[Inquiry] Established Family Backgrounds

They're in the main forum until he's sorted and they're not under Cissa's account.

Linking EFBs in sheets would be great, I think. I'm all up for that.

They're in the main forum until he's sorted and they're not under Cissa's account.

Hahaha,   I didn't see them there!  Thank you.

This is kind of related to the topic but I've had this idea in my head for a few days now.

I thought it would be really cool to mind map everyone's connections/relationships to one another.

11 Free Mind Mapping Applications & Web Services

I don't know if that's very realistic though

We sort of have something like that already? It's in the early stages and I have to take out some characters whose drivers left, but it's proving to be interesting. xD

I want to look into the apps you linked because they sound pretty cool!

I'm wondering if maybe instead of the employment and name directory the way it's set up (I may say this because I never use it, but if people do it doesn't need to go) it can be done alphabetically instead, to solve the find a specific EFB problem?

We can definitely do that.

Geography, I'd really love to see that: something like

Durmstrang Area
     Scandinavia
          Norway
               Families
          Sweden
               Families
          Etc.
     Baltic States

I really like that. The only thing I'm worried about is having too many sub-boards within sub-boards, but if it's something that other members are interested then I'm willing to do this.

We can definitely do that.

I really like that. The only thing I'm worried about is having too many sub-boards within sub-boards, but if it's something that other members are interested then I'm willing to do this.

Well, I was thinking like more of a second directory list with links? That way it wouldn't be in sub-boards or anything, but you could just browse through the directory and click on families that sounded interesting to you, and you could restrict your search to areas around where your character was going to be from. It would suck to set it up initially because of the sheer number of EFBs, but it wouldn't be hard to upkeep once it was there if that was part of the process of sorting a new EFB. I don't know, it might be easier just to use sub-boards

Another idea we had been discussing was linking EFB in character sheets. Thoughts on that?

I do that as well already and then I post the EFB into the character sheet thread so that if someone is looking up info on my character, they can scroll down and look at the EFB too.
plus i just like to keep all the details on my char in one place >>

I think the levels of distinction are good, but that's because I'm heinously postmodern and if one has to have categories at all, more categories = better because they can be more specific.

However whenever I find myself looking at other people's EFBs I'm almost always after a particular family, and don't necessarily know what level their family is, so I have to do a forum search.

I would suggest the approved EFBs just be listed by family name, but then have various indices grouping them by class, line of work, country, blood status. 

Could you not make a sortable table with columns for Family name (including a link to the thread), Location, Class, Line of Work, Anything Else Important, and then people could click on the table headings to sort it per their needs at the time?

I was actually more thinking of an index thread with a jQuery sorted table (eg http://tablesorter.com/docs/) which would be less effort to code if javascript/jquery would be compatible with smf?

Or even a wiki page ... do we even still have a wiki?

Or an even more low tech solution, the admins keep a spreadsheet, and sort it everywhichway you can and just copy and paste it into an index thread post by post. i.e. post #1 - sorted by family name, post #2 sorted by played character name, post #3 sorted by area ... etc.

How do you mean layoutable? It should be fine with any CSS 2 compatible with tables that you care to throw at it, I'd imagine it also has CSS3 support too, although plugins are less likely to support that than the core jQuery, obviously. jQuery is good unobtrusive javascript - it will just manipulate the DOM and then let the stylesheets sort the layout.

Of course, it might just be me that would find this kind of sortable thing useful. Any one else got any opinions?

I try tend to write my scripts unobtrusively so I haven't really got anything to suggest in that area. Although I'm sure I've seen some jQuery sorting plugins that will do custom layouts too.

Also bear in mind that you can build a custom install of jQuery from the main jQuery website, only containing the functions and properties that you need - but that assumes the sorting plugins are sufficiently well documented to have all the necessary dependencies listed rather than just "dependency: jQuery 1.9.1" or whatever.

I dunno whether I would use a sortable table (although I'm loving the geekiness of this convo).

I think the most important thing is to keep it up to date.

Javascript is all processed client side, and jQuery in particular all happens on or after document.onload and the DOM is ready for manipulation after any weird php has happened serverside - aside from the issues you mentioned about including things in the headers which is a fair concern, I don't see what the back end has to do with it, it would just be a couple of plain text .js files that get served to the browsers and interpreted by them...

I agree with Cas though, that currency should be the top priority

That would be  the beauty of the javascript solution - to add an entry, all you need to do is append a new row and the clientside sorting would take care of where in the table that would need to go.  All you'd need is a template table row that people can plug the details into, paste it in just before the </table> tag and voila, good to go.

I think this conversation got a bit technical for the spirit of this thread though, and we might have scared off the casual reader? Oops. Sorry. My fault.