🐀 The Rat Reforms Entry 02: Forum Reorganization

[ RAT REFORMS ENTRY 02 - FORUM REORGANIZATION ]
or, an account of reorganizing the infrastructure of osiris
<< the live journal of hazel-malphe, pharaoh of osiris >>

WOAH it's been a while since the last one of these! Okay so, got a few things to go through since I published the first entry some 200 days ago. In general my reforms have been a little slower now that I've been in the seat for a while, I prepared a whole load of graphics and resources for the day I was elected delegate weeks in advance but it becomes a lot harder to get work done while you're in the seat between IRL obligations, studies, and the constant obligations of the job. However! This is what I've got.

<< FORUM REORGANIZATION & CLEANUP >>

This was the big one, it was one of my first goals going into the Pharaohship. Our forums as they were, while an invaluable historical resource and documentating tool, had been in a VERY awkward position for a long time. As a community we weren't able to direct as much activity towards them as we'd have liked, so activity has been strong in gameside & on discord but minimal on the forums. Technical issues didn't help, although we're mostly over those now.

There were several derelict threads, many of them posted and still OP'd by long-banned members, as well as index visible subforums not used for months if not literally years. So much of the index was taken up by junk that it's a wonder anyone knew what to do at all, add that to our pretty weird gameside outreach infrastructure and you have an explanation for why we got so few citizen applications and practically no legion applications for so long. Osiris always needs to be able to show that it's worth the involvement of its players, the state of the forums should inspire confidence.

I had two primary goals; first was clean-up, it'll feel less like a dusty old crypt if all the dead, pointless, and redundant threads are taken to the morgue. Admin replaced OP on a few of the banned ones to me so it looks a lil less awkward, sorry Adytus but pure black names look kinda ugly.

Second was to reorganize some of the subforums. A few I had archived entirely, and a few were reorganized or replaced by new subforums. I had a few government subforums centralised as to take up less index space and I totally merged all of the applications subforums into one, instead of a blur of like four different introductions and applications subforums it's just a single thread for each application in one subforum. u can see the patchnotes i put on the discord for each change below!

Overall I'm happy with the state of the forums now. There's still a little weirdness going on but I think new members are better funnelled into the applications subforum than they were, the governmental subforum category on the index is a lot less cluttered, and most of the redundant bits have been snipped out. The forums are anecdotally the most active they've been maybe since I joined the region, which I absolutely love to see! I'm also not aware of anyone having connection issues lately, which is encouraging.

<< SOME HOUSEKEEPING >>

Quick one, tl;dr I like never used dark theme before, discovered that a lot of people do and that the Osiris page looked janky while using it, so have shifted the banner and WFE about to better account for people using any theme and not just light theme. I think gold is a generally pretty difficult colour to work with for that, but basic rules are to keep the banner dark enough that it doesn't appear hard on the eyes juxtaposed on a pitch black background + be conservative with gold in the WFE, the new Osiris WFE is mostly the basic colour with some gold highlights. I've switched to dark theme since then now that the WFE doesn't burn my eyes out.

Have also messed with the welcome telegram a little bit to try to get newbies to make the jump into the off-site community more, I've noticed a distinct uptick in engagement since then. Remember kids, the welcome telegram is one of the best recruitment telegrams you can have. Also been keeping up with endorsements, protip I got from Venico, individually telegramming people to request an endorsement back increases endotart engagement MASSIVELY. U kno I used to be a TNPer so I should've known this.

Also, we've had the historical library for years and I've been meaning to expand on it for a while. Maadi beat me to it and updated virtually the entire existing body of records that we'd lowkey neglected, so big thanks to them! There's still work to be done with the peerages and honours, we never actually logged when we got the peerages or where we got either of them, so we're gonna have go go through old forum threads to find when each peerage and honour was actually awarded. I actually have a peerage that was never logged, makes me sad. I've also expanded the library to include historical sources derived from elsewhere too, drawing no small amount of inspiration from TRR's library of spurned knowledge, which I think presents an excellent model for NS libraries to help streamline and demystify learning about NS history. Obligatory clarification that if you don't want your work referenced there then let me know and I'll yeet it.

In a region as old and as diverse as Osiris there's kinda always more housekeeping to be done, there's always some old forum thread that needs to be updated or some area of government that needs to be overhauled, but I'm glad it's reasonably well dusted tentatively.

<< GENERAL EXECUTIVE STUFF >>

Alright last thing for now! Not my own work, I just wanna acknowledge some of the excellent work in Gameside & Community Affairs lately. On Gameside, Tethys 13 has continued to basically solo it. I'm very appreciative of their consistent work with getting Questions of the Day & lowkey hilarious wrapups out, it's not super flashy work but it's very important for gameside outreach and for the community at large. On the Community Affairs side, most of this goes to Cretanja, Maadi, & Dragonian Alliance, all of which have knocked it out of the park in the last like year-ish. Draco had to step down a few months ago for IRL obligations so Cret stepped up and has been on fire, has been soloing a plethora of lil community events + organised the Winter Friendship Festival with The Leftist Assembly, which I hope will become a regular occurrence. Never thought I'd actually enjoy helping run a festival, I think NSLeft just vibes way harder than most other regions I interact with.

And that's basically it! There's still a little more work to be done, particularly with bringing the Sekhmet Legion into full operation, but most of the objectives I set out for myself when I became Pharaoh are essentially completed. I've overhauled and made uniform the region's aesthetics, cleaned up the dispatch system, cleaned up the forums, and every branch of the executive is active. I'm fairly content that all the important stuff is in proper working order.