Eventual Sharing Question

[meek75]

I know that file sharing is still a ways off, but choices now can effect it. So, here is my question. If a user creates custom tags and categories and such, then share the material, will the custom categories be shared too? In other words, is it worth the trouble to create custom stuff from a sharing perspective?

[Joe]

Sharing is a bit of an overloaded term, so let me break it down into 2 different scenarios:

1) You are a GM who wants to show custom content to your players.

Realm Works: GM Edition (RW:GM) is already built with full support for this in mind. Obviously, anything you share via Player View will fully include your custom content no differently than standard content. But Realm Works: Player Edition (RW:PE) also fully supports custom content. Any custom tags or tag domains you create will be fully usable by players for filtering and searching content. Any topics or articles you create based on custom categories will also be viewable.

In the future, web based player access (WBPA) will be the same situation. Effectively, any view of your realm will have access to the content you create for the realm, whether standard or custom. Certain aspects may come online later than others. For instance, it's possible RW:GM will have Custom Calendar support before WBPA does.

2) You are a content creator who wants to upload/sell custom content on the Content Market.

This is what I'm assuming you meant, and there's a few more caveats here. In general, we want to be able to support uploading/selling custom content to the greatest extent that we can. We're certain that various game systems will need to come up with custom content outside of the standard content in order to be complete. The first big caveat is that we are currently building some of the infrastructure that will make this all possible. That means we're in some unexplored territory, and that things could change based on future discoveries.

A main goal for Realm Works and the Content Market is to allow GMs to gather content they like from multiple sources and easily integrate them together with their own content seamlessly into one unified realm. Some customizations won't cause too many problems with this vision, while others clearly will. While reconciling lots of customizations is possible in theory, it will take a lot of technical effort (pushing back other features), and will likely result in a longer and more tedious integration process for users, which is bad news for our goal of easy and seamless.

Because we haven't worked out all the specific details, I can't really give you a straight answer on exactly how content sharing will work with 100% accuracy. The good news is that we've got a few guidelines you can follow that will make it much more likely that your customizations are safe:

1) Adding new content structure and using it for your content is usually OK. Adding new tag domains, new tags, new categories, new section definitions, new snippet types, etc. There's still some sticky issues we'll need to deal with here (what happens if two people share two categories of the same name? If two people add a section to to the end of a category, who's goes first?) but they are more straightforward problems than others.

2) Repurposing existing content structure is usually NOT a good idea. Don't morph a standard category into something else entirely. Don't drastically change the definition of an existing tag or a tag domain. I've gone into detail on this elsewhere (http://forums.wolflair.com/showthread.php?t=45689), and the Realm Works interface itself actually already warns you against this and gives some explanation. You're still allowed to do it within your own realm, but the sharability of any content created this way is not guaranteed.

3) Deleting existing content structure is not recommended either. In most cases, we have a checkbox you can click to hide or show categories, domains, tags, sections, etc that you don't want to see.

Hopefully this helps!

[meek75]

Answers all the question I think are answerable at this point. Thanks for the reply!