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.