The Times They Are a-Changin'

[Tyvokka 198]

The Times They Are a-Changin'

 

After what seems like years(oh wait...) I am excited to announce the release of the latest Deadlystream overhaul next Wednesday (5/23). 

 

What's New: 

 

• New theme - Updating the homepage and forum to have a more up-to-date look and feel. 
• New forums - We have had a large backlog for new forum requests and they will be fulfilled beginning next week.
• Clubs - The ability for members to create and manage their own micro-communities within Deadlystream. Much like sub-reddits or the "social groups" feature of LucasForums.
• Chat - Not exactly new but the chat room is coming back to a forum near you!
• Bookmarks - Allows any member to save content and come back to it later (think reddit save feature). 
• Wiki - Adding wiki functionality to Deadlystream to make tutorials and general knowledge sharing more intuitive. 
• Discord - We will be endorsing an official Discord for the KoTOR community and displaying Discord stats on Deadlystream directly. More to come soon. 
• Admin tools - A much needed update to admin and moderator tools for the staff to help make their lives easier. 

 

 

What's Changin': 

 

• Gallery and Blogs - Modernizing and adding new features to both applications, making them easier to use and adding some must have features. 
• Community Engagement - Updates to polls (surveys), raffles and awards. We want to see a big uplift in the number of community events hosted by both Staff and the community as a whole. 
• Downloads - Many small enhancements to the downloads section and many optimizations to make downloads faster and easier. 
• Login and Profiles - Login with discord, steam and google and new fields to display your steam and discord users directly on your user profile.
• Premium Members - Additional premium only features such as DS email accounts, chat rooms, forums and more. 
• New Users - Updates to initial communication to new users, helping them understand Deadlystream and the KoTOR community overall. 
• Modders Account - Focusing on advertising this feature to the community, its free and provides a bigger upload limit, access to a new modders only forum, and additional features around the site. 
• Bans - More transparency around bans, why a member has been banned and how long the ban is for. 
• Staff - We will have more announcements around available positions and general staff updates in the near future. 
• Other - Hundreds of small tweaks to posting, uploads, downloads, user profiles and the overall user interface. 

 

 

What's happenin':

 

 

• 5/23 - we will release the site update, forums will be updated immediately, the front(home) page will be down.
• June - roll out of new features, forums and general updates. Optimization of the site and new features throughout the month. 
• Mid-June - Discord integration, community announcements / updates. 
• July - Homepage will be brought back online, tweaks to the site and features as needed. New admin tools rolled out.  

 

I am personally very excited to be able to finally announce these changes. Any questions are more than welcome.

 

May the force be with us all!

 

[jc2 581]

I am very appreciative of the upcoming heightened transparency on banning!

I particularly look forward to the forum renovation, modders accounts, downloading changes, and the community engagement updates. 

 

Overall, it's nice to see Deadlystream updated. 

[DarthParametric 3,785]

Oooh, new sub-forums and a wiki. Nice. Is this just an update to the latest IPB, or are you migrating to a different script like XenForo, VB, etc.? What's the wiki? Was it that one you liked the look of?

[Tyvokka 198]

Oooh, new sub-forums and a wiki. Nice. Is this just an update to the latest IPB, or are you migrating to a different script like XenForo, VB, etc.? What's the wiki? Was it that one you liked the look of?

 

Still IPB, found some good wiki enhancements to the pages app. I like the one I found but I dont really want to maintain a "bridge" between the two apps long term, once they have an SSO solution I will take another look. 

[VarsityPuppet 1,085]

Somewhat related: Is IPB something that we can integrate with a mobile app of some sort? I've been wanting something like that for awhile. I think it'd be awesome

[bead-v 251]

Exciting! That's a LOT of really awesome improvements! Looking forward to it!

This could be considered a request, but considering how much is being done, I will rather formulate it as a question and be content with an answer to it: is the PM system getting any updates? (the feature I'm interested in is to be able to search through posts in a conversation – right now, I can only see conversations where the search string appears, not posts).

[Tyvokka 198]

Exciting! That's a LOT of really awesome improvements! Looking forward to it!

 

This could be considered a request, but considering how much is being done, I will rather formulate it as a question and be content with an answer to it: is the PM system getting any updates? (the feature I'm interested in is to be able to search through posts in a conversation – right now, I can only see conversations where the search string appears, not posts).

There isn't anything specific to PMs but I may have just missed that.

[Tyvokka 198]

Somewhat related: Is IPB something that we can integrate with a mobile app of some sort? I've been wanting something like that for awhile. I think it'd be awesome

Hm I will keep it in mind, we may have options for this later in the year.

[LiliArch 115]

This is thrilling news. Looking forward to updates!

[Mellowtron11 180]

Really looking forward to the Wiki inclusion for basic modding tutorials! Thanks for letting us know what's going on!

[DarthParametric 3,785]

I see we finally got a tools sub-forum. I'm surprised there wasn't at least a little fanfare about it though. Anyway can a mod finally unpin and lock that NWNMax thread in the general modding forum, and move across the pinned KOTOR Tool thread as well.

@VarsityPuppet: With your newly minted admin status, I gather we are hassling you about this now. Make it so.

[bead-v 251]

VP was kind enough to make the new forum for us, thanks again @VarsityPuppet! Though it would be nice if we got some news as to where the other site updates are at.