Feedback Requested: Article Submission

I agree with BBcode. It's simple and most people who use any forums use it.

I like the new layout. It's pretty.

A few more things:

Using Ctrl+V to paste doesn't seem to be working right now (it did before...).

The results of prior dice rolls don't seem to have migrated with the rest of the database.  Will they come back when the dice roller does?

@ Clueless. I can't find the Planewalker Encyclopedia. Has that been moved over to the wiki?

If it has are you planning to put canon information in a separate place to fanon information? I hope you are as I need a bit of a leg-up with Planescape and that encyclopedia is very helpful to me. I was hoping that (when the internal navigation was a little bit better) I could use it as my 4th source of external encyclopedic links for the Spelljammer Wiki. The information there is fantastic, but I do need to be able to navigate around it to find useful links.

@ Loki: I'm juggling too many projects at the moment. I'm fairly tied up getting the Spelljammer Wiki up and running, but was hoping that after I got specific parts of the SJ canon wikified I could then see where there are gaps in the canon and write bespoke fanon to expand it. I orignially thougth that this could only be useful to Beyond the Moons, but maybe Planescape fans could get some use out of it (even if they don't want to do your Planejammer thing).

With Greyhawk, Forgotten Realms and Dragonlance all having a different "theme" and even different rules I'm thinking we should be shooting for making every crystal sphere seem unique. Now the vast majority of that work would be something that would be appropriate for Beyond the Moons, but if BtM has somethig like a Greatspace section built for it, I see no reason why Planewalker couldn't get a plug on article (or even a PDF) along the lines of "A Planewalker's Guide to Greatspace". I see Greatspace as a chance to build "The Hellenic crystal sphere" and from a Planescape point of view, it would be the chance to visit a part of the Material Plane that features an advanced Hellenic culture and iconic monsters from Greek history.

One of the great things I think that could be done from the Planescape point of view is that planewalkers who randomly visit the Material Plane might not be aware of the crystal spheres and might not realise that different regions of the Material Plane have been "claimed" by different gods and "customised" to their tastes. I think that if a PS GM wants to raid Spelljammer (and Beyond the Moons) for places to visit (and maybe even ignore spelljamming ships) they could pick random planets and let their players learn about that part of the Material Plane the hard way. I think this sort of "piggy back" stuff could be built by people like us and sent to the appropriate official site.

I think Clueless's tag idea would be very useful, because all stuff like this could be written by people like you and I and tagged with "spelljammer" "crossover" and/or "planejammer". And if Planejammer ever got to be big, it could have a "homepage" that gave appropriate links to Beyond the Moons (as well as a ton of articles explaining how to reuse those things in a planejamming way as well as a more conventional planewalking way).

And I think that the "official cooperation" idea is something that can be built by people who have a foot in both camps and then used as a model to encourage other people to form crossover groups with other D&D communities. (Even without going through Spelljammer it could be very interesting for PS players to be taken to less well known D&D settings, like Wilderlands or Jakandor.) I'm not quite ready to start churning out new stuff yet, but I'd be very happy to have Planewalker get equal access to anything I write for Beyond the Moons. And if you ever get around to starting work on a Planejammer netbook please poke me with a stick, as I would love to be involved.

I am a massive fan of the Hypertext d20 SRD. I've got all the core 3e books, but I find it far faster to build characters online than by flipping the pages of gamebooks. I agree totally that the hyperlinks are incredibly useful and would like to see an online 3e PSCS that was chopped up like the Hypertext d20 SRD. I think it is essential to have the full monty PDF version (as it is far easier to read that sort of thing cover-to-cover) but a hyperlinked version could link over to the appropriate parts of the SRD and make it uber fast for people to create Planescape characters.

My main issue would be how do you separate the 3e PSCS from the 4e PSCG, or any other PS conversion (or even a PS retro-conversion that allows classic D&D fans to join in with the fun).

If you are going to have various canon, fanon and conversion efforts on the same site visitors need to be able to spot the difference fairly easily. Dragonlance Nexus has some nice looking masthead banners. You have some great art over here, and I wonder if you could do something similar. You could even bring back those funky section names as subtitles for individual sections. That way people could see the new and old name on a masthead (as well as maybe a planewalking character that reminds them where they are).

@waermodi email the screenshot to me or to Clueless

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Thanks!

Stuck in the real world, detailed responses coming for you son Big Mac.

i was having the same problem for a while, but it turned out being a switch thing.

i clicked on the one tab, then tried to switch to another, and then it overlapped. It turns out you have to click the one you had selected first in order to turn it off, so you can then click the one you want.

also, just as a quick thing to say, i really like the new site so far! it looks really good, and its pretty easy to navigate (above issue aside)

Uh, can I make a suggestion? I don't mean any offense, but this site is very, very, VERY user-unfriendly. There is nothing in the FAQ that gives a how-to for submitting wiki articles, for one. I'd love to submit some myself, but I have no idea how. There doesn't seem to be (or at least I can't find it) a guide/description of what each forum is for, leaving those like myself rather confused.
And heaven forbid you want to browse the spells/equipment/etc. submissions... (A list page with hypertext for many of these things would be nice)

Yup - all good now.

Speaking as someone who dropped in again after a long time off the site is frankly a huge mess. It's almost impossible to get to anything save through the search function. The Wiki link dead ends at the opening page. The search function seems well organized but it conflates forum posts and articles.

Most depressingly, even if you find something, the formatting has all vanished so every article is now nothing but a giant wall of text (it's depressing looks at my submissions, which had formatting when submitted, in such a state). This has afflicted even such essential things as the FAQ.

If maintaining the articles in a functional state is too much of a strain on the staff's energies, I'd think it might be best to subsume them into the forums. Create an entire section of the forums purely for articles in a finished state as a way to ease the administrative requirements. Then you could get rid of the now superfluous sub-menus which are currently not functioning.

I'd be quite willing to help organize such material (though I have no coding skills) in the interest of getting things into a format where they could be accessed and read by a visitor browsing the site.

The wiki is is definitely as of right now. You click on the Wiki link in the upper right, it takes you to Rip's Grand Tour Submission, and then clicking on any of those links renders and 'Access Denied' message. You can get to articles within the Wiki using the search, but once in those articles it rapidly becomes impossible to move through the supposed links between them (though that might be in code of the individual pages, I have no idea really).

As to the sub-menus I didn't mean not functioning int he technical sense (apologies) but in that they really aren't useful. They just lead to a submission log for the various categories, and if an article is not in one of those categories there's no way to reach it via menus at all.

As far as the articles go, I think they need to be organized by some measure. I mentioned putting them into the forums because then you could (presumably) create a sort of pseudo-directory system by using a system of sub-forums. Perhaps the wiki would work this way if it was functional, I don't know. Regardless I think there needs to be some kind of topology to organize all the many submissions. I believe the original intent was to mostly sort everything that wasn't part of a specific project by plane. Obviously this never happened and a number of articles ended up floating in nothingness.

I think ultimately it's probably best if things can be organized using as few different methods as possible. So, for example, if the Wiki method is to be used for the encyclopedia summaries of the canon material, then it probably makes sense to organize the fan-created stuff the same way, and just put a label at the top of each age for differentiation.

Hey, just looking at the site again after a long absence, and... I hate to sound too negative, but I've got to agree with Hyena of Ice above, especially this part:

Yes, yes, a thousand times yes! Sure, the searches are nice if you know what you're looking for, but if you just want to browse the monsters, or locations, or whatever, it's an excruciating experience. You only get lists of ten articles at a time, with snippets of each article, in apparently random order. (Well, I assume in reverse chronological order of submission, but it almost might as well be random.) If there would be any possible way to have a page just listing all the pages in a category—just listing the titles alone, without a summary would be fine, and not even necessarily every page in the category, but certainly much more than ten—that would be extremely helpful. (Especially if they could be listed in alphabetical order.) I'm not saying to get rid of the current way it's listed, but a (prominent and clearly visible) tab or button to bring up just a plain list of articles would make for a vast improvement in browsability.

Everything looks great!

I would ask one thing - how does something come up onto the front page? Because I recommend articles for the front page but it seems in the last month we've had the same stuff on here. Does it take a certain number of votes to get this stuff up here?

Thanks again Clueless (et al?), your dedication and hard work are much appreciated!