Dear fellow Nescians,

about the recent absence of our beloved friend Christie, please read this blog post if you have access.

Howdy visitor!

As you can see and have noticed if you check the website regularly, this website is heavily under construction. I would like to clarify what to expect. and indeed…

No more forum!

The forum, based on PHPBB is no more. It was simply too sensitive for hackers and spammers and with it being open source, it also meant updates came swiftly and were too often not reversely compatible with older versions. It required a huge amount of administration and reprogramming to keep everything working. We are going to do it in a different way.

Clan-blog

This new website is a combination of generic clan information and the applicable registration forms on one hand and a clan-wide blog on the other. What does this mean?

Well, for one, you don’t need to go to the right forum chapter anymore to post your comments, questions, tips, suggestions and life events you want to share. You can write your piece first, drag-and-drop pictures and place them, and then choose which categories you want it to appear in. Yes, those can be multiple. Then you can choose, regardless of the category if you want it to be public or private. Public means it can be read by any visitor to the website. Private means it can only be seen by other clan members.

Read the manual…

Oh dear, I can hear your eyebrows lifting! Manual? You hate manuals! Yes, and for that reason, you can just skip the entire manual and only use it if you are trying to find something you want to do. It is however wise to read the excerpt. Excerpt? You love excerpts! See? problem solved! No but seriously, once you get to the writing post part, it looks quite different than you might be used to. It can be as simple as writing a title, writing the text, pick a category, pick public or private and click ‘publish’ or ‘draft’… Or you can add images, embellishments, frames and borders, animations, video, sound, weblinks etcetera! For that…. it might be handy to open a second tab in your browser and magically make the manual appear.

Draft? Am I being drafted?

Nope. Another change to the forum we had before, is that you always keep full control over your posts. You can write a draft and finish it some other time. You can change your post later and even delete the whole post if you are no longer satisfied with it and it has not been manually locked or archived by an administrator. You can ask an admin to do that or to unlock it or delete it when that is the case. You can later change it from public to private or reverse or put it in a different category. You can even just change the picture you used if you found a better one. More freedom, more control. You can be notified when someone wrote a comment to your post.

Only want to read…

No problem. You go to the overall blog page and you select a category and it will show you all posts in that category from newest to oldest. If you want to see what an author wrote, click the author (anywhere, like in the post meta text) and you will see the posts by that author. Click a date and you will see the posts written on that date. Want to see all the posts about dogs or cats? Use the search option and it will show you all posts about dogs or cats, if you wish by a spoecific author from a certain moment in time.

When is it ready?

That depends on how much time there is to actually finish the programming and make the website secure and functional (read: simple) enough for everyone to be able to work with it. Current estimate is… a few weeks.

Since the e-mail address we had for many of you was not or no longer appropriate, or just not present, we will need you to re-register with your current valid password.

Not putting in a valid password results in your password being sent to the Internet mist some people call a cloud and will be lost forever. So if you wish to share your points of view or actually read the news and other members; posts, please use a valid e-mail address in the registration.

After you log in, go to your profile and fill out the other elements of your profile form. Two things we urge you to do is to change your password right away and enter the valid e-mail address you can access (in case you select that you want notifications sent there or to recover your password). Admins cannot see your password, so if you forgot it a recovery link will be sent to you. Your private data will not be shared outside the clan and your e-mail address will not be shared with anyone.

The site is almost finished! We added a Private Messaging system, rules pages, many a blogpost, some documentation on how to write a post and quite a few more things. We still need to do two things:

– Tell the existing members how to gain access, and

– Test the site and fix the initial issues that might arise.

You are not alone!

For most clannies this type of writing blogposts will be new. Even though we can direct you to the needed clicks and checkboxes, things will inevitably go wrong. For that you can use both your personal private messaging system and the contact form. Admin and editors will help where they can and untill the 3rd, 4th post give directions untill you don’t know any better than as if you’ve never done anything else before.

Yes, it takes getting used to. Yes it is more work than clicking, typing and clicking and ready. Like with the previous forum. Let’s compare:

The forum was like this:

• Log in
• Read posts
• Reply to someone else’s post by clicking reply and typing, then clicking Submit

This Website is like this:

• Log in
• Read posts
• Comment to someone’s post by typing your comment in the comment box and clicking Submit, or replying to someone’s comment by first clicking Reply there

Oh… hang on… that’s the same with one more option!

Writing a post…

Writing a brand new blog post requires a few more clicks but it has a huge advantage, to which I will come at the end.

The forum was like this:

• Surf to the Category you want to post in
• Surf to the subcategory
• Click New Post
• Type your title and text – the forum decides what it looks like; the Category decides who can read it (this is still a bit the case)
• Click Submit

This website works like this:

• Look at the top bar and find the + New menu spot, hover over it and select Post.
• Write a title, select private or public and pre-publish your post (you can always edit it later)
• Pick a category or categories, then pick an editor of your choice (there is a manual for both)
• Shape your text and images any way you want, you have access to almost everything
• Open the bottom (purple) menu and click ‘Save’ (If you leave the editor you will be prompted to save or dump)
• Revisit your post and edit the existing post, delete it, add to it, change pictures, shape it differently with the Visual builder or the classical editor (WordPress logo (W) in the left upper corner – posts – your post – trash or edit or quick edit or Divi edit whichever you like best) – OR limit your blogpost to specific roles or persons.

See? also 5 steps plus one more for an enormous amount of extra rights, permissions and options.

Make us something beautiful!

That will be the next challenge once you have access: Make your blog posts as beautiful as you possibly can – if you want. Or stick to plain text like before and we will read it anyway!

Still too difficult? Help is never far away. But give it a try and you will soon get used to it. It is a different way of doing the same thing… more beautifully.

This new Clan blogsite is great and has so vastly more options than the old forum did, but with supreme power comes, well… not really responsibility in our case, but more… well, simply more. More options, more choices, more freedom.

However, not everyone is suitable for more freedom, and even less for more choices.

So for those clannies we are looking into a more simple front end editor that takes away most of the choices. If they change their mind, they can still edit their post later to add more… But first hand it won’t be more difficult than simply filling in all fields.

For now, it’s not there yet, so please use the manuals for now.