Owh god, does it annoy me GREATLy of all those RP sites with their 'guest friendly advertising board', although there's one small rule NO PROBOARDS. Well excuse me, let's go over your reasons that you don't want proboards to advertise on your site?

1

It's such a hassle to redo the coding of our advert alllllll the tttiimmmeee

My anwser

A one: you know that Invisionfree is the ONLY free forum software who uses those damned annoyed align tags? All other free forum softwares, and paid should ban invisionfree, because invisionfree uses different tags then every other free forum software out there

A two: Is it SSOOOOOOO hard to make two adverts, one for invisionfree, and one for the others? It's so easy to use copy and paste you know, I do the same, because I use IPBfree, *gasp* and you know IPBfree is the same as Invisionfree, but *gasp* it uses the same bbcode as proboards OMG!!!!

So you know, even though my board is IPBfree, and we use the same bbcodes as Proboards, do you think I really care what you think about 'how hard it is to redo our coding every single time a proboards board posts on our perty too cool roleplay.' I'll advertise anyway, because if I understand correctly, it's not very polite to discriminate.

Edit: one other thing that annoys the crap outta me 'you can only advertise here if you link back to us.' Like wtf? I have to do your advertising for you? Like.... huh?

You tell them, ShinLi!

Those statements grate on my nerves to no end. And I use InvisionFree, so it's not even my board they're banning.

Personally, I don't see the big deal about allowing ProBoards to advertise. I've never had any problem at all posting my advert on ProBoards. It looks the same there as on InvisionFree.

I was totally confused about the whole fuss until just a moment ago. It's the align tags that everyone complains about? How completely lame is that? You're going to ban every single board hosted on ProBoards because you want a different alignment? Get over yourselves. Last time I checked, it wasn't hard to change a few tags and save yourself another copy. Or better yet, don't use alignment tags! If someone isn't going to come join your RP because your advertisement was aligned default left, then they're pretty dumb. And if you're worried that someone won't join because of that, then you're even dumber than they are.

Seriously. An align tag. *humph*

Well what invisionfree does is use this:

And what every other forum software do, including proboards and IPBfree, is this:

Like HOW HARD IS IT TO CHANGED THAT! ><.

The text sizes are different as well. IPB and ProBoards only go up to 7 or so, with 7 being the largest obviously, while InvisionFree goes from -5 to 24. Proboards also uses blockquote instead of list tags; not sure about IPB.

But I agree with you, ShinLi. I think posting on Proboards is a hassle because it slows down my computer, but I'll still do it because I have separate codes for IF, ProBoards, and IPB. It only takes 5 more second. :/

True, but the Only time this is going to seriously hurt the advert is when the advert contains smaller-than-necessary text.

solution? Don't change the text, otherwise, yes you're making more work for yourself, and it has to be said, it's cutting your own throat.

I go on a C-box tour of games that do this, asking the oh-so-pertinent question: 'when you say NO PROBOARDS' do you mean no proboards, or do you mean Invisionfree only?'

Then post anyway because I'm phpbb and I have a loophole! Much to the annoyance of the silly, silly people that decided this rule was a good idea. However, what irritates me most is that people seem to think that IF is universal and so ignore the rule on my forum that says, 'preview your advert before posting' and post up an advert with weeny text. You don't have to go far on my ad forum to find a prime example of this. I won't delete an ad for this but I will put in my link back that they have to repost the advert in order for it to show up.

Considering there are ONLINE translators that will convert your html into universal BBcode for you, then there's little to no excuse.

I've noticed that admins that do this are amazingly lazy people. They spend more time putting unnecessary shit on their skins and advertising their site on someone else's page and saying "Advertise for us" than wanting prospective players (who may be on Proboards, mind you) to advertise on their site.

Said admins also behave as if IPB is the only type of forum program that exists. Just as you said, only Invision has the HTML-esque align tags.

The security code should be a non-issue. If you type a billion and a half characters in your posts, the least you can do is type 6/7 characters for the security code.

Another excuse by people is that Proboards is ugly, etc. Well, a lot of IPB RPs that say this - aren't short-stopping. The only plausible excuse is that your computer hates Proboards. Then, perhaps, I can understand it.

sadly, i am guilty of the no proboards rule but, i have allowed it in the past. really, i stopped doing it, not because i was didn't want to take the time to advertise there, but because i realized that we weren't pulling in any members from proboards. i used to write up separate ad sheets ALL of the time because it wasn't really an issue but, when i realized that it wasn't helping my board, i stopped.

i had ONE member that was usually on proboards join my several sites in the entire time that i've been posting and they had no idea how to work IF boards. i was happy to give them help but they ended up leaving because they didn't like IF.

of course, i've also limited those that can post to invisionfree only.

now, i will say this, i do not understand everything about zetaboards and, therefore, i have requested that only IF boards advertise on my sites because i've tried to post on a zetaboard before and it only showed the code tags, nothing of my actual ad.

in conclusion, it's not that i'm lazy, i just don't see the point when most people don't cross over from one type to the other so i just don't do it. if my not learning zetaboards coding and working up an ad for zetaboards is lazy then, well, i'm guilty of laziness there.

yes, i DESPISE those that say we have to advertise the other board before we can post on that one. now, THAT is laziness. i'm always one to do the work because it shows that the admin isn't lazy. it's enough work to advertise your own board but to have to do it for someone else? come on! it's ridiculous. not just that but, unfortunately, i've got dial up so my computer's connection isn't exactly the fastest.

i know that invisionfree isn't the only board but it's usually the only board that the members of my board use. i've spoken with a lot of my members on all of my boards, taken polls just out of curiosity and there weren't many that would have been willing to switch to another board program so why bother? i left proboards a long time ago and i've never looked back.

I don't understand that, you say you didn't pull any members off from proboards, so you just ban proboards all together from your forum? I mean you don't have to advertise on proboards sites, but maybe some proboards wants to advertise on yours? That will only be 1 or 2 forums a week? Maybe even less!

And Zetaboards? Go to the support site, there's a forum there where you can post random topics and test it out. When zetaboards first came out in their beta stages, the first thing I did was to register a beta zetaboards forum, so I could figure out things. Zetaboards is new now, but I've already seen serveral rpgs run on zetaboards in the directory submissions.

What my point is, if you say your advertising forum is 'guest friendly' but you only allow invisionfree sites, that's not what I call guest friendly. That's plain rude in my opinion, and I it annoys the crap outta me, it really does. I've started up RPG-D specifically so every single RPG out there could advertise, not only Invisionfree sites. I only decided to do it on Invisionfree, because I hadn't seen a directory for RPG's on IF. Otherwise I might've just as easily picked another forum software to make it on.

It's all excuses in my opinion. What would you think if I started to say, well you know it annoys the crap out off me that some IF forums allow only other IF forums to advertise on the site. So you know what, let's just ban those forums here on RPG-D, so that we let them know that we don't agree with their excuses. Because I think all of RPG-D's staff members think about this the same way.

When I started up my PHPBB3 forum it didn't even have alignment codes (that I could find) so I had to put them in myself (with the awesome BBCode adding thing), and I put them in as {center}{/center} (using square brackets) because it's so much easier than flipping align=center crap.

If it weren't that I'm not even going to have an advertisement for that new board (because I don't want to advertise ^_^) I would post it everywhere! Because it slips through the 'no Proboards' loophole, even though it uses the same code. Mua ha ha ha ha!

Ugh. I hate it when people ban Proboards or any other board! If you are too lazy to convert the code and type in a security code that is not even case sensitive, why not just let the Proboards advertise on your site and not post back? That's what I do when I can't be bothered going through the painful lagging that is Proboards on my computer (Proboards seriously hates it).

Oooh I want to advertise on a Zetaboards now, just for the experience. Pity I don't have to advertise anymore ^_^

I think that's a good idea, ShinLi ^_^ We should so do that -puts on discriminator-hunting hat-

Ahaha! My SimpleMachines is the same way -- it doesn't hit the silly NO PROBOARDS rules, even though it's all the same markup. Because it's IF that's the black sheep there with its own proprietary code -- everything else is {center} and the like.

Heh, I'm doubly sneaky there - I advertise Fey and Cheshire which use the nice, non-align tags. But they look exactly like IF (as many admins seem to be too lazy to note the URL, the skin changer in the footer, or to actually read my rules), so I can giggle as their ads wind up looking horrible XD

How will you know that you aren't pulling people in from Proboards if you refuse to even try?

You cannot make the assumption that people are not willing to join your RP from proboards. Proboards has good RPers, just as Invision, Zetaboards and SMF does. To neglect them simply on the assumption that "People don't join from Proboards would be erroneous." I've gotten a great deal of RPers on other sites by advertising through Proboards. Making a generalization about "Proboard RPers don't cross over to Invision" is generally untrue. You can't really know if you hooking people in if you push them away before they get a chance to even join. Guest Friendly =/= No Proboards.

Ultimately, you limit your own options when you do that.

Zetaboards is something that you have to learn. I do have some ads in my RP section that doesn't have tags. Perhaps you won't be able to use tags for a while in Zetaboards until you figure it out?

((as for the SMF people, SMF is a FREAKING AMAZING board.))

It really is a tremendous piece of work. I think the reason why it's not used as often is because the company has only recently started a free host, and finding a host for it was more challenging than proboards or invision. I hope that now that the free host is up more people will get exposed to it and love it like I do. <3

I dunno. I really don't like the way SMF is set up layout-wise.

As for advertising, I haven't decided whether or not we're going to have an ad forum at the new site yet. It seems like none of us can't be bothered with school being such a pain. Has anyone else been successful just affiliating?

I think my affiliates get me more people than my ad forum does, to be honest. With affiliates, you can cater to them. When I find advanced sites that I like and would consider joining, then I'll affiliate with them because those are the kind of members we want. I just started affiliating pretty recently, but I think it works out better than just dropping ads everywhere and anywhere. If you affiliate with good sites, then people start to recognize your site. It sets it apart more than random advertising does.

How so, as a curiosity question? Do you mean the admin section? The board layout can be whatever you want with the various skins, it's more CSS based than some others.

Nope. I meant the actual board layout. I've only been to a few but it took be awhile to figure out where everything was because the set up was so different. I can't remember the exact details because it's been awhile but one of the things was trying to get back to the home forum page.

Yeah, that would've been a bad skin. That's the thing -- SMF is *so* extensible that it's really easy to make it suck too. XD

Yeah, that would make it less of an "SMF sucks" problem and more of a "bad webdesign" problem. Because SMF is so customisable you can change the shape quite dramatically. With IF you have to keep the same shape, so conventions can stay the same.

If a person has forgotten to include a link back home it's their fault, not SMF's.

Ahh. Funny how the two (or was it three) of them shared the same layout but had different skins. Drove me a bit nuts.

Psh you guys are going way off topic.

Dave I'm planning on only using word of mouth, RPGD and affiliates to get members for my board (if I open it) so we can compare things with each other if you decide not to use ads. And if it's as good as sarahj says we won't have any problems.

I can't stand people's claims that 'Oh, but I hate Proboards because it's so ugly!' I went on an absolutely fantastic Proboards site the other day. The only thing I had to say I didn't like was that the text was tiny (not Proboards' fault) and the admins had mandatory font colour claim. I laughed and told my boyfriend and he went WTH?

Also, have those people SEEN many of the IF skins? They are hideous! Worse than just 'oh it doesn't look nice' and into 'ahhh my eyes are bleeding!'. How is that better than Proboards? It isn't.

PHPBB3 is also pretty sweet, though it's confusing. Especially Prosilver -nod- But if I actually knew what things were I bet I could change it quite a lot. But I don't.

Ah, for the good old No Proboards rant.

I'm another of those people who's computer looks at a Proboards forum, wets itself and runs away. But I do allow them to advertise. We have adverts coded for most major forum softwares (yes, including a seperate one for IPBFree, because I like my text sizes to come out my way).. and I do my Proboards advertising when I have high speed internet.

I don't see how it could be so hard. But then, we are the enlightened, here at RPGD. Perhaps it is because of Shin Li's vision (that all boards should have somewhere to advertise) that we're a little more accepting? An IF-Only advertising forum would be more apt to argue the other way..

.. But I'm rambling.

I'm an IF die-hard, but even I don't get the anti-proboards thing. We get quite a few members from our Proboards advertising, I don't understand why an admin would so deliberately shoot themselves in the foot and disallow advertising from a major subsection of the RP world!

With IF, yes, with IPB, no.

All the proprietary boards, whether it's vB, IPB, BurningBoard, Discuz!, etc. are all extremely customizable in their layouts.

SMF, phpBB, and MyBB are also very flexible in their appearance. InvisionFree should never be the barometer for the Invision-line as a whole, because IF is basically a stripped down, prepackaged version designed for intuitive use, not for raw customization. It's actually not that different from proboards in that regard, which is one reason why I don't understand this "IF vs Proboards" feud. They both are free, ad-powered boards that serve to make forum creation more accessible (at the loss of customization and features) to the general public. I can do more with the linux command line than I can with IF's admin CP.

That said, on the topic of {align=} vs. {center}, the latter is accepted as BBCode format. However, neither of them are w3c compatible. Both align and center are both deprecated code. It is highly recommended (if you have the ability to customize the innate BBCode of your board) to change it to CSS/text-align.

Also, all boards (yes, even IF in its own roundabout way) have the ability to add custom BBCode. Just make both {align=} and {center} valid BBCode on your forum and you're in the clear.