=][= THE EMPEROR'S CHILDREN FORUM HAS ARRIVED, AND BLOGS HAVE CHANGED =][=

[Brother Tyler]

With the impending release of the new Emperor's Children codex and a range refresh, we are seeing a lot of Emperor's Children topics cropping up. To save everyone time later, the Emperor's Children forum has been created.

 

We are also in the process of revamping the Blogs and several important changes have taken place:

• Members may now create an unlimited number of blogs (increase from the previous limit of 1).
• A variety of categories have been created for blogs, helping members to organize their blogs and increase findability by other members.
• Links to related blog categories have been added to various forums.

This is a work in progress, but the basic structure has been created. There is a lot more work yet to come.

 

For those members that already have blogs, you can move your existing blogs around. First, you'll have to create the new blogs. Then you can select any of your internal blog categories and move them into the new blog. I'll post a mini tutorial about this later.

 

Planned work for the Blogs:

• Change the redirect icons (right now it's the red helmet) to the faction icons. We'll retain the red helmet icon for those blog categories of a general nature (e.g., the Modeling, Sculpting, and Painting Blogs icon linked in the + GENERAL PCA QUESTIONS + forum will remain the red helmet), but factions deserve some theme.
• Links to factions that don't have separate forums (e.g., the Raven Guard, the Iron Warriors) will be linked in the relevant Resource topic (e.g., the Raven Guard Blogs will be linked in the Raven Guard Resources post that appears in the Adeptus Astartes Resources topic).
• Recent blog entries will be displayed in forums, if possible. For example, the Dark Angels sub-forum (in the Adeptus Astartes forum) will show recently posted blog entries in the Dark Angels Blogs category. These will likely appear in the sidebars. I'm not sure that this addition will be possible, however, so I'll be playing around. Don't be surprised to see some tinkering going on.

Something you'll notice is that we don't have categories for games (the Horus Heresy: Age of Darkness game is the obvious example). The concept with our Blogs categories is that games will be identified by including the appropriate tags. So if someone is creating a blog about their Ultramarines [Legion] army for the Horus Heresy: Age of Darkness game, they would give their blog a nifty title, then assign the Ultramarines Legion and HHAoD game tags. Actually, we haven't quite settled on all of the tags for games, especially the Horus Heresy: Age of Darkness game, but I'll edit this post once we figure that out. It will be much easier once we upgrade to Invision 5.0 and tags become pre-determined.

 

And just as we've added links to the related Blog categories, we will probably similarly add links to the related Gallery categories. So you may see a link to Dark Angels & Successors albums appearing the Dark Angels forum. And we might do this for Downloads, too. The intent is to give members easier access to related content around the site, saving you from clicks (e.g., you don't have to click the GALLERY button at the top of the page, then the Imperium category, then the Adeptus Astartes/Legiones Astartes sub-category, then the Dark Angels & Successors sub-sub-category).

 

We may consider similarly adding Gallery and Downloads content to sidebars, too, but I'm not sure if we can filter things out appropriately (e.g., so that only Dark Angels & Successors albums/images appear in the Dark Angels forum). If we can't, we won't add those sidebar blocks.

 

With the change in blog limits from 1 to unlimited, we will be adjusting the progressions for creating blogs. We are looking at revising all achievement progressions, however, so we'll implement all of those changes in one fell swoop. For what it's worth, we're looking at increasing from 5 to 20 levels, with some new colors added in. This will affect a lot of things, though, so we need to get everything prepared before we implement anything. Once we do, the system will retroactively award achievement badges.