• Please note: In an effort to ensure that all of our users feel welcome on our forums, we’ve updated our forum rules. You can review the updated rules here: http://forums.wolflair.com/showthread.php?t=5528.

    If a fellow Community member is not following the forum rules, please report the post by clicking the Report button (the red yield sign on the left) located on every post. This will notify the moderators directly. If you have any questions about these new rules, please contact support@wolflair.com.

    - The Lone Wolf Development Team

Group Category split

G

greenedr00l

Member
Splitting out the "Group" category into various sub-groups (Commerce, Criminal, etc.) seems to me to add a lot of complexity and confusion to the categories. First, these group headings partially duplicate the Organization Type tag contained within each entry. Also, for the setting I'm working with very few groups fall cleanly into one category or the other. There's a great deal of crossover between Government/Military, Religious/Military, and Religious/Criminal. Given this, I'd either need to arbitrarily pick which new category to use or create duplicate entries in two or more categories, neither of which seems as clean to me as the more generic "Group" category with associated Organization Type tags. For me personally, almost all of my group content will probably end up staying in the new "Group: Other" category. I'm very curious if other people are having the same experience with this particular change and what the intended benefit was for breaking up the category?
 
We had a lot of members of the Beta team creating more specialized groups along the lines that we've now created. A driving goal for Realm Works is enabling users to publish/share content, which means allowing them to incorporate content from multiple sources. If lots of users are creating different specialized categories for groups, then any user who tries to import content from those different users will end up with lots of annoying work to do. Imagine grabbing content from four different sources and having four different categories for religious groups, plus one of your own. Same for military groups, etc. That defeats the purpose of what we're trying to achieve.

The best solution was to create a bunch of groups that everyone can use. That way, if you import content from four different sources, you'll end up with all that content using the same set of categories.

However, it's perfectly easy to ignore those specialized groups and only use the generic "Group: Other" if you prefer. This doesn't hurt anything and still means that importing content from four different sources will be vastly easier than if each source uses different custom categories.

If you are not planning to share content with others or use content from others, then you can freely bash the provided structure into whatever best suites your fancy. If you DO plan to share content (offer and/or consume), then the provided structure offers a framework that will greatly simplify the process for everyone while still taking advantage of the power of Realm Works.

Hope that makes sense! :)
 
Can we please hide individual categories that we will not use? Right now, we have a choice of all or only those with content. But if I move something to another container....

A checklist of visible categories would be hugely helpful.
 
Go to the Manage ribbon at the top. Click on the Categories button in the ribbon. For each category you don't wish to use, you can uncheck the "Shown" checkbox. Now it will always be hidden.

Hope this does the trick for you! :)
 
I hate it when you've already implemented things. :) That's beautiful!

What happens if I import material from someone else that uses hidden forever categories though?
 
They automatically appear inside topics lists for navigation and selection. :)

At that point, there is material in them, so they will be visible. However, you won't see the hidden categories listed for creating new content, since the assumption is you still don't want to do that with those categories. :)
 
rob said:
We had a lot of members of the Beta team creating more specialized groups along the lines that we've now created. A driving goal for Realm Works is enabling users to publish/share content, which means allowing them to incorporate content from multiple sources. If lots of users are creating different specialized categories for groups, then any user who tries to import content from those different users will end up with lots of annoying work to do. Imagine grabbing content from four different sources and having four different categories for religious groups, plus one of your own. Same for military groups, etc. That defeats the purpose of what we're trying to achieve.
Click to expand...

As one of those making new categories for some things, I would like to say I like it, generally.

I did the same more with types of Merchants, though. I think various people will want to expand "subtypes" of various things. One of the key elements, to me, is the visual cue of the Icon. There may not be much difference in content.. sometimes none.. but I use the "Hierarchical" view constantly, and separating the types visually by Icon is probably of the most value to me. Honestly, making the Icon variable by subtype (a tag domain might be the best way to do that) would reduce the need for otherwise nearly identical Category types.
 
Thanks for the explanation Rob. I was sure there was an objective behind the change but it wasn't making sense to me. I've only used two custom categories so far (one for Races that I'm still using and one for Titles which I saw you added in this last update so I'll be changing those over to the "official" category) and I've been using tags to sub-categorize instead of changing the category structure.
 
(Not on the Beta team... and first post...)

@Rob - Thanks for all the input here and on the KS site.

As a db-Analyst it looks like at some point you will need to create an easy tool to resolve/merge tag values. (splitting is not as easy ...)
e.g. change all YOUR Hafling tags to MY Hobbits
or even merge all YOUR Merchant_A and Merchant_B to MY Merchant_C

This will allow data import and then "easy" manipulation into each users world.
Maybe have an Auto Convert for export data -
a) mark default values
b) mark changed names and point at appropriate "standard" default
c) mark thing I split from a single default
d) mark truly unique stuff

It will make the importers life easier to have a reverse process...
 
@greenedr00l: Using tags to sub-categorize is often going to be an excellent way of handling things. It's the approach we'll often be using for content we develop in-house. :)
 
@Avi: You're absolutely correct about this. We've actually got a solution for this all mapped out, but it hasn't been implemented yet. It's one of the pieces that we'll need to put into place as part of getting content sharing/publishing fully operational. The basic idea is that we'll need to treat multiple tags from different users as if they are the same. Since we haven't implemented it yet, it's quite possible that we've overlooked particular special cases thus far and will have to sort those out still. But it's all something we'll be sussing out right after we get V1.0 release.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top