Unofficial Starbound Forums Update Thread

Greetings everyone!

In the spirit of bringing both SB communities (Official & Unofficial) together, I've proposed to both sides a "What's going on over there/here?" thread. Essentially, a thread on each site that quickly covers the important goings-on on the "other" site. Both site admins agreed this would be a decent idea, and I hope you will as well. So, how will this work?

Well, with some frequency, I will post substantial stuff from the SBF below....and OSB stuff over there. Some things, like contests, will be obvious. For others, I'd like for you, the staff and community of OSB to tell me what you feel is worth the folks of SBF knowing. In the end, having both sides of the SB community in contact is best for all involved. So, as you see cool stuff to share...just let me know!

Cheers!

UnOfficial Starbound Forums (SBF) "Happenings"

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Efforts to Mend Fences

With the introduction of new staff, one of the first issues the team selected to tackle was the less-than-ideal way that members of the OSB forums were being treated when choosing to visit our corner of the SB universe.
As such, the team posted some stern guidance to everyone, linked below for your perusal. This is intended to be strictly enforced, and we hope it will show that we are serious about mending any ill feelings between the two communities. As always, anyone here is welcome to stop by!

http://starboundforums.com/threads/community-bulletin-forum-conduct.799/

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Latest SBF Evolutions

Ever the tinkerer, SBF Overlord Intradox has introduced some clever new features to our community. Below is a brief synopsis:

• Once members reach "Member" status, they may create their own custom title.
• Member-Initiated name changes are allowed, but only so often (every 120 days)
• Chat window was added to the entry portal: http://starboundforums.com/chat/

Stop by to check out the new digs!
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New Staff Named!

With the influx of new members - and in anticipation of launch - new staff members were named for SBF. See below for a list of changes!

• Blumchen was named Admin, only subject to Intradox (aka "The Law")
• New Moderators were named: Mr Mystery, Artemis, Sil
• Yours truly was imbued with mod-like powers as well....though my primary role remains "Human-Cyborg Relations"

http://starboundforums.com/threads/forum-rules.3/
Congrats to the new staff members!


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Recently, Intradox (SBF Admin) rolled out a few tweaks to the member interface system on SBF. A brief summary is below - and a lot of this is still in flux and subject to further tweaking. Experimentation is great!

- All SBF members that have reached "Member" status have the ability to self-edit their own custom title.
- Staff roles are now clearly denoted via the use of Ribbons appearing below the users name. Specific roles are color coded.
- All SBF members can change their own member name once every 120 days if they so choose.
- A more expansive list of post ratings was added (beyond "likes"). This one is definitely still in the experimental stage!
- SBF named a few members to a small News Team that is responsible for keeping SBF abreast of the latest happenings with the game itself. The team is headed by Mr Mystery.
- Other ideas are in the works - stay tuned!!!

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Intradox has continued improving the interface over at SBF, finally landing on a darker theme that is receiving widespread praise. The key new feature is the ability to add a custom background - making each members experience unique! This is still a work in progress, and interested folks are invited to test out the new interface and provide feedback in the thread linked below!

http://starboundforums.com/threads/new-theme-feedback-important.552/

Preview image:

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The "Aliens" Art Contest. Set up as the first of a series of monthly contests, this competition asked members to design and draw/sprite their own race of SB Aliens. Three winners per category, prizes include featured status, forum goodies, and fortune and glory. Future prizes expected to increase along with the community.

Though the contest wound up on the small size (hey, gotta start somewhere! ), the quality of the entries was good.

http://starboundforums.com/threads/the-winning-aliens.447/

The overall winner was Beta with his bionic space raptor.



Second Place went to Zebri for Captain Spocktopus


A third place tie was broken via staff vote....and Maplestrip's Plutbot won by a narrow margin


Congrats to each of the winners - hopefully this will be the first of many contests with ever-better prizes and entries!

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The second monthly contest is now up on SBF. This time, the design challenge is to create your own space station/planetary base. More intriguing is that ALL forms of media are fair game....so, if you are the most epic lego builder or mashed potato sculptor alive, you have a fighting chance! Prize is a custom title along with the usual sticky/feature prizes. Entries are due April 30th - get yours in now!!! Best of luck to all future entrants!
http://starboundforums.com/threads/design-a-space-station-or-planetary-base.460/#post-9630

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That's it for now...moving forward, I'll rely more on each community to highlight things they want to share (along with my own observations). I expect this will pick up steam on both ends as information leaks out and each community comes into its own.

As always, comments and feedback are welcome!

Cheers!

 

Good to see you're trying to get more people to know about the unofficial forum, which has been a bit quiet since everybody went here...

 

Glad you like it. It's actually an attempt to bring some common ground and sharing to both sides.....as you will see there is already a "sister" thread over on SBF. Hopefully, these can keep a bridge between both spots, keeping folks that choose to stay/spend most of their time in one place or the other.

It's high time to embrace such sharing around a common purpose....building a strong community (with two facets) around a game in which we are all interested.

I plan to update both threads as new information/contributions/news drops. I do hope folks will find them useful and that they fit their intended purpose.

Cheers!

 

Well, it's a noble cause. I'd even think this thread deserves a sticky ; )
There isn't much 'much' news about either forum yet, though, except for the two alien art competitions, which are very alike...
And of course the fact that the other forum is pretty quiet right now :'(

 

With all honesty I don't really know why there needs to be a seperation at all.
This official area should facilitate the whole community, not with some gap splitting the people between two forums.
Sure, it's okay to have a different place. But it's not the best and most optimal example of community unity.

 

Plenty of games and gaming communities can and do support both official and unofficial/fan sites. Done right, each can offer a different nuance on things. Over time, each spot will settle into its own niche....folks will probably hop between the two....and, ideally, the broader community is the better for it.

It's time for both sides to stop debating the existence and/or the culture of the other. Both exist....and will continue. Instead, we can realize all of this is in support of a common cause....building a great community around and supporting SB! Then we can focus on those nuances so that it doesn't feel disjointed or "split". In the end, it feeling that way...or not...is up to all of us.

I hope that makes sense.

 

Very well spoken. I hope you're right...

 

This certainly looks interesting. I like the idea, although I'm not convinced that it will catch on, but it's nice that you're bringing this to people's attention. I guess we'll just have to wait and see how it turns out.

 

Hello.

The effort you have put into this looks like you have done an extremely good job.
However, my personal opinion is, splitting the community is just a bad idea, especially when this forum is extremely good.
The only reason you should split a forum is if the one provided is a piece of crap. However the one provided here at Starbound is extremely well done, it has a great community, a great moderator/admin section and it covers all appropriate areas.

That is my opinion, nothing against you, that is how I feel.

 

Well, personaly, I like the other forum more. The only reason I'm here is because it has a 1,000 more members :S
I guess it's just a matter of opinions, though.

 

I don't think I can express my support for fansites any more eloquently than Loki already has, but I'll throw in my opinion regardless.

As someone who owns and runs a Minecraft fan site - fan sites are completely essential to keeping communities alive and thriving. The main Minecraft forum is huge and hectic, and for newbies, perhaps not very welcoming. On our site, we have a much smaller community - some 35,000 registered users - and it's a closer community. We run our own Minecraft servers as extensions of that community, everyone loves that they can make friends on the forums and then play with them on our community servers.

It doesn't matter how big, ugly or unwelcoming an official forum is; people will always use it, because it's official. It will always be the place people go to for reliable information. But that being said, it will not always be the place they go to for hanging out with other players. Sub-communities are great for this. If we discouraged them, we'd be alienating a large percentage of fans.

It's not segregation or 'splitting' of a community; think of it more as sub-districts of a city, or provinces of a country. We all belong to the same 'country' but we also belong to the communities of our province, our town, our village, our street.

 

Wow, that is very well said. However, I'm afraid that Starbound might not have a community like Minecraft has. That is if it's anything like that of Terraria. At the moment, I think it's honest to say that this here is a small comunity. The game hasn't been launched yet of course, and I'm not sure how big a community usually is for a game with so little teasers (at the moment, I think we're far above average because of the Terraria players coming here), but Terraria had a far smaller community than Minecraft or most non-indie games.

As Starbound is looking now, we can expect a lot more fans than we had for Terraria, but we can't know that yet. A second forum might not survive it now, which is proven by the fact that there are only max 30 members online at the same time there. I hope the community becomes bigger and more people get to know about the unofficial forum so it won't die.

Yes, I'm very negative here, but it's just my opinion. With only a little community here, it is the question if we need an even smaller community somewhere else.

 

Hello.
Minecraft is split into lots of communities because it is so big. Because Starbound is much much much smaller then it would be best to keep everyone together, I personally think you've got it all right here....maybe a few more sub forums.

If you say it's not the best for hanging out, try accomodating for it? Like, have this Fan-based forum directly linked and vice versa, that way people won't have to spend ages searching for what they want, it is all there for them on Starbound.

The main thing I'm being worried about is that the Fanbased one became popular and ended up selling out the Curse, and then Starbound would be known as another Curse game.....

 

I don't think anyone associates WoW with Curse over Blizzard, or Minecraft with Curse over Mojang, and both of those games have Curse-owned websites. So what if the other forum hands over ownership to Curse? That's their decision.

As for 'try accomodating for it' - I put my point across poorly. I didn't mean in terms of what one forum has, feature-wise, that another doesn't. The only thing that can accommodate different kinds of communities is the people. Every community has its own 'vibe'. Some people don't like it here because our rules are more relaxed - they find it more comfortable on the Unofficial forums in that regard. That doesn't mean we should tighten up our rules - in doing that we'd ostracise the people who enjoy it better this way. Which is exactly the point; it's absolutely impossible to please everyone, which is why a plethora of fan sites help community growth - they provide a range of places for people to fit in.

 

I agree and understand that pleasing everyone is actually impossible.
On a note, I like it here more than other forums due to a more relaxed approach of the rules (I don't know if anyone else is the same), because people still obide by them and I haven't seen too much mishap on the forums yet, apart from a couple of incidents however that was dealt with quick and easy.

You have won me over on the multiple forums for a reason, I never thought of it in that way. So, would you think about linking the forums up together? Or having a page on Starbound with a 'List Of Forums' and people can just pick and choose which one they want, to suit their needs? ;o

 

Providing a 'Community' page from the main site that lists all Starbound fan-sites is something that might be cool. ^.^

 

I assume there are only 2 so far?

 

Could be ;o I have taken into consideration what you said about different needs. I just fear of Curse >..> because they provide horrid servers for people.....

 

That sounds about right.

 

This forum, the unofficial forum, and about four wikis.