BYOND Guilds Released

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ID:14499
 
Jun 29 2006, 6:39 pm
Keywords: members, website
BYOND Guilds are finally here! If you've been reading the BYOND Labs blog, you already have a good idea of what's in store with this update. Guilds can essentially function as BYOND subcommunities, built around any theme. The theme can be anything you want - from your own BYOND creations, to a particular genre of games, to something that's not even related to BYOND.

For this initial release, guilds have the following features:
  • Any BYOND Member can turn his/her site into a guild.
  • You get a forum for your guild, with unlimited subforums.
  • Other BYOND Members can join your guild.
  • You can choose whether to accept or reject applications for membership into your guild.
  • You can assign ranks to your guild members.
  • Each guild rank can have various privileges, including:

    • Post to your blog (same as the current Contributor feature, which will be going away in lieu of this).
    • Edit your site's CSS.
    • Manage guild members (accept or reject membership applications, etc).
    • Manage the guild forum.
    • Manage your hosted files.
    • Separate read, write, and moderator privileges per subforum.

Initially, we hope this will be a great tool for people who wish to build forum-based communities, or game development teams that want to collaborate through a central guild site. This release is just the beginning of our guild functionality - we have plans for many more features. See BYOND Labs for some hints on what's to come.

Getting Started
To enable your guild, simply go to Manage Guild, which is a new button on your Edit Site page. To activate your guild, click Guild activated and then Save. Once you've done this, you can create your forum, set a message to be shown to guild applicants, and start creating your ranks.

You can customize the look of your guild forum via your site's CSS, just like you do for the blog. There are also new elements for guild-related pages and boxes. Particular CSS classes and ids of interest may include:
  • #guild_member_page
  • #guild_box
  • #guild_member_content
  • #guild_members
  • #guild_rank
  • #forum_page
  • #forum_page_header
  • #forum_content
  • .admin
  • .unread
  • .style1
  • .style2
  • .style3

See the default blog CSS (your Edit CSS page) for a more complete list.

As always, we are more than willing to listen to your ideas for future enhancements. Post your feedback and bug reports here.
Jun 29 2006, 8:11 pm
Awesome job. One thing, though:

Click here to see.
Jun 29 2006, 8:13 pm
Eek, how do you leave guilds?
Jun 29 2006, 8:19 pm
Oops, that Join button was moved from the headbar but I forgot to take it out of there. Fixed.

Airjoe, the same thing just occurred to me! Looks like we forgot about that little detail... Should be an easy fix.
Jun 29 2006, 9:24 pm
Mind commenting back once the leave guild thing is in? I don't want to just keep checking every 5 minutes, not sure if it's in and I just can't see it.
Jun 29 2006, 10:38 pm
It doesn't list you as a benefactor if you turn it into a guild? Is that a bug, or is that how it's going to be? It shouldn't be like that, in my opinion.
Jun 30 2006, 1:19 am
I thought it was going to replace the current hub system? I'm a little anxious to get away from this whole BYOND-staff-reviewer based hub functionality, and I know a lot of people want to get published... It's been a while :P
Jun 30 2006, 2:45 am (Edited on Jun 30 2006, 4:07 am)
I love the history tab that's right there and in the open for you to see without trouble. Awesome. I was a little annoyed with adding the ranks one bye one. Would be cool if you could seperate the ranks with a comma, like so:

Rank1, Rank2, Rank3, Rank4.
Err, also, when changing pretty much anything, it would be very unannoying if the screen would scroll back down to where you were working.

Also, I'd want to be able to give each rank an image that corresponds with that rank. So when they're posting on the guild forums their rank is said and shown. Would be neat because I'm using US Army ranks. :)

Another thing, I just got confused and accidently made two forums that are the exact same. I found no way to delete a forum, only a way to 'deactivate' it. So how do I delete a forum?
Jun 30 2006, 3:46 am
The only thing I have to add is maybe another box on member pages that lists the guilds that person is currently in (and preferably the names are a link so the owner of the member site can get to a guild page without having to type in the URL manually).
Jun 30 2006, 5:50 am
Is there anywhere where we can see a list of all guilds?
Jun 30 2006, 9:46 am
I thought it was going to replace the current hub system?

Eventually, yes. We didn't get that far for the first release.


I was a little annoyed with adding the ranks one bye one.

Rather than doing the comma-separated thing, I'm hoping to do some of my first AJAX coding on the guild management page, so you would still do things one by one, but they would take effect immediately and the page wouldn't reload. I'm hoping to work on this over the holiday weekend.


Is there anywhere where we can see a list of all guilds?

We should add a guild criteria to the search page...
Jun 30 2006, 9:54 am
You should add like a checkguildmember() proc, kind of like IsByondMember(), would be rather neat.
Jun 30 2006, 9:57 am
BYOND 4.0 is adding guild functionality, I think.
Jun 30 2006, 11:26 am
We definitely intend to support some API...in fact our hope is to reuse the existing channel API.
Jun 30 2006, 11:27 am
What about leaving guilds?

¬_¬
Jun 30 2006, 11:28 am
Hahaha.
Jun 30 2006, 12:30 pm
Apparently you can still do something like

http://members.byond.com/XxDohxX/forum

even though I don't have a guild or the liking. But, I messed around with it and you can't put a forum actually up. Just thought I should say something.
Jun 30 2006, 12:49 pm
Will non-members eventually be able to join somebodies guild? Since these are meant to be centers for game communities it would be nice if all members of said community would be able to join, membership or not.
Jun 30 2006, 1:08 pm
Will non-members eventually be able to join somebodies guild?

That's not currently planned. The ability to join guilds is one of the benefits of BYOND Membership.
Jun 30 2006, 1:24 pm
You'd get more potential members if non-members could join a guild, since most gaming communities are probably about 90% non-member.

If I was the creator of a semi-popular game and had a membership, I would think to myself how I really like how guilds provide a more convenient way for me to manage my games community (for example I may have been paying already to host a forum for my game), but the fact that the majority of my community wouldn't be able to even post in the guilds forums would kind of put a damper on it.

Plus you would then have all of those non-members now cruising around in the members section thinking to themselves "gee I should buy one of these memberships."
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