2012: Brand New Year, Brand New Ideas!

[Tenshii~Akari]

   What's happenin', everyone? Hope everyone has had a wonderful year, as 2011 is quickly winding down. While some things have been slow at times, the staff have thought about a few things we would like to shoot for during the new year:

• Quarterly Themes: While monthly themes are pretty awesome, we also realize that the months themselves tend to slip on by.  In order to promote more time for theme creativity for those who'd rather post within the time period without feeling pressured by "deadlines", the plan of action is to make the top three elected theme choices available at the beginning of each quarter.  This way, if someone doesn't have any ideas for one theme but plenty for another, he or she will have three choices for that quarter to contribute to and plenty of time to create and share their custom content.  While it does seem like a long period of time, we're still open to more ideas on this to make it more lively during the quarterly period.   
  
  
• Forum Makeover: We're pretty sure everyone has gotten darn tired of seeing the same, tired default theme.  So far, we've found a few themes that look pretty sleek, so we'll be putting together Oasis 3.0 as soon as we can. It's also a possibility a new banner contest will be held in honor of the new theme once things are finalized.  Keep your eyes peeled for future updates!
  
  
• Creator Theme Master List: As you all probably realize, some pretty good custom content tends to be lost over time in Sunken Ship. Plans are underway to do some much needed organizing, mainly in the form of a master list linking to each contributed item in all of our theme posts.  This will categorize all themes by category type (objects/Bodyshop/Sims/etc.) as well as incorporate a small preview image* of the content, similar to our normal Oasis Updates on the front page.  We're hoping it makes searching for favorite themed downloads a lot easier in the future! 
  
  *You may have also noticed the poll above, as we do have concerns about how everyone feels about any of their images being used by other parties besides themselves. Note: we're only requesting to re-upload one preview picture per contributed item to our image account for purposes of the list only, mainly to avoid image hotlinking issues as always. We would NEVER claim these images as our own, and will gladly take proper measures to credit as usual. If you have any problems or concerns with this, please feel free to let us know!

Well, that's about it for now.    Like always, have anything to add? Questions, comments, and constructive inputs are always welcome.  Have a good one!

[Pierre]

Hello tenshi,

have you tough about upgrading the oasis forum for the new year to the smf version 2 rc 5 and depending on the theme you could rotate the theme, of the forum to fit with the current contest of the forum as well and a feature that would be usful to add on the forum. Would be to activate the Spell check function for member to use to fix there spelling. And as for the banner it would be nice to rotate the banner to fit the curent contest as well.

[Tenshii~Akari]

Seems like a pretty good idea, Pierre!  I'll have to check with Kielen on that, though.

(That, and I often forget about the spell-check thing, since I use Firefox and it automatically does that.)

[Pierre]

Your welcome tenshii and merry chrismas to you and your family and a happy new year 2012