New forum manager needed!

[Jacob Orlove]

Hi everyone. As you probably noticed, it's been a while since cards were last added to the Master List. Godder is going to try to catch us up a bit, but what we really need is for someone (or several someones) to step up and replace Ephraim as CCF moderator (he's moved on to D&D). No adepts were interested in a long-term commitment, so now it's open to anyone, although not everyone who volunteers will be accepted. You can post right in this thread if you're interested.

In addition, if you'd like to see any changes/improvements to the current system, now is the time to suggest them!

[Godder]

And when he says changes/improvements, anything goes for suggestions, including board set-up, CCF rules etc. We reserve the right not to implement wild stuff, but want to see your ideas. Have at it!

[Illissius]

First of all, thanks and appreciation go to Ephraim and all the other moderators for their hard work maintaining the Master List. That said, I would like to do away with the entire system, or change it to the point of unrecognizability at the least.

I'd like to see a decentralized system where the impetus isn't on getting your cards into a Master List, but merely on sharing ideas, critiquing, and improving them. Everyone clearly has wildly differing standards for what is and isn't acceptable, and I don't post cards so that I can spend pages and hours of my time arguing with people who find something exceptionable with them. Ideally, the only person the cards should have to satisfy is their own creator. (For example, I came up with what was essentially Split second several months before Time Spiral's release, but refrained from posting it because I knew that certain influential members of the community would absolutely hate it. (Incidentally, I'll note that the goal of R&D is not to follow rules but to break them). The reactions I witnessed upon the mechanic's revelation unfortunately vindicated this decision entirely.)

Posting limits would be either relaxed or removed completely; spam isn't good, but with the whole 2-3 threads per capita, several days of discussion, 24H clock system, I only ended up posting a handful of the 100 or so cards I used to have in my file, because I just got tired of the effort and bureaucracy.

The Master List wouldn't have to vanish completely, but I'd rather see it as a Hall of Fame or Editors' Picks type thing than "every card we've ever created"; a panel of well-respected judges would cherry pick their favorite cards from among everyone's submissions to include in it (whether by consensus, majority vote, individual approval, or some other system). And for the other function the List used to fulfill, a means of archival would still, nonetheless, be nice... everything is kept around in the forum itself, but maybe we could have separate threads archiving cards per each user (if they aren't too numerous), or even just handy links to forums software searches per user, color, or whatever else.

I've also been wondering whether it would be worth splitting the forums into a Design and a Development half, a la R&D; what I've described above is essentially Design. Development would take cards from out of Design, change and amend them as they see fit, and make sets out of them. It would probably require lots of over-the-internet cooperation and agreement, though, so (partly based on past experience) I don't think it would really get off the ground. Still, might be worth a try.

One more thing. We have a bit of text in the forum rules to let R&D use our cards if they ever want to, but I somehow doubt that what we have is enough to satisfy Wizards' legal department. (For one thing, no one is forced to read and agree to our rules, so someone could still conceivably claim they didn't, sue Wizards for copyright infringement, and win). Perhaps we could contact Wizards' themselves to see if they can supply us with some legal text and whatever other safeguards they require before they can allow R&D to browse the forums; this might mean having to use a mandatory click-through license agreement-ish page before anyone is allowed into the forums (which may or may not be acceptable to the rest of TMD; personally, if that's the price, I'd be willing to pay it), or it may not end up being feasible at all, but I think it's worth giving it a shot, if only to find out.

[parallax]

I've never been very clear on what purpose the Master List was meant to serve in the first place.

[Godder]

It allows people easy access to the cards made so far, which makes it easier to avoid duplicates (or near duplicates), and also makes it easier to pick out cards if we ever start another set. If we don't care about duplicates or another set, then the Master List is less useful.

Regarding the 'boilerplate' issue, I don't think RnD would look here much, or at least, they'd never admit to it, boilerplate or no boilerplate.

[Illissius]

Regarding the 'boilerplate' issue, I don't think RnD would look here much, or at least, they'd never admit to it, boilerplate or no boilerplate.

Maybe. I recall Maro saying several times that he would love to see player-created cards, but the legal team won't let them, because it would open Wizards up to too much copyright liability. (e.g. if they ever make something even vaguely similar to a card R&D might have seen, that could be used by the creator of the card as grounds for a lawsuit)

[Godder]

One of the recent sets had a 'guest' designer who got the job by showing MaRo his work at a major event (I forget which one), so it's possible. That said, I think being an individual makes things much easier because there's only one person to negotiate with, so the legal issues are much more easily resolved. The chances for a forum managing it are much slimmer, I think we'd find.

Posting limits would be either relaxed or removed completely; spam isn't good, but with the whole 2-3 threads per capita, several days of discussion, 24H clock system, I only ended up posting a handful of the 100 or so cards I used to have in my file, because I just got tired of the effort and bureaucracy.

For what it's worth, the rules don't actually have a specific limit on how many threads you can have going at a time. We have faith that regulars won't abuse it!

I'd like to see a decentralized system where the impetus isn't on getting your cards into a Master List, but merely on sharing ideas, critiquing, and improving them. Everyone clearly has wildly differing standards for what is and isn't acceptable, and I don't post cards so that I can spend pages and hours of my time arguing with people who find something exceptionable with them. Ideally, the only person the cards should have to satisfy is their own creator.

Once you're happy with a card, you can stop. The rules don't force people to add cards to the Master List, they just provide the procedure to follow if that's someone's intention.

Splitting into Design and Development is an interesting idea, but we haven't been as successful in the area of Development as we'd like...

[asi]

Maybe we could introduce some sub-forums with different categories of card creation- like creation contests, flavourful cards, filler cards (they CAN be interesting to design, but maybe nobody would like to discuss them, I'm not sure), and so on.