Announcing Something Completely Different
 

Hi there musicbanterers,

Me and Trollheart don't always see eye to eye on various topics, but if you've been around MB for a while you may remember that both myself and Trollheart have played with the idea of creating a new home for the MB community. In short, my motivation has come from a frustration with the current ownership and lack of updates while I believe Trollheart has been chiefly concerned with the day when MB might suddenly be gone.

Finding some common ground and motivation in our concerns, we put our differences aside, hooked up on DMs and went about establishing a new forum with the sort of features we'd want from a modern forum experience. After some testing, we've made a forum that we're very happy with. We call it:

Something Completely Different

Our self-hosted forum runs on Simple Machines Forum and is hosted on a rented space/server. It is accessible through our newly registered domain: scd.community.

Some features:

• Mobile / tablet optimized
• Phone notifications
• Optional dark theme
• Users can change to visual themes if they don't like how it looks
• Users can like posts
• Users can tag/mention other users (generates notification)
• Secret forum so we can share personal details without sharing it to the whole world
• Support for MB's weird, old smileys
• Automatic image resizing (huge pics get smaller)

The biggest bonus is a forum that we manage on our own, such as updating and adding features. This way, we can also share backups and make sure that your content doesn't just disappear one day.

BUT! A forum is nothing without users. While a whole MB signup is too optimistic, we want to warmly welcome you and hope you'd like to check SCD out. Hopefully our features and growing community will make you want to stay.

We have a small to-do list and once our community is up and running, we're hoping to find some motivated moderators, both to nurture the community, but also to help us develop Something Completely Different further. We're hoping some of you can help us with this.

And if nothing else, you can have SCD as a backup place or safe haven from which to put pressure on Advameg.

If you're curious, feel free to check out our mission statement and, of course, post any questions you might have or send me a PM.

Added it to my bookmarks, might join later

Cool GD :) Looking forward to seeing you there

I'm still tweaking the CSS to improve readability etc. but here's a quick gander at the current state of the index as it looks on my phone, side-by-side comparison between light and dark themes.

https://i.imgur.com/fjjD1Xll.png https://i.imgur.com/yqvrwdBl.png

The cyan text in the dark theme should be a little brighter, so that's on my to-do list. I wanted to be able to easily switch to a dark theme because I think the current blue MB theme is keeping me up at night. :laughing:

Also added a couple of features I earlier forgot to add to the list in OP.

You've done a great job on building the SCD website, Guybrush, and I'm happy to hear that you and TH have been secretly collaborating even though you have often taken opposing views on the various "What to do with MB?" debates.

I'll join SCD when I can work out a new avatar (which may take longer than you would imagine :shycouch:)

I'm in. Thank you!

I took a tour and the new site looks very impressive, Tore - thanks to you and TH! And great name for a forum.

Like Lisna, I plan to work out a new avatar (which may take me even longer than Lisna :shycouch:).

Hey, thanks for the kind words, Lisna :) Me and Trollheart have turned out to be a (surprisingly) good team, I think. He's honest with me when my ideas suck and wise in the ways of MB, so that's very good. He came up with the name, among other things. As for what I bring to the table, I guess I'm currently the resident techie / nerd and have some management experience that I can apply here.

Looking forward to seeing you on SCD :) <3

Edit:

Hey, ribbons and Chula too! Brilliant! Thanks guys :)

A couple questions. One, would we be able to post Youtube videos without it overloading the server?

Also, will there be sub-forums, not overloaded like MB is, but some simple ones like one for album reviews for example.

I'm also curious how much is this costing you (hope I'm not being nosy here but we need to know what we're walking into).


PS- If I do make the jump, I do have moderating experience from my days at the writing forum.

****posting will commence.

No worries about nosy-ness :) I appreciate it.

I think YouTube videos should be okay. We don't know yet what the scale of the community will be, but my basic thought is that if we run into server load problems that are caused on the hosting side of things, we should either move the site or upgrade. Things need to run smoothly.

About sub-forums, sure thing! I kinda suspect we have too many forums already so my thought would be to branch out when / if it becomes a necessity. But I don't wanna be the sole decision maker and subforums for movies, books and album reviews (forums in the media section) is one of the concrete suggestions. If people write reviews, it makes sense to have them imo. A great thing is it's so easy to change on the fly when we control things.

The current price sits at about a yearly 60-70 USD I believe? It doesn't worry me, but of course we could set up a GoFundMe or something. After all, it could get more expensive if we figure we need more server power.

Moderator experience is very welcome :)

Nice forum Guybrush, it does have a nice look. But I thought you wanted something more streamlined like your vision for MB was. This Something Completely Different has a bunch of forums just like MB has lol


signing up :thumb:

I think Guybrush definitely deserves credit for 99% of the work done on the new forum. I did come up with the name we agreed on, admittedly, but only after several long-scrolling lists of names which were "you got to be kidding!" I think we kind of stumbled on a good name.

The idea I believe is (despite the name) to keep it generally as familiar to MB-users as possible, with the added benefit of being able to request, and actually have implemented changes, unlike with MB which as we all know is like shouting down a mountain and hoping that instead of the echo of your own voice coming back up, the meaning of life will be communicated to you.

As we're only getting started, it's a good time to point out what we should/shouldn't have, though I would caution that if Batty joins we should probably lock away the good silver, you know what he's like. All are of course welcome, and all we ask is that you treat us as gods and pay us absolute and blind obeisance, and make the odd sacrifice when the moon is fuil. Sound fair?

Great to see some people getting interested, especially mostly people I like and would prefer to have over there, and we look forward to welcoming you all. Should note that new avvys come at a max of 150 pixels, which equates to the larger ones here, so you don't need to worry about having tiny little hard-to-see pictures. After all, size matters, or so I'm told.

:shycouch:

Oh and I can confirm for anyone doing journals, you can just copy and paste directly to the new forum: all YT, images, text effects etc seem to work right out of the box, so there's no fiddling around.

You might say the current forum layout shows the breadth of topics we'd want to cover, so it's a sort of ambition.

But I still wouldn't want inactive tombs laying around, so you may still find me making the argument we should prune the forums a few months from now. :laughing:

I'd welcome anyone to disagree with me, of course.

I don't see no Mike Varney section.

Nerd chimes in:

150 width and a bit more length, but one needn't worry so much about uploading the right size because the site's resizer will shrink it for you :)

Just don't get a tiny one!

This should generally be true. If anyone finds it's not, shoot me a pm and I'll see what I can do to improve compatibility in the future.

For now, the list bbcode acts a little different, more like the html equivalent. But then I think I may be one of a very few people who actually use it.

All available bbcodes and smileys are not yet in the post window, but are secretly included. F.ex, I knew we needed to carry Shycouch-guy over for the sake of our dear shy Trollheart. :)

Where I go, the couch goes. Not that I use it that much.
Do I?
:shycouch: :shycouch: :shycouch: :shycouch: :shycouch: :
:shycouch: :shycouch: :shycouch: :shycouch: :shycouch:

Someday, probably not real soon, we'll be able to log into something like this:

https://twinmotion.unrealengine.com/...dmeWd_SE3Y8URU

Someday, probably not real soon, that will support my browser. But not today. :(

¯\_(ツ)_/¯

I just stopped over there and signed up. I'll put up my avatar later, after I dig it out of my files.

Sorry if this has already been asked, haven't read through every reply here yet - but you mentioned 'secret forum' - does that mean we won't be popping up in browser searches, etc. and probably won't be seeing new members naturally join and participate?

Great work though guys! I know tore that if you had your druthers, things around here would be much different. Great to see you put your money where your mouth is, very much appreciated! :beer:

Thanks SGR :)

There's a secret forum which is intended for threads like members picture gallery or ones where you might share real names or sensitive personal information. It's currently invisible to bots and guests and those who have less than 100 posts, although I've made special arrangements for those who come over from MB so that they get early access.

We have those threads here of course where they're just out in the open, but I myself prefer a bit more privacy with certain kinds of info.

Ahhh ok so the 'secret forum' thing is not the whole forum itself?

No, it's just one forum out of many. The secret heart of the community perhaps, if we get there :)

If no ones going into this, I have to take it down since it's large. Just wanted to do something fun.

Looking good fellas.

Cool, but if you're gonna do rendering let's really do it!

https://i.imgur.com/5WAIiA6.jpg




The big guy would be Trollheart obviously.

It's not a rendering, it's a virtual world. You can walk/fly around in it. You can also change the time of day, and the materials. Go explore a bit, it's gonna be gone tomorrow.

Really cool Plank! Thanks for sharing that with us! When/how did you get into Unreal Engine development?

And what band/song was the guy in the house jamming out to?

Kinda creepy bunch of peeps in there.

Looking at me funny. Hm.

Joined.

I wonder whether we can get OH and Ant to join, I miss them.

OH got banned from the Discord too so I imagine he's gone.

OH is in the discord server I mod. He does options trading and trading daily. He types in our stocks channel the most. He wants to master options trading this year but he is already pretty good in my opinion.

Hes active in there though so he's not gone anywhere, just was banned from the musicbanter discord because he kept talking about his dick from what I remember lol

What happened?

What Mindy said.

Just plugging that I am doing an exploration of Caravan's first seven albums in a tribute to my tribute to gentle giant here: https://scd.community/index.php?topic=25.msg117

OccultHawk is active on SCD, just in his NonSexual form.

OH is very active (and well behaved so far). He has twice as many posts as anyone else save Guybrush. No more new members lately though. No one else is interested?

He thoroughly beat me at chess, so perhaps his NonSexual form has more brainpower.