Proposal for a "Hardware and Accessories" category in Community

The intention is to be a single place to discuss and help on anything related to hardware and accessories used with VAM

Hardware/accessories examples:

• VR matters
• PC part testing or suggestions
• Sex toys
• DIY projects like MacGruber's E-Stim channels using a Raspberry PI

Currently there's several threads on these topics spread over all the categories, and considering there's going to be more, a dedicated category may be useful to find and discuss the topics.

I'm also quite interested to know about what people do to extend and improve their VAM sessions. There's a crazy deviant world out there with interesting ideas to bring more physicality to a VAM session for sure

I just voted with YES!
Now what?!

HolySchmidt said:

I just voted with YES!
Now what?!

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Now there's more votes




But still nowhere near enough to justify a new category, too small of an interest I guess.

Hey I just saw this now. and only because I was looking for stuff about e-stim & vam, and saw ash's post in discord with a link here. so you could say i'm interested! I can only imagine there will be more people who are interested in that kind of stuff as time goes on. Would be nice if all the discussions & info were in the same place

I think this should have been an announcement rather than hiding in the forum. Not much users are going to see this as I myself only saw it 25 minutes after atani's post this morning and it's been out for weeks. Nevertheless this would be useful even though it won't have a flood of users.

murn said:

I think this should have been an announcement rather than hiding in the forum. Not much users are going to see this as I myself only saw it 25 minutes after atani's post this morning and it's been out for weeks. Nevertheless this would be useful even though it won't have a flood of users.

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This is a proposal to add a new category, not an announcement that there will be one. Also, I'm not a moderator to make decisions or announcements, just a user like the rest.

murn said:

Not much users are going to see this as I myself only saw it 25 minutes after atani's post this morning and it's been out for weeks. Nevertheless this would be useful even though it won't have a flood of users.

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Yes and yes. But I'm not that active here anymore.
That's one part of the problem: the forum is overloaded and kind of badly structured. And there's not that many active users (in the forum) anyway.

HolySchmidt said:

Yes and yes. But I'm not that active here anymore.
That's one part of the problem: the forum is overloaded and kind of badly structured. And there's not that many active users (in the forum) anyway.

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Open to suggestions on how we could improve.

The structure of the forums doesn't matter much to me, as I always start with New Posts. Otherwise, I run a search.

AshAuryn said:

Open to suggestions on how we could improve.

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Ok, lets go ... of course this is just MY interpretation of how things have to be sorted. I am a pretty logical dude and kind of a perfectionist (the germans ...), I'd say I have kind of a talent for organisation. Anyways ...

1. The whole "Wiki" part could be a subforum in "Official". Excluding "About us", this should be a subforum in "Official" as well (has nothing to do with Wiki as how I understand it).

2. "Hub FAQs and Guides" should be where? Exactly, in Official. - Two complete categories gone so far and a lot cleaner.

3. "Questions and Answers" and "Help" in "Community" is still senseless. Thats two subs for the same thing, everyone who needs help has a question. Makes really, absolutely no sense. Just keep "Help", everyone knows what it means.

4. "Feedback" is unnecessary as a whole category. Make a "Feedback" sub in official, put the two feedback subs in it and rename the category to "VaM2", which is long overdue, and leave the 2 VaM2 subs where they belong. There is no VaM2 category guys, whats up?

5. Create a new sub in "Community" called "Hardware (and questions)" for example between help and off-topic, like @atani asked for. Questions popping up again and again, no one knows where all those questions are right now. And its a really important part of VaM.

Following all this steps would make the whole forum more compact and provides a better overview.

I still dont know what to do about the whole "Custumization"-thing because its not nice to look at, too many categories. You could make clothing & hairstyles ONE category and the same with morphs & textures. Just for a more compact look. Not much going on there anyway.
EDIT: You could even put the whole customization category into community as is.

These are my suggestions. And one more note: has no one noticed that "Community", the main point of interest in every forum, is so far down that I lost interest in participating before even reaching what this all should be about? The community?

HolySchmidt said:

Ok, lets go ... of course this is just MY interpretation of how things have to be sorted. I am a pretty logical dude and kind of a perfectionist (the germans ...), I'd say I have kind of a talent for organisation. Anyways ...

1. The whole "Wiki" part could be a subforum in "Official". Excluding "About us", this should be a subforum in "Official" as well (has nothing to do with Wiki as how I understand it).

2. "Hub FAQs and Guides" should be where? Exactly, in Official. - Two complete categories gone so far and a lot cleaner.

3. "Questions and Answers" and "Help" in "Community" is still senseless. Thats two subs for the same thing, everyone who needs help has a question. Makes really, absolutely no sense. Just keep "Help", everyone knows what it means.

4. "Feedback" is unnecessary as a whole category. Make a "Feedback" sub in official, put the two feedback subs in it and rename the category to "VaM2", which is long overdue, and leave the 2 VaM2 subs where they belong. There is no VaM2 category guys, whats up?

5. Create a new sub in "Community" called "Hardware (and questions)" for example between help and off-topic, like @atani asked for. Questions popping up again and again, no one knows where all those questions are right now. And its a really important part of VaM.

Following all this steps would make the whole forum more compact and provides a better overview.

I still dont know what to do about the whole "Custumization"-thing because its not nice to look at, too many categories. You could make clothing & hairstyles ONE category and the same with morphs & textures. Just for a more compact look. Not much going on there anyway.
EDIT: You could even put the whole customization category into community as is.

These are my suggestions. And one more note: has no one noticed that "Community", the main point of interest in every forum, is so far down that I lost interest in participating before even reaching what this all should be about? The community?

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Thank you for your feedback.

I can give some perspective for a couple of these.

#1: Has to do with permissions. Only moderators and admins can post in "Official", so we cannot move anything to "Official" that might require users to reply or post. The Wiki, for example, includes "Wiki Contributors" who are not moderators or admins, so in order for contributors like Atani to be able to help with the Wiki, we cannot move it to "Official".

#3: The "Q&A" is a specific type of forum. It allows answers to be marked and upvoted, and for members to get badges based on answering questions -- this encourages community members to participate and help answer these questions so it's not just the staff (or Atani) answering questions. Also, there's a history in there of hundreds of already-answered questions. In contrast, the "Help" forum doesn't have a way to "Mark" answers. There's no quick and easy way for a newcomer to scan a thread and see "Oh, here, this must be the best answer". They must read through all of the replies to try to guess which one is the "best" reply.

On the other hand, we have a hard time getting people to mark their questions solved, and we have a backlog of questions we need to go in and mark "solved" as moderators because the question is too old. If we were to merge these two (and I'm not sure which one is "best") then it would require ALOT of work moving hundreds if not thousands of posts because merging means losing the "marked solution" information if each one is not done manually.

#4: Same issue as #1. Cannot move a reply/post forum to "Official" because permissions.

#4(b): VaM2 category will appear once the AddonKit has been released and the community can actually begin creating. This is imminent.

#5: ... that's what this thread is about? So... not sure I understand this one.

Hopefully that helps with some additional information. If you have any new suggestions based on this new information let us know. I think moving FAQs and Guides to "Official" could make sense, and moving "Community" closer to the top also makes sense. Thanks again for the feedback!

I don't think the Hub guides and FAQ should go in Official as they are user created content and the community focus is important.

atani said:

I don't think the Hub guides and FAQ should go in Official as they are user created content and the community focus is important.

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Not VaM Guides. Hub / Policies guide. It's all moderator/admin content.