Tag: features

Trello Redux

I have also reorganized the Trello boards, now we have unified boards for Current Plots, Dead Plots, Character Development, and Lore Development.

When the site was updated to use Google Workspace for email and such, it caused a few issues. One of those issues was, it broke Trello. After some time today, I have managed to recover what was in our Trello account and it is now back online! I have also reorganized the Trello boards, now we have unified boards for Current Plots, Dead Plots, Character Development, and Lore Development. Each of these boards centers on plot elements (past and present) which need to be developed in order to do a specific plot or set of plots. As usual anyone is free to join. Thanks to a new policy of Trello we can now have the ability to link files from Google Drive, OneDrive, Box, and DropBox into a Trello card directly.

Please use the Current Plots board for plot ideas that need to be flushed out. The Character Development board should be used for characters (NPC’s and otherwise) being prepared for a plot. Anyone should feel free to move cards into Dead Plots if it was their idea otherwise, please let staff handle that. The Lore Development board is placed there for when a plot line requires background lore to be developed for it.

As always anyone is free to use these boards. Please label a new card with the setting it goes with, since we’re using a unified set of boards for all 3 settings. Happy writing!

Trello Boards

In an effort to keep things organized and try to not drop plots and forget to RP out storylines. I am going to try to put all major plots (and hopefully most minor ones as well) onto our new Trello boards. I’m not sure yet how this is going to work in practice, but I’m hoping it’ll work well.

As such, here are the public links to the boards. Trello doesn’t have a way for me to just use an invite link to let people be added, which is probably a good thing. Instead I have to actually add people. If anyone would like access to create/edit/modify Trello cards just let me know.

I’m going to do my best to also put past plots, outlines, and ideas onto it as well so that we can try to revive things and maybe resurrect some old plots.

URL Update

In the long process that has been moving to the moltenaether.com domain name, the URL’s for all blazingumbra.com will now automatically redirect to the corresponding page on the new domain. All BU links will work exactly as are for a good long while. Eventually we will be moving entirely to the moltenaether.com domain but probably not until 2021 at the earliest. Users may need to log in again to the Wiki or WordPress as the cookies are no longer valid with the new domain.

If anyone gets any redirect errors (most common is likely to be too many redirects) I encourage users to wipe their cache and refresh. If the error still occurs, let me know what page was being accessed so I can do testing and resolve the issue.

Discord Sign In Added to Forum

For those people who may not wish to sign into the forum using yet another login, in addition to Facebook and Google we also now support login via Discord credentials. If Discord is linked to the same email you used with Discourse, you can use that as of now to sign in to your existing account.

Discourse Single Sign On

All users of the forum can now use their Discourse login credentials to sign into the WordPress. This will automatically link your Discourse information and profile from the forum to the WordPress database. I’m working on possibilities for using Discourse as a Single Sign On solution for the Wiki as well but that is a long way from finished.

Those people who already have accounts on both, the system will use email address to link the two, if anyone has any issues let me know and I’ll do my best to fix them. This is going to make it a lot easier for people to post their own updates for their own stories.

Infinite Codex – Notes & Tags

For a long time now I’ve been using OneNote for my notes, before that I used Evernote. I’ve used a lot of other software as well, the problem comes when you want people to collaborate on those notes.

Discourse has a feature they call a “Wiki”, by that it means a post which can be edited by anyone the way a Wiki is. This isn’t nearly as powerful as our wiki, but is still pretty useful. I have called this kind of universal notebook the Infinite Codex. As I explain in the description of the area, it is a place on the forum to put notes about plots and other ideas which can be edited by everyone, commented on, and doesn’t have to be correct nor is it instantly part of our canon. This is designed to be informal, similar to a post where people comment and reply but where the author or anyone else can go in, make changes, additions, and the like.

I’ve started by posting to it almost all of the half-finished storylines I have notes on in hopes that this will give people an idea of how it can be used. All of the information is up there, it can be easily edited, and it can be easily linked to elsewhere on the forum or anywhere else. My hope is that when people want to get some ideas out, they feel comfortable just making a post in the codex and editing it as they need.

Tags

I have also enabled the tagging feature of the forum. It’s had this feature for a long time, but until today it was disabled. Posts within RP areas need to be tagged with the tag for that setting. This allows using the tags to pull together information from across form areas. Major plots will also have their own tags for the same reason. People who’ve been here long enough to be in the “Regulars” group or otherwise have sufficient access can create their own tags, otherwise use the ones that are already there.

I’ve gone through and tagged most everything where it should be. Hopefully this will allow better organization and finding information (say from Phoenix Nebula or the Codex) and tying it to a particular post or series of posts.