We rode the wave, surfed the Stream, achieved our thoughts...

Once again, welcome back everyone! This year's event, for those who were there, consisted of a total revamp of the message board's overall structure to showcase a brand new system: IOSoBo, the Interordi Social Board. How it looked, however, was a total ripoff of Facebook's look and feel! Considering how much place social networks now take, it seemed like a logical step forward!

IOSoBo was actually still IOBoard at it's core, as you could notice, but with a new social platform plugin bolted over it. The regular discussion forums were still available and in-use through the day. However, the colors and layout were directly taken from Facebook. The Stream became the board's default landing page, the concept itself being heavily based on the Wall. You get your thoughts front and central, your list of installed applications (games) on the left, you add friends and see their updates appear on your page... Anyone who has used Facebook will quickly recognize the pattern.

Games were also available, under the "Applications" title. 10 minigames were available for your pleasure (I guess?). Some of you once again went straight for the "admin" option... and quickly earned a 30 minutes ban! Will you guys ever learn! Beyond that, however, all of the applications had a common theme. Did you find out what it was?

Over that was added an extra element: Achievements. Those now common in-game elements were spread around and could be earned by performing various actions: posting, reading, playing games, and so on. They'd all get posted on your Stream so you'd be able to show off to those who added you as a friend!

Some of you people jumped at the opportunity to click around and use the system, and it was very fun to see in action. I stayed online pretty much all day long to make sure I didn't miss anything!

It took a lot of work to get this together in time, but I had a major asset: several required features had been added to the board in the previous months, sometimes going as far back as a year or two ago. For example, the new look was created using the skinning system, which was available but not used. The same system has been live on the oekaki board for a while now. The thoughts sharing was new, while the ability to comment on them is the same as what I use for the news posts on the Mega Man PC Website and ION Gamma. The blog format for the announcements was already available but unused, and the list goes on. I didn't create those elements for the event, but once I had the core idea, everything fell into place quickly. It's always nice to be able to reuse your work for more than one task.

Enough rambling. I present you... the stats!!

• About 300 friends have been added!
  
• Sb20 spammed your feed with 64 new friends!
  
• Only 7 members "Liked" stuff. No love here.
  
• 55 thoughts were posted!
  
• 23 Stream comments were exchanged!
  
• A total of 872 history events were recorded in the past month!
  
• Wow, 309 achievements were earned! See which!
  
• 16 people (the largest number) earned the Surfer achievement!
  
• 8 people tried to become an admin... and failed!
  
• Necro was friended by 7 worshippers!
  
• Kanto awaits 4 new Gym Leaders!
  
• Oh no, 14 out of 35 achievements went unclaimed!

You missed all this, or you want more? No worries, the Stream and all related pages are still available for now! To view your Stream, hit the appropriate link in your "User options" bar.

Since I spent so much time on IOSoBo, I'll let you play with the Stream, the achievements and the related elements for a few days still. The rest of the board is back to normal and won't appear any different, so even the whiners can't complain about it. I WILL take the Stream down relatively soon, though, so don't get too used to it. I'd rather produce original software instead of replicating the content of competitors.

With that said, maybe the new (temporary) layout gave you some ideas on how to improve the place, make things more dynamic, build on what we already have... If so, do speak up! I'd like to get your suggestions. It did inspire me on a few things, and maybe you and I would like to see the same changes.

With that said... Discuss!

Edited by Dr. Cossack on April 2, 2011 at 2:43:38

I thought Unknown Entity was Doc...

Because of the DR symbol in chat...

Anyway, I just got convinced not to use facebook.

No one's going to make a guess as to the common theme of the games?

I also expected to hear more complaints against Facebook. I had to wait until three quarters of the day had flown by before someone made the only negative comment against that social network!

Correct.

Each one was a more or less direct reference to a past prank, going as far back as PokéLab in 2004. The only exception was the Rickroll, which I felt deserved a surprise spot!

As I posted on your Stream when you got the Starer achievement, there's a technical limitation on the timer of 20 minutes or so. You won't be able to reach the 30 minutes required for the Creeper achievement, and the hidden Stoner one is also impossible to get.

In your user options bar, click the Stream link.

You've got 22 achievements and 1 in progress. That, alongside the Completionist, Stoner and Discussion Starter ones, equals 26. I wrote in the first post of this topic that a total of 35 achievements were available. You still have a bit more work to do.

By request, I've lowered the requirement for the Creeper and Stoner achievements to 15 minutes only. This means that they can be obtained now.

You must mean Creeper, you already have Starer. Try again, lasting over 15 minutes this time. Sb20 did the same tonight and it worked.

Stoner is another one entirely, don't get confused either!

Correct.



Think about which game is the most debilitating on the mind.

Since those who wanted to hunt for achievements have reached or are near their goal, I'm announcing that I'll be taking down the Stream in a week. If you still wanted to make some progress, now's your chance. Otherwise, you most likely don't care anyway!

It all comes and go together, yes.

Here are the four achievements you're missing, and that no one scored.

Attention Whore: Create ten topics
Feed Spammer: Post on your Stream twenty times
Mr. Everywhere: Comment on someone's thoughts twenty times

There's also the Completionist one, of course. As a final prank, that one was impossible to obtain! It's a bit of a paradox: you're given that achievement when you get them all, except that you can't get them all until you have this one, which is granted only if... You follow my logic?

In any case, if you manage to score all of the others, I'll grant you this one manually for the effort!

And there you go! You're an achiever, that's for sure!