Wow...

[Shawn]

It's a lot more work than I thought, trying to keep a forum secret. :)

[Master Yoghurt]

Yeah, it is quite an art to master :)

[Morgan Evanar]

*sets Moya adrifted and pulls down the temperature*

[Marcus Telcontar]

:: LIstens to EP II Soundtrack::

[TheHolo.Net]

:lol I se the CT is all set.

[Marcus Telcontar]

Time to think up some of those truly delicious CT's I am becoming so well known for at GJO :)

As Yog would tell you, I do have my doubts right now about this. I dont like the idea of moving, but I do see advantages. For one, I've noted the TTL's of EZboard and my firewall at work dont play nice. It's an exercise in frustration to post anyhting at EZboard, and that happens with nothing else. I would say Ezboard's TTL's are set high. Why, I have no idea. Probably as a bandwidth choke? Or a connection or bandwidth throttle?

[TheHolo.Net]

I'm not going to give you any kind of recruitment speech, but if you have questions, I'll answer.

As for ezboard, yeah they are probably trying to throttle/limit bandwidth in some way so as to help save them some money or something.

[Marcus Telcontar]

No questions, it's just more Ezboard GJO is an Internet home for me and I do have a fair degree of attachment to it. Plus, it has a great deal of freedom for me presonally, where I do pretty much what I want to do. It has been a place where I have protected people in the past and given others a fressh id and start out again.

That's where I think I have my single biggest concern. GJO is fairly free of OOC garbage and I want it to stay that way. I also would like to see GJO keep independant in the mold of "Well if you dont like what we do, go F*** yourself". I'd like to think GJO has become a safe haven and a very plesant place to be, which might be a bit more difficult to do basing the forums here.

I really dont know. This is a bit sudden and I need to think this through properly.

So I guess, summary wise, it's more of the doubts about what I can and cant do now. It's along the lines of can I say what I want if I see somethign wrong? Or if someone screws up and comes to me for assistance, can I help them start again quietly and anonymously and help them amend mistakes? Is GJO going to remain independant? Now, that to some may not be an imprtant question, but for someone like me, whom does do things that would put noses out of joint, it's important. It's the freedom aspect that I have at GJO. It's like a pet I've cared for and now I feel like it could be taken away, even if I have done a good job with it's care and been responsible.

I know some of this might sould totally silly, but that's my hoonest thoughts and the reason I have hesitation.

GJO is my home, which I have a great deal of freedom with. Moving here is like a rental property, which means I have restrictions as it's no longer "my" home. That's really what it boils down to I guess.

Eh, I'm rambling. I'll shut up now.

[Marcus Telcontar]

Onr other thing - one of the things about the freedom of GJo is that I could protect people from hostility generated by other groups. (Im sure I dont have to name whom) That's important to me. I hope that I can still do that

[TheHolo.Net]

These forums will be considered a separate entity from SWFans in all aspects except for the profanity filter we already have in place. SWFans Staff only has jurisdiction here so far as to help out if GJO staff is not on hand to take care of things. Freedom to act as you wish, and speak as you wish will remain entirely up to the GJO staff.

I think you know Nup and I well enough to know that we aren’t power hungry fascists hoping to get control of GJO. Its simply not true. We have gone to great lengths to give the GJO staff as much power as we could and the features I hacked in for staff members are quite abundant in their usefulness and helpfulness. check out the IP search feature sometime., it rocks the socks off ezboard.

I foresee a very pleasant future for SWFans if it does indeed become a central hub that contains all one needs to Role Play in any fashion they see fit, be it NR, Jedi, Sith, Dark Jedi, Bounty Hunter, Smuggler, whatever. I think the single location might do a great deal for making the community closer and stronger if we aren’t as spread out. I think there are a lot of reasons that this could be a great thing, but I said I wouldn’t give you a recruitment speech and I already sort of have so I’ll step off my soapbox now and let you continue to think things through yourself. :)

[TheHolo.Net]

Originally posted by Marcus Q'Dunn
Onr other thing - one of the things about the freedom of GJo is that I could protect people from hostility generated by other groups. (Im sure I dont have to name whom) That's important to me. I hope that I can still do that These are the GJO forums still, the staff of GJO will have the right to do whatever they see fit to keep the peace in their opinions. I know the current staff of GJO well enough to trust them and I am sure Nup does too with his willingness to host these forums here.

[Marcus Telcontar]

Well...... I'll definantly think it through. I'm not going to dismiss the idea out of hand, becuae it is a quite good setup I have to say. It's more the concepts of independance and freedom to act that is on my mind. I've adready mentioned to Yog that the fact GJo has grown quite quickly in the last month or so is also something to be kept in mind. I'd like that growth to keep going.

So there are my two concerns. Independance (whoch you have answered favourably, thank you) and continued visibility / growth.

[TheHolo.Net]

I’ll give you a couple responses to your second part and then leave you to ask more. :p

These forums are present on search engines and are crawled by web bots on a very regular basis. I see web spiders in the Who’s Online section very frequently. I mentioned to Yog earlier that with your own custom style sets in these forums you have the ability to set your own META HTML tags for keyword content.

And besides all that, you can do what we did at the old Fans, make every forum link directly to the corresponding forum here. Ezboard didn’t shut SWFans down when we did it, though we did get the one threat after about 6 months of no activity, which we just went ahead and upgraded to gold since it was A)Cheap [no traffic to speak of really] and B)We already had the funds, which they would not refund. So really our visibility as an ezboard forum went unchanged in the switch to a vBulletin forum since the people that visit the ezboard are directed here, and our site referral logs show it.

[Shawn]

It's along the lines of can I say what I want if I see somethign wrong?In a word, Yes. :) Your guys' board, you say what you wish.

[Master Yoghurt]

First of all, Mark, thanks for being honest and open about what you think. Believe me, I do know what you mean about GJO being a home. This group has given me many fond memories. I have learned to know some great friends, and it is a great place for others too. I dont know how many laughs, annoyances, frustrations and pannings I have received over the years, but I do know I would not have missed it for the world. :)

Let me assure you one thing, I would be damned if I let that community we created slip away. I would never propose moving here if I did not honestly think it would be good for the Jedi. This group has had its low points and high points, crisis and growth. Most of them I have experienced (I joined SW vs Titanic back in summer 99). I CARE about our community. I am sure you know that. Would I have spent all the hours.. weeks, IP searching for infiltrators back in the old days when that used to be a major problem if I didn't not? Heck, I even used to have a huge text file with all the posters IP's. It was a nightmare to update. Then all the countless battles, the frying pan, the the Force Kittens, the Force Enema, the wedgy!

I always respected you Mark, you were the one I respected the most, and the reason I got involved in the roleplays in the first place. Always viewed you as a mentor.. always listened to your opinions, rants and whatnot, most of the time, I have agreed, on rare ocassion, I have disagreed though, lol. Even to this day, I rate your opnion highly, because I know even if you may be blunt some time, you always have a good point and a heart for the Jedi and the roleplay in general. You CARE too! I know that, because else you would not been here posting your concerns. Neither would you be putting up with all the OOC crap you have been through time after time, and still come back! That is what I call compassion for the roleplay and all the friends you have here. Would you believe, on some ocassions, I was concidering if it was not better if I left all together as well? In retrospective, I am glad I never did, because I think this is a great community that grows better all the time. The bonds grow stronger across all levels. The OOC can be bad some times, but I do feel matters have improved.

I firmly believe in the future of roleplaying here at swfans. I think moving here would reduce the OOC distance between the groups. We, the GJO could be the pioneers in fusing the roleplaying community into a unity, while at the same time, keeping our independence and freedom to rule ourselves. Yes, that is important too! We are all unique indivividuals, there are differences, I know, there are some people who cant stand to be in the same threads as each other, sad but true. But you know what? No one is stopping them to go on about their business. They will still have the option of not going to these forums (GJO), and we can go on about our business, that would be like running these forums as we always had.

As I see it, we have pretty much control to do whatever we want. You were using the analogy with renting a house. I dont see it that way. I prefer to see it more as a co-ownership of a village. There are all these small houses. Unlike a rented house, each house owner could do whatever he wanted with the house. That includes installing a new roof top, staircase or a new chimney. If we want a new layout, we get it. If we need a new forum, we add it. When we want a hack to the script added, we request it. Is there anything we need changed, we call the carpenter/engineer/plummer etc (Ogre) or the village architect (Nup). What if we want to paint, change the roof tiles or add some tapestry? Well, we can do that on our own. Direct access to the image folders allow me to change the graphic design on the fly. Dont believe me? I could change that GJO image map into a flying banana with monkeys hanging beneath it if I wanted to. Right now. Those reply buttons could be made into frying pans and Darth Maul wedgies. Heck, why do you need me for that, anyway? I could just give you FTP access to thegjo.com website, and you could add those on your own, when you want to your heart's content.

In fact, if you look at how much work Ogre and Nup as put into this forum allready, I think it clearly shows their commitment to help with anything we want. It speaks volumes about how helpful they have been so far. I am 100% confident they have the best intentions. All they really want is the best for all groups and posters and the roleplay in general.

[Figrin D'an]

Reservations about a major move like this are only natural. Admittedly, I have a couple as well. I feel attached to our current board as well... perhaps it is somewhat a silly reservation, since our board can be identically duplicated here, but it's one of those things that simply exists on a personal level...


That aside... I think this could really help the RP community as a whole, as well as GJO. The biggest problem/complaint about the RP part of our community is that many members of the individual groups seem to hide away on the board of their particular group, and don't get involved enough at the main board. A move like this might be conducive to increasing that kind of inter-board activity.


My main concern in this venture was ensuring that the existing GJO staff would be able to continue their duties and provide services in as complete a capacity as that can currently. After a conversation with Yog, and reading about the hacks that Ogre has instituted, I am confident that will indeed hold true. As long as GJO is still run by the GJO staff and it has the power to independently administrate the group, my primary concern is alleviated.

[Morgan Evanar]

Sorry. I have zero reservations about moving. I am unnatached to any EZboard. I am somewhat fond of the content, but I'd much prefer not to have all of the buggy weirdness EZboard brings.

In other words, EZboard can go frell itself.