Happy May! I hope all of our Fleet moms, and the moms that put up with us, had a fantastic Mother’s Day last week.
We don’t have a lot of business this month, but there are a few announcements. First off, as you’ve no doubt noticed, we’re trying something new this month with the monthly meetings. It was suggested last month that we consider using forum channels for our monthly meetings instead of the normal text channel. Starting this month, we’re going to start posting meetings in a forum channel, with each month’s meeting being a separate post. This will allow us to stay better organized since each meeting will be self-contained. If anyone wanted to go back to a prior meeting and see what they missed, they won’t have to scroll through months of other meetings to find the one they want.
For those of you who were at this past Khitomer Conference, this is very similar to how we handled the different panels. The old meeting room will eventually be moved to the archive. Going forward I’ll continue to create the room ahead of the meeting time, and include the link to the room in the reminder bot message. There was some confusion today about which room we were in, so I’m sure there will still be some bugs to work out. Just note that the meeting will be in a different post each month.
We are also starting something similar with the recruitment channels. Historically we’ve had three channels that I would consider to be part of the “recruitment” family of channels. The most obvious one is recruitment. There commanding officers could post ads for their sims. looking-for-homes was the inverse of that. In this channel players could post information about a character they were looking to place, and commanding officers could reach out to them for more information. And finally, the characters channel was a place for members and prospective members to discuss some ideas they had for new characters, and to get feedback from the community.
What we’ve done is consolidate these three channels into a single forum channel. This new recruitment forum channel will work much the same way as the old channels. The difference now is that each sim ad, each character ad, and each character discussion will be their own separate post threads. This will help keep conversations and ads from getting lost in the shuffle, as well as make it easier for the staff to enforce the recruitment rules. When creating a new post, it will be required to choose tags so that the posts can be more easily searched.
An added benefit of having ads moved to posts is that there is no longer a restriction about only responding to posts via PM. Now players and COs can respond directly to the original post.
The last update I have this month is about the next upcoming convention. SciWorld 2023 will be held on June 10, 2023, starting at 10:00 AM. This year’s event will be hosted by Star Army and RPG Writing.
From the OngoingWorlds post, there will be a mix of voice presentations, text panels, and hopefully trivia this year. If you are interested in hosting a panel, please reach out to one of the co-chairs or post interest in #panel-signups in the SciWorld Discord.
As always, Live Long and Prosper
-Alex