What should be done with the All About You section?

[Kyrit]

I'm sure all of you have noticed many of the changes that were recently made, but we aren't going to just leave you in the dark. As such, I've compiled a list of the various changes that have been made to the forums. Additionally, we have a poll for all of you going on as to the fate of one of Evelon's sections; the All About You section. Many staff members feel like the section isn't exactly needed. It's something users could always just include in their journals if they really wanted. People have used the area though, and from time to time users do still use it, even if it's not very frequently. As such, we're going to leave this one to you guys.

Anyways, on to the changes that have already been made!

Wishlists;
       Made a subforum of Important Documentations

Auction House;
       Made a subforum of Advertise; from now on only official auctions will be held here, and the rules have been updated to such. If users want to hold their own auctions though, they can still hold them in the Advertisement forum, which had its rule section updated to showcase such.

Tournament section;
       The entire section was renamed Events, to make room for some changes.

Test and Mock Tournaments;
       Made a subforum of Tournaments

User-Hosted Tournaments;
       Made a subforum of Tournaments

Contest Central;
       Moved up to a forum of the Events section, so it's not buried in the Out of Character section. Additionally, a subforum was made for all user-hosted contests, to help all official tournaments stand out.

Removed;
       Seasonal tournament subforums; All official tournaments will now just be in the main tournament subforum.
       Outline Roleplays sections; these areas just weren't used.
       Meet the characters; again, this area wasn't really used.
       General Vacinity; over several years, there were only ever 9-10 threads in this section. As such, we just moved them to Medicai City, where users can still access them.

I believe these are all the changes that have been made currently. Hopefully it isn't too much of a shock and everyone can adapt to them. And if there are any future changes that any of you think would make the forums look nicer, feel free to suggest them to us in the suggestion boards!

[Remedy]

I love the changes being made. Honestly I feel like it's very effective in making the forums more organized and easy to navigate.

To weigh in on the All About You section:
I've seen various topics there where people are using it as kind of a mix between a second zoo pen and a second journal. Somewhat of a place to keep ideas and plots without fear of them getting buried in a "safe keeping" post in their journals. I think it is very useful in this respect, and might even be more widely used if the name or description of it were tweaked a bit.
Maybe make it more blatantly of an area for plot organization, personal information, and anything else that doesn't fit in a Zoo Pen or Important Docs. This could also be used as an area where people can keep accounts of their RPs, and perhaps could be a good place for a stickied "Active&Open Roleplays" topic could go.
I feel like these revisions might make it more of a useful and comprehensive area, and people with threads there already wouldn't have to fear losing them to the void or anything.

[Mojave]

I like the idea of reorganizing the forums, and I'm good with either keeping or discarding or moving the All About You section. What I'd like to see is an overall cleanup/reorganization. For example

UPDATES
Updates (cleaned up with everything over 6 months old moved to Archives and threads for certain types of updates where the mods can post updates about that subject. Like one thread for marketplace updates, one thread for trait updates (removes need for minor updates board), one thread for sales, etc)
Archives (anything older than 6 months and not part of a general subject thread goes here)

GETTING STARTED
Rules & General Info (maybe include an updated thread about how to order customs with the correct paypal account and email to send orders. I personally have to ask since the adoption site says one thing and the old sales thread says something else. xD )
Help
Suggestions (maybe sticky Mod suggestions and throw the rest of them in this board or keep Member Suggestions a sub forum)

YOUR PETS AND YOU
Hellos and Goodbyes
Zoo Pens (with it's current subforums)
All About You (important docs, wishlists, and journals as sub forums)
Official Records (with it's sub forums)

SHOP AND TRADE
Evelon's Marketplace (remove the Trader's Outpost and Auction House completely. Put Morey, Vance, Alonia Ranch, and Kiel as shops)
Advertise (roleplay advertisements as sub forum)
Bazaar (user trade houses could go here as a sub forum or removed completely since they're pretty much inactive)

And then the rest is good as it is. o3o

[Remedy]

Hrm, Mojave, looking over your organization list I'd just like to weigh in with my opinion. Of course, I'm sure every user might have differing views on how it should be set up. XD
I don't think a lot of things really need to be changed, because the site has been very functional as it stands. Just a few tweaks here and there might make it look cleaner and make it easier for newbies to navigate, though.

(a "-" denotes a subforum of whatever is above)
UPDATES
Updates!
-Minor Updates

I think this should be kept, as its useful for mods to announce small things that won't have a profound or long-term impact on the forum.

-Archives

I think this should stay a subforum, as I highly doubt anyone would be accessing it often. However, I do agree that anything from the Updates threads that are more than 6 months old should go ahead and be moved here.

Suggestions Board

I honestly think the suggestions board's current placement is perfect as is, because the suggestions potentially become updates. It ties in with the theme of the section, though the general suggestion area is not as widely used as the member suggestions board. Maybe member suggestions could become the default "suggestions" page? Or stickied mod topics, as you mentioned. There are just a lot of them, so I don't know if that would be practical.

GETTING STARTED
Rules and General Info

Obviously this is important to keep first and foremost, but I also do agree that many parts of it could use some updating. I'd be more than happy to hash out some rough drafts for updated rules sections, if that would help out any. I don't see it as something that would be very hard to do.

Hellos And Goodbyes

I think this should stay in the "Getting Started" section, as that's where new users go to introduce themselves and, well, get started. I don't see it being very applicable in the "Your Pets and You" section, since it's not really a record-keeping place for your pets, and isn't the main place to talk about "you" except for the general introduction.

Help!

A good thing to keep here so newbies and users alike can ask questions and get quick answers.

Official Records (with its subforums)

This one is a bit tricky, because it's an "official" area that doesn't quite fit in with "Getting Started" or "Your Pets and You." I'd almost like this to be moved up to the "Updates!" area. Or, actually, since the "Your Pets and You" section is all about records, I could see it working there, too. I have no idea what to do with this thing, honestly. ;D;

YOUR PETS AND YOU
Zoo Pens (with its subforums)
Important Documentations (with wishlist subforum)

I think this should be kept as its own forum because it is widely used and accessed. Just makes sense to me to have it be it's own thing with the description right there on the site index page. Wishlists also make sense here as the subforums, because Imp. Docs is a documentation of the pets you currently own (among other things) and Wishlists are a documentation of the pets you want to own.

All About You!

Again, I'd like to see this renamed to something like "Writing Records" or... something. Bahah I have no idea. I'm terrible at naming things. But I see it best being used as a place for users to keep roleplay/plot records and anything extensive that doesn't specifically follow the lines of "character personality" (which should stay in zoo pens).
Maybe Roleplay Advertisements could be a subforum of this, rather than the Advertise section? I mean, while it does make sense to put advertise with advertise, they're still fundamentally different. Advertise is in the marketplace section because you're selling or trading your stuff, but Roleplay Advertisements... aren't selling anything? You're just looking for people to be writing buddies with, or to form plots with. As such, if this section is revised to be dedicated to plots/writing, I think RP Advertisements could be moved here.

SHOP AND TRADE!
[X] Trader's Outpost

I agree that this (and Auction House) should just be tossed. It's barely used, and when it is it often goes inactive for so long that people who offered on pets lose interest or forget. I like the idea of moving Morey, Alonia Ranch, and those other two to the Marketplace, though.

Evelon's Marketplace
Advertise (and subforums; though like I said, I think "Roleplay Advertisements" might go best with the revised "All About You" section)
The Bazaar

And everything else as is. c: Sorry this is so long, bahaha. ;D; All in the name of furthering discussion, I suppose!

[Kyrit]

Just a very quick post to say that all the threads in the rule section, aside from the religion on Kodai tossed in there, are pretty up to date. When I worked on combining threads and giving them table of contents the rules were gone through for updates. I'll scan through them to see if anything needs updating from since I did all that work, but yeah. The threads that are there should be very up to date, honestly.

[Silver]

Hooray for moving stuff! I love organization!

I definitely agree with others on archiving old updates threads. I had a lot of trouble figuring out what information was still relevant when I returned.

I think the updated Rules and Info stuff is great! I often refer back to it, so I was glad to see it get a face lift. I did notice a few more things that need to be looked at, though...

I think most of the stickies in the Help section need to be updated at and/or moved. A lot of them have some really old information, and I think a most of them would be better suited to Rules and General Info. The questions threads are fine, but guides and FAQs are better suited to the info section. (A lot of the info in the rules section is formatted like FAQs anyway!)

This poor thread is so old it still links to the Freewebs site!

I think this needs a little update, too. It doesn't really reflect the way the Docs are used now.

[Jaykobell]

It doesn't look like there's been a lot of discussion on this, but I was thinking about something just recently.

I think Pickle's got a good idea of renaming the 'All About You' section, or maybe to... repurpose it?

Since it says 'All About You', maybe it could encompass everything... that's about you? So let's say...

Main Section: All About You!
Subsections: Zoo Pens / Templates / Wishlists

The only thing would be that we would have to move Pet Stats; but maybe they could fit under Official Records? Since that section does have things like Forum Obtainable Pet Records, which is more like an 'encyclopedia' than like... real ownership records (which is what Official Records is mostly [used] for).

Worst case, maybe they could have their own section back again? Though they're not a main thing anymore, really... we could always keep them under All About You, since they pertain to Zoo Pens and pets/characters? They're a bit weird to fit perfectly somewhere.

And in that same vein, if we want to keep using the All About You section in that kind of fashion, we could put something like the RP Records there too; especially since, if anything, the majority seem to want it according to the poll here.

[Kyrit]

The poll has been running for a while now, and it seems pretty evenly tied between Keep It or Toss It for the All About You. The only thing pushing keeping it is keeping it but moving it, so we've moved it! The staff agreed that since it's about you (typically) and not Evelon characters, it was moved to the Out of Character section. The Journals section ended up moving with it as well, and well.. I've left it that way for now. Journals often don't have a lot to do with Evelon (though some do), so it's more fitting for them to be down there anyways.

That's the only major change I have to note tonight in this thread, though there are some other changes being talked about (ex; I just brought up a potential shift for things in "The Gallery" to having some merging/moving around that would land the sections being moved to the "All About You" section), but we're still talking. That includes the ever present question of, "What do we do about the Outposts." I promise we're talking about those. You might notice if you visit that area that the Alonia contest prize pets have been moved to the contest area instead. Oh. I also did get rid of the Minor Updates section and tossed some old threads in the archives. I did that a while ago though XD

A quick note though; Kiel and Vance can't move their auctions to the Marketplace, as KS gain is turned on in that area. That's why we decided to just give them a subforum for the staff auctions. Anyways, I'm sure I'll be back soon with even more changes that have been made! That's it for now though.