Hey, everyone! It's that guy again.
As you may or may not have already noticed, we've just expanded the skeleton of the boards we had so far to be more or less complete. We've tried to consolidate and expand or generalize the old structure a little, based on discussion between me, Prime32, and Stratovarius (say hi to our new cyberlich overlord). Here's the upshot:
The Meta section is for talk outside the forum's primary purpose.
-Board Discussion is, naturally, for discussion, questions, concerns, criticism, etcetera about the boards themselves. Make suggestions, ask about issues, complain to or about moderators.
-Off Topic is for anything that doesn't have to do with gaming.
The Gaming section is about games in all their forms.
-The two D&D sections are meant to contain all D&D talk regarding their respective editions, including both CO discussion and non. 3rd and 5th are specifically separated because these were the two largest sources of discussion on the old boards. Should other games or editions prove popular enough, we can split off their own boards as well, or merge them back into Other RPGs if they die off.
-Other RPGs is for any and all other role-playing games. This includes other editions of D&D like AD&D or 4e, as well as edition-agnostic talk, for now.
-Tabletop is for other tabletop games that aren't RPGs, such as board games, trading card games, wargames, traditional games, and so on.
-Videogames is for just that, videogames. While different types of games work differently, they're all ultimately games, and certain principles of game design and storytelling are universal, so we agreed we wanted all types of games in the Gaming section.
-Game Design is for talk about game design specifically, basically a more general rename of what was the Mechanical Writing board on mmx. Dissect games of any stripe, talk about what makes them tick and what lessons can be learned, talk about designing your own games, and so on.
-News, Podcasts, and Reviews is for posting and discussing gaming-related blogs or blog posts, news, articles, podcasts, reviews... although the board name sounds exclusive, it's not meant to be a complete list of what goes here.
What was formerly the handbooks boards has been merged, renamed, and split off into a separate Handbooks & Resources section. The idea here is that in addition to the old D&D 3.5 CO handbooks, you can post any sort of resource for any system, such as compilations of dev commentary or online content, GM advice articles, cheatsheets, and more. The old handbooks section already sort of got used like that, so we're broadening and making it official.
The other thing we're trying here is the Submissions board. You'll note starting new threads has been disabled on the main Resources board. The idea is that new or incomplete threads get posted in Submissions where they can be discussed and improved, and then moved to the main board on request when complete. You'll still be able to reply to threads in the Resources board, only making new topics is locked.
The Homebrew section is, similarly, a dedicated section for homebrew. We've removed the subsections, since many of the big projects tended to straddle several of them, and will continue to provide separate boards to large projects or collections.
The Play by Post section is the same old. We've put the Campaign Journals forum, where you can post recountings of your own games, under here for now. Prime32 has been looking at several possible mods to enhance the PbP section, but for now we're focused on getting all our ducks in a row first.
We're still under construction, so this layout most likely won't be final, but this is where things stand now and our thought process on it. Feel free to discuss and make suggestions!
Oh, and just to clarify: This doesn't constitute confirmation that the previous MinMax boards are gone for good. We're still seeing if we can salvage the old data off bluehost's servers. Whether we manage to or not, we'd like to take the opportunity to give the boards a bit of an update.
