Overview

Vesta was designed by a roleplayer for forum roleplay. It has features that most forums have to have third-party modifications to make work. Jcink comes closest, but even it has major drawbacks, which is true of almost any forum application. As Vesta is improved and upgraded, the roleplaying experience will get better and better as well.

This thread is an overview of Vesta's primary features. Some of these will be added to the Tips and Tricks thread to help everyone learn how to use them.

Light & Dark Themes

Yes, we will eventually have a custom theme done for Sagas. However, we're waiting until the next upgrade is done since there will be significant changes to how themes are created and handled.

Vesta's themes come with a dark and light variant that you can change with the simple click of a button. At our old home, I had to find both a dark and light theme and then make sure any changes were done to both themes. Vesta's theme framework allows me to make simple structural changes to how the theme displays in one place. The only time I have to make changes in both themes is when I need to adjust colors.

To change from one theme to the other, go to the top of the page. You will see a little "sun" icon on the far right beneath Logout in your user menu. That is the theme button. Click it and the site changes to the light theme. You will note that the icon changes to a crescent moon which is the symbol for the dark theme.

Warning! Do not change the theme in middle of posting! When the theme changes, it takes you back to the main forum page.

Joint Posting (JPs)

Yes! For those of us that like to JP dialog heavy posts, Joint Posting is thing on Vesta. A joint post is when two or more Players edit in their tags to an existing post. For most sites, editing is disabled for all except the original poster (OP) and Admin. With Vesta, the IC forums allow us to edit. And, best of all, an edited IC post sends out an alert just like it would if you were to write your reply in a new post.

The benefits of Joint Posting are many, but the main one is that it allows for smoother dialog. You do not have to splice posts by copying what your character is responding to into your reply, etc. It makes things less confusing when writing a multi-player thread and lessens the number of "short posts". I mean, seriously, there's only so much that goes into the thought process to answer a knock on the door and say, "come in"!

For Sagas, it is the Players' choice whether to write as a JP or to write a thread as post-by-post. Work it out with your writing partner(s).

Auto-Saving

Have you clicked Create or Post and when the editor opens a post is already there? This is how the site auto-saves drafts of previous posts. It is a safety feature designed to prevent loss of your work should the site go down or your computer glitches.

Activity Checks

Automatic activity checks are a thing. Basically how this works is it will mark player accounts ( and characters ) inactive IF:

• The player account has not been logged into in a week.
• The player OR character has not posted in a month.
• Players and characters will be automatically filed into the inactive group ( it hides the account and character(s) from all listings, counts, and tallies ) when the player account has not posted in a calendar month. No log in for a week just lists their activity level as inactive, but it fixes itself once they log in again. If a character has an UNANSWERED THREAD in the IC boards, which are defined in the backend now, the character is considered active regardless of when that was posted.

Quote Rotator

• There is a quote rotator. You can add neat IC or OOC quotes to a list, and it'll randomly display one on the index every page load. It's lots of fun and a neat way of highlighting your site talent.

Timeline

• The timeline has been redone so it is now displaying by month/year rather than all in one with tab navigation. When a site gets really large and has been running a lot time I figured that'd be a really big load so I cut it down some.
• There are some settings for a random IC date range that will be chosen when a thread is not manually dated. I can disable this or make it editable in the ACP for you because atm you'd have to edit a backend file every time it changes.

Post Templates

• You can enable or disable automatic post templates. What it looks like is dependent on the theme, you can style it differently, but this lets some people use a defined template curated to match the site and some to... not.

Hide From Online List

• Players can hide themselves from the online list. This is a per account basis, not per session so it'll keep them hidden until they disable it in profile again. Admins and mods can always see them on the list, they show in greyscale.

Characters

• The character profile is no longer tabbed, so everything shows on the one page.
• It has special coding for a custom species claim, occupation claim, and faction claim, characters can have more than one occupation and faction, it only parses up to 5. If you want to get this working I can make sure it's set up right for you.
• There is the option to instead turn the character list into a paginated list based on alliance rather than a full on ranking list, so if you only want to use one kind of group anyway I can just make it a normal character list for you.
• Automatic face claim reserves are a thing. They'll reserve for a week at a time.
• Characters can have relationships. Works a lot like the thread tracker but it's manual. Character ID can be left blank and it'll use the nickname field for the listing's name, otherwise it'll pull the character name from the board and the nickname functions as an actual AKA.
• Profiles can be trained to automatically look up and display a link to shipper threads for characters, if you want that working I can get it so.

Member Group

• There is a new member group called Visitor, opposed to the base one called Guest. Apparently guests were not able to see the stat center and some other things because the system was confused because the ID was 0, so I added a custom member group for guests that is not ID 0. If you want something not to show to anyone at all, mark it for guests and nothing else. To show it to guests, mark visitor.

Threads

• There is a list of unanswered threads. This will display threads that have no response in the IC areas. Probably not as useful for JP style.
• The open thread automatic hook for Discord will pull threads marked as open, so auto-alerts for specifically open threads is a thing now.
• On that note, threads now have denoted statuses, open, tagged, and complete.
• I killed thread tags and now we just have thread descriptions.
• Fixed the board display so that the last poster info is always present and accurate.
• Joint Posting: Threads in forums that allow us to write JPs will now send alerts and Discord updates when a JP thread has been edited.

BBCode

• Some basic BBCode now parses. Namely, b, i, u, img, url, align and center, this'll make it possible to do site to site ads if you wanted or players can cheat bold and italics lol

Misc. Functions

• I have fixed all of the moderation functions so they work as they should now. In-thread moderation has been collapsed into a drop down menu for mobile friendliness.
• There is now a switch that will change the order of names so if you have anyone whose name should be ordered last first you can achieve that without putting them in backwards.
• Did some adjustments to how moving threads works and it should make the forum stats accurate.
• Deleting a post, thread or a character now does not delete it anymore. Posts and threads will go into a special board so make a trashcan board, and characters deactivate and unlink from the player account. They're thus salvageable if someone changes their mind later.
• Topic OPs cannot be deleted with the delete button anymore, it now needs to be removed via the delete topic function.
• There's also a wanted ad rotator similar to the quotes that can display a random want ad on load, I can get that working for you too.
• The stat center can now also display the posts/topics today and yesterday, for a vague idea of activity level.
• Players also have activity level indicators that decides based on a post average in the last calendar month, OR for as long as they've been registered if they're newer than a month.