the rotation. Once again, it must be jpg, gif, or png, and it must be exactly 300x150 in size. Send it to me or just attach it to a post here, and we'll add it to the rotation.
    So come on! I want to see like 40 logos in the rotation, with something from everyone.

It's back!

    posted by Ricky on May 17, 2006, at 6:57 PM

    Yes, that's right. The Hall of Fame is finally back. It took me long enough... I had to figure out the best way to convert the post-format into HTML format, and then I needed to figure out the best way to show off the media galleries, and I procrastinated an awful lot... but it's finally done!
    The logo is temporary, until I get a better one. I'm not too happy with the navigation bar- it looks awfully plain- but Frontpage is so... difficult with that aspect I'm not sure I want to bother with it for a while. I need to make an updates page as well- that'll come later.
    I did Void of Illusions first because that had the most material to act as a "guinea pig" of sorts. I hope you like what you see.
    Any comments and suggestions regarding the Hall of Fame are welcome. Also, I'm always looking for reader comments!
    Now that the template is finished, I'm gonna try to convert an entry a week in order to catch up. Once I'm done with that, I'll get back to adding stuff to the Hall of Fame (History of Venishe, for example). Notices regarding additions will be posted in this thread.
    I would really appreciate it if you guys chipped in a bit and made logos for the remaining RPs (which can still seen on the VGRP board). It looks better than just plain text... and it shouldn't be hard to make- I just need a fancy-looking logo for each RP. Thanks to anyone who rises to the challenge.
    And that's it. Tell me what you think.

Hall of Fame update #1

    posted by Ricky on May 24, 2006, at 11:34 AM

    Geowalkers is now up! Thanks to Kayorei for the title logo (and Thalzon for making the background transparent), and to Thalzon for providing the artwork (and GeminiSaint for helping me get my hands on it).
    GeminiSaint has also been helping me get the entries set up- thanks to him, Void of Illusions 2 should be up sometime today or, taking various problems into account, tomorrow.

Hall of Fame update #2

    posted by Ricky on May 31, 2006, at 3:20 PM

    Void of Illusions 2 is now up. Many thanks to GeminiSaint for putting the main page together, and giving me most of the pictures for the media gallery.

Hall of Fame update #3

    posted by Ricky on June 05, 2006, at 1:21 PM

    Beyond the Village Walls is now up. Special thanks to GeminiSaint for helping put the pages together, and for making the logo.

Hall of Fame update #4

    posted by Ricky on June 06, 2006, at 11:33 AM

    Tournament of Legends is now up. Special thanks to GeminiSaint for making the page, and the logo.

Hall of Fame update #5

    posted by Ricky on June 08, 2006, at 10:47 AM

    A You-Make-The-Choices Story has been added to the Hall of Fame. Special thanks to Multiball for making the logo!
    I need a logo for Destiny Dreams. Not the new one, the original- Destiny Dreams.

Hall of Fame update #6

    posted by Ricky on June 09, 2006, at 11:35 AM

    Small update: I added some pictures to the media gallery for Void of Illusions 2. I forgot to put up a picture of the beads (it was somehow deleted off my computer ), also, I found a couple pictures in GeminiSaint's deviantart gallery that I didn't have (one of Kuro, one of Miko, and one of those two together), so I got those up as well.
    I'm currently working on the first new entry to the Hall of Fame- the entry that I finished just as MyFreeBB screwed up on us. The Blade of Fake will be up soon.

Hall of Fame update #7

    posted by Ricky on June 12, 2006, at 6:35 PM

    The Blade of Fake has been added to the Hall of Fame.

Hall of Fame update #8

    posted by Ricky on June 13, 2006, at 5:14 PM

    Minor update: Tournament of Legends now has a media gallery. Special thanks to Mavrick for sending me the pictures, and providing descriptions.

Hall of Fame update #9

    posted by Ricky on June 14, 2006, at 3:56 PM

    Okay, let's see...
    - I made a small change to Maverika's description in the Tournament of Legends media gallery.
    - I added copyright info to the picture of Saga in the Blade of Fake media gallery, and I also added a picture of Wootsey and Irah that Thalzon had made (special thanks to GeminiSaint for supplying it).
    - The Hall of Fame's main index now has a new logo, courtesy of Armadox. Thanks, Armadox!
    - VGRP Quest has been added to the Hall of Fame. Special thanks to Matthias for making the logo.

Bluehost apologizes for recent downtime

    posted by CtrlAltDestroy on June 21, 2006, at 8:40 PM

    So we've been getting hit by DoS attacks. Some stupid hacker wannabees had some kind of a grudge against some of the sites Bluehost hosts.

Hall of Fame update #10

    posted by Ricky on June 23, 2006, at 5:16 PM

    Gene has been added to the Hall of Fame! Special thanks to Trauma Advocate for the logo. 

IntelliCensor is gone

    posted by CtrlAltDestroy on June 29, 2006, at 9:44 PM

    I've just finished manually uninstalling IntelliCensor from RP Haven. The default censor should still be in effect. Tell me if you run into any problems.
    Well, I'm off to Florida now... See you next week!

Hall of Fame update #11

    posted by Ricky on July 21, 2006, at 5:27 PM

    Finally! History of Venishe is in the Hall of Fame! Also, I've added Zuntrios' reader comment to the Blade of Fake entry as well, so check that out, too.

Hall of Fame update #12

    posted by Ricky on July 27, 2006, at 3:50 PM

    Destiny Dreams: Somnium Terminus has been added to the Hall of Fame. Also, I added a "cave in" picture to the Void of Illusions 2 media gallery that I missed before.

Minor and major forum changes

    posted by Ricky on July 27, 2006, at 6:46 PM

    The following changes have been made to the forum.
    - The RP Haven Contributions board has been moved from the bottom of the forum to the top, with the News board.
    - The Breakroom Board has been deleted. The three game threads within were moved to the General Message Board; please feel free to continue and create new games there. The two character-driven threads were moved to the RP Board, where they belong, really.
    - The General Gaming board was deleted. The two threads within were moved to the General Message Board; please feel free to talk about games on that board.
    - The Art Board, Fiction Board, and Video Game Review Board were moved from the "Creations" section to the "Community" section; the now-empty "Creations" section now no longer exists.
    Also, the censor has been removed (old news for some of you who noticed, I'm sure). Instead, we're going to use a self-moderating system like the one we were using on VGRP, with some added material: One, if an RP director does not want adult language or material in his/her RP, please respect that wish, just like you'd respect the wish not to use magic in science-fiction or use humans in a non-human world. Two, if you are going to use adult language, take a moment to put spoiler tags around it, so people only have themselves and their highlighting curiosity to blame if their eyes start bleeding. Three, adult language is, as always, not allowed in out-of-character messages.
    And, I think that covers it for now.

Hall of Fame update #13

    posted by Ricky on July 31, 2006, at 8:10 PM

    Fallout: A Post-Apocalyptic Adventure and Fallout: The Fate of the Wasteland have been converted and added to the Hall of Fame. Special thanks to GeminiSaint for making the main pages, and changing the official logo so well! Thanks to Trauma Advocate with helping me in regards to information for the media galleries.