Development forums
 

... should be restricted to members of the forums only. I realized that, quite often, there are more guests than registered members.
I don't particulary like to have my work exposed to anyone, so I feel that only members of the forums should be allowed to READ and post in the development forums.

Opinions?

No.

Why not? It wouldn't hurt.

I disagree. Graal development is already composed of so few people that closing it off any further would kill it off entirely.

It would hurt.

It might. The way these forums are it is entirely possible that there are members of the development community that can't access the forums. free vimes, if you catch my drift

So you're okay with the fact that people just come here, look at your stuff, take it and use it without saying thanks because they don't have a forum account? You don't even know who's doing what!
Just restrict read access to members, that's all I want.


How hard is it to activate your accounts on the Graal forums?
I believe it would make more people come in to say thanks, or eventualy make them post their own stuff since they have an account!

Don't post your work if you don't want it to become accessible to the public domain.

The development forums are just as important as the Wiki and closing the door will only have negative repercussions.

The simple solution would be to stop posting your work.

I don't post stuff here to just show it. It's either posted for people to directly use it or learn from it.

Even if I posted stuff that I didn't want copied, I'd still leave the forums open, because attracting people to the game, and specifically its development community, is far more important than my pride.

I'm not talking about pride, I'm talking about the fact that your work can be used somewhere else without any credits. You will never know where your work is at the moment, who's using it and for what project.
People know there are alternatives to Graal, and seriously, how many times did we see people starting standalone projects using graal's stuff without permission? I've seen that way too many times, it's really annoying.

I've never seen it, but I would assume the people who do it are familiar with Graal and would probably have a forum account anyway.

Felix's solution was perfect.

Get over yourself, nobody cares that much about your graphics.

All the power to people who manage to create something successful from public assets.

Are you trying to induce paranoia in the community? Have some trust that more people will be using what they see for good rather than for bad.

The fact is that anyone who is stealing content won't have enough talent to make a successful project anyways.

I've been part of communities which were 'closed off', and I must say they were more elitist than skilled, and there was a truly ugly atmosphere inside of them. I don't want the same to happen here.

If people are going to steal, they're going to steal. Locking away the forum is going to only be an incentive for them to sign up on the forums... and all you need is to subscribe to Graal once(which you need to have a server anyways).

The days of problematic stealing are mainly gone, you rarely see anyone steal stuff anymore and when you do it's not hard to get it taken care of. If you're paranoid with your work Graal isn't the place for you since all you have to do is play to get the graphics.

I guess you're right, but it's not about my work nor about the work being used somewhere else ON GRAAL (can be taken care of really easily).
I guess I'm just too used to security and other stuffs that websites like DeviantART have.

What does DeviantART have?
The only effective way that I can think of that you can stop people from saving an image from a website is to load a remote image in a flash object. Those right click blocker scripts that some websites use don't work very well and most of them can be bypassed by just right clicking quickly.

Even if the script worked you could always take a screenshot of the image instead.

You can still get it under Window > Activity if you're using Safari, not to mention you can always take a screenshot if you really want it.

"Right-click" blockers are ridiculously stupid.

Watermarks are a small solution to it.

Not to mention disabling JavaScript will also stop the script from working.

Then watermark the images you upload to these forums :oo:.

Hell I've seen watermarks defeated by clicking view print and the preview completely removed the watermark and displayed the image at full resolution.

Sure it can be annoying that someone takes your stuff, But we do need to present graal as if devlopment is happening here..
I can see how blocking off the devlopment forums could cause one of two thoughts to occer, "I'm intersted to see wat this is so I will create an account to see." or the more likely, "It's blocked, I'm too lazy to register and see what this is."

If its open they might think, "Well, All this lack of good devlopment and chat of graal "Dieing" makes graal appear as if its a wasteland, nobody wants to be a part of."
Or Hopefully, "Graal devlopment looks amazing, I want to be a part of it."

In short, we need the world to see Graal as devloping, the more we present the better for the community. Besides, registered users take images just the same.. perhaps we should have a no stealing disclaimer? (doubt that will do much however.)

In short the more we show the better for the community if it gets stolen, meh why care?..

Shouldn't really use website's watermarks then, add your own completely to the image lol.

Oh well, I got my answer now.

Disabling right click would be dumb, and a nuisance. Also, doubt it's even possible of the forums. Honestly, this is the internet. Stuff gets around, if this worries you then I'm sorry but just don't put it ANYWHERE on the internet.

I think you're being a bit anal about it.

Ditto.

I am more guest then logged in, because I don't know my password, I saved it in a .txt file so I can search it up :p

Might be nice to have a feature to only expose certain text in a post to members only (I know there are plug-ins for this for vbulletin). This way you could password protect your attachments in a zip/rar file and only expose the password to members of the forums.

I'd like that. I just feel more "safe" of showing my work on the Dev forums if this is implemented.

If you're going to go through all of that trouble, might as well just get one of the plugins that blocks attachments from non-members.

If possible have an option (that's unchecked by default of course) saying "[] Hide to unregistered users." or something.

Anything like that will do, really.

http://i54.tinypic.com/21ag5f.png

Here use this watermark i made you ;)