Tweaks & Changes (2/22/2016)

[James Gryphon]

Made more changes to the forum that most of y'all will probably think are important, so I felt it would only be fair to document them here. In order of magnitude, most to least:

1. I installed a new mod which expands the poll options a bit. The forum already recorded who voted for what, but now, this can be publicly displayed. When you go to make a poll, you'll see (underneath showing the poll results) the ability to choose voter visibility. The options are fairly self-explanatory, so I won't go into them here. You also have the option to allow voter comments; that allows voters to put in short comments explaining why they chose such and such, or to just spam if that's their kind of thing. *shrug*

I must emphasize that voter visibility is an option; it is not mandatory, and no polls that already exist have been automatically changed, without the poll creator changing it, to allow this. Furthermore, once a poll has been made, it cannot be switched from one kind of voter visibility to the other without deleting all of the votes, so you don't have to worry about a thread like SFC being changed to reveal everyone's votes to everyone.

The one catch with all of this change: admins (that would currently be Matthias and me) can now choose to see whoever voted for something on any poll. Right now, I plan to exploit this as much as possible, so that I'll never have to wonder about SFC votes again. If this makes you uncomfortable, all I can say about that is that I do understand. If there is a public outcry against this, I'm more than willing to roll back the mod, or else promise not to look into your voting options for personal pleasure, if either of those will make y'all feel better about this.

If you don't read anything else about this mod, read this: the mod's default setting for voter visibility is "ON". If you don't want the public to be able to see who voted for what, change this before posting your poll. I could probably change the default setting if y'all want me to, so definitely ask if you want that.

2. There's now a tagging system. It works a lot like Facebook or Twitter's "hashtags", and hopefully this can help organize topics better. It's worth noting that you can only apply tags to topics, not individual posts, and then only in topics that you have started.

3. There's now a list of the active staff members in your menu bar, to the right of "CALENDAR". Not a big deal, but I thought it was cool.

As usual, if any of you have any questions or comments about any of these changes, or on other topics, please let us know. Thanks for being a part of the community.