Guerrilla

Hi @BigBen1967 and welcome to Scifi-Meshes.

A couple of things:
1. Please check the dates before bumping a thread. This one hasn't had any activity since 2014. The post dates are under the username. Just check the latest one before you post a reply.
2. Please don't just show up to advertise your stuff available elsewhere. We're all for for promoting and elevating the work of our community members, but that means that you should be a part of the community, not just show up in an old thread and tell people to find you on Facebook. You could post your station in Finished Work or our Discord, for example and take it from there.

Please check the Community Guidelines when you get a chance.

TLDR: Please check the dates before responding to a topic, especially in Work In Progress

We've had something of an influx of new people and people who haven't been here in a while show up lately. That's pretty neat. Welcome (back) everyone! It looks like a quick little refresher on forum etiquette and community guidelines might be necessary though:

You have probably seen one of these guys on the lower left corner of your screen, when typing a response to a really old thread:


Also, from Them Rules:

Don't ask for models
Releasing or not releasing a model is up to the artist, and it's not really something you should bring up in their project threads.

Don't ask for updates
I'm sure the author would post them, if they had them.

So,

1. Please check the date of the previous posts before typing your response. You can find it under people's username in all posts:
   
   If you want the exact date, you can hover over it. Anything more than 6 months ago should probably be avoided, if you're not adding anything substantial to the conversation. You can always private message (Message button in their profile) to try and reach them. Posting in their profile is kind of like a Facebook wall, and equally useless. It's not private nor does it send notifications as far as I know. If someone's profile doesn't have any badges, it means they haven't logged in since we switched forum software in February 2019 (so at least 5 years).
2. However, returning to your own old projects is always appreciated. It'll get tagged with the Necropost tag automatically, but I'll remove any extraneous ones, whenever I'm on the forums. Can't do it on mobile though, so I need to be on my computer or iPad at the time. If removing seems to be taking an unusually long time, send me a private message or ping me on Discord.
3. It's not that big a deal on all forums though. Like necroposting in Finished Work or General Discussion is generally not that big of a faux pas, since they move quite a bit slower. Finished pictures are still worth looking at and people like to go back to old conversations, when a new season starts and so on.

Why do we frown upon asking for models? Because we try to run this place for artists first and foremost and a bunch of people contacting one person to get something out of them probably gets pretty exhausting after a while. We would rather offer a safe haven from that kind of thing here. We're all about the actual work here, so more of a journey than destination type community after all. We encourage and welcome sharing models and resources, but never expect or require it. You can reach out in private, but if the answer is no (or silence), that's the end of that.

Thanks for reading. Let me know, if you have any comments and suggestions on the current policy here.

I really like those cutaway images you do. The angle kind of reminds me of old strategy games and RPGs. They always make me think how cool it would be to have some kind of Starfleet Tycoon or Sims game, where you order your little pixel redshirts around a starship.

Vanilla 3.2 is out, and seems to be working for most people, so I'll try to get us updated next weekend. As usual, forum will be unavailable during the update, but it should take less than an hour.

No new features, a couple of security patches.

Just a quick heads up. The spam filter on the forum has been a little trigger happy for the past few days it seems. I haven't changed anything in the backend, so not sure what's causing it, but I've seen a couple of legitimate posts caught in the filter in the past few weeks. I'll approve them whenever I check the dashboard, but if your reply gets caught, there might be a slight delay since I need to manually release it. It literally just holds the post for review, so no need to worry about unforeseen consequences. You might see some double posts, if people make another post that gets through the filter before I release the previous one.

If your post gets caught the quickest way to get in touch is our #site-server-support channel on Discord or replying to this thread. Or you can just wait for me to check the spam queue the next time I'm browsing the forums.

TLDR: You can now export your SFM user data from your profile in convenient CSV format

Your privacy is very important to us...

Just kidding! This isn't a generic GDPR or CCPA message announcing that we'll continue sending you newsletters or processing your data pretty much just as before, but with a little more necessary ass covering due to legislation. Actually, I suppose in a way it is... I added functionality for you to download most (I'll get back to that in a moment) of the information associated with your account here on SFM in convenient CSV format to do with what you please. You can access the functionality in Edit Profile.

There are a couple of fields that are omitted for security reasons (I don't want to give out password hashes for people to figure out, or detailed information on the database structure) or simply because they're not human readable in the database (IPs for example), but with those caveats in mind, generally everything you input you should be able to download and review, if you want. This has been possible ever since the migration, but until now required pretty significant manual effort. Deletion and alteration request still need to be mailed to [email protected] or just messaged to me on the forums.

I realize none of this is probably exciting or even particularly interesting, but I guess in the end I kind of do care about your data, and we really do try our best to be responsible adults with it. You can check out our Privacy Policy here, if you haven't in a while.

Another feature request from Discord, this time from @Comco

I just added the option to filter WIP and Gallery forums by prefixes, so if only feel like looking at Practical models in progress right now, you can.
You can find the filters in the Forum descriptions:


The plugin is pretty powerful and can filter all sorts of parameters, so if you have any suggestions for cool ones you would like to see on the forums, let me know.

Another example:
Get posts from the last:

• 24 hours
• Week
• Month
• Year

Let's start with this one.

sorceress21 wrote: »

You launched an unfair gripe at me sir. I did not violate the terms of service.

Well, no. I responded to multiple complaints about the hostile tone that seemed to have less to do with Star Trek and more to do with the shit you see on Facebook and comment sections.

As far as TOS goes, the Community Guidelines say:

Guerrilla wrote: »

About These Rules
This is not a complete list of what you can and cannot do on these forums, nor is it really meant to be. We reserve the right to refuse service to anyone, even if there is not a specific rule about their particular misdeeds in this document. Rules lawyering and seeing just how far you can push the rules will, more often than not, result in a worse outcome for you. We do strive for fair moderation at all times, but this is a privately owned forum, and we really don't owe anyone an online platform. Using this forum is a privilege, not a right.

sorceress21 wrote: »

Name calling? Not following you on that one. I called no one a name.

It was more of of a general you. If a point requires, for example, name calling or silly culture war rhetoric to go along with it, it's not a very good point nor is it welcome here.

I am NOT the one who decided to politicize a scifi TV show and I'm pretty sure regardless of one's political perspective the average Trek fan doesn't want it in the show.

You are the one who decided to go with the left wing wokeness bullshit rhetoric here though. You reckon stuff like left wing wokeness bullshit, Holly-leftist-democrap-wood, Hollycommiewood is perfectly neutral thing to drop into casual conversations with strangers and doesn't come off as really fucking belligerent? That's a pretty big assumption you're making about the average Trek fan too.

sorceress21 wrote: »

So let me get this straight, I pointed out how disgusted I am that the producers have politicized Star Trek which is exactly what you don't like and that's an issue? For the record I could care less which side of the Right vs. Left culture war Trek favors because they should favor neither. Had Discovery favored the Right, I would have made fun of that side with the same level of credulity.

Well, no. The issue is I have zero interest in hosting this asinine culture war shit on my site. The outcome is actually already determined. We'll have no more of this on the forums. Whether we accomplish that by you working on your tone and rhetoric, abstaining from posting in some or all topics or me making those decisions for you, is up to you.

sorceress21 wrote: »

Me and you both! I couldn't even get through Discovery Season 3. The left wing wokeness bullshit just stunk the whole thing up beyond my ability to tolerate. It was just terrible television period.

Could we not do the whole Fox News Culture War routine here? It's unnecessary and comes off really hostile, which is why I'd really rather not have anything to do with it in my internet house. Keep that shit in comment sections and social media, if you have to, but this is not the place.

Here's the salient bit from the GD rules:

SFM is a on-topic forum
Those topic being 3D, Art and Science Fiction. We're not saying that's all you can ever talk about, but we do reserve the right to close threads that aren't on topic.

Banned topics
Obviously anything illegal, pornographic and the stuff specifically mentioned as no-go in the Terms of Service. We would rather you didn't post politics, religion or anything that people generally feel strongly enough to fight on the Internet about, and rarely change their minds. We're not saying that always happens, but often enough the result is a shitshow and a closed thread. If you feel your post is going to ruffle some feathers, maybe take a minute to think about whether or not it's really necessary (it's not.). Ask yourself, whether it is strategic or cathartic? If you absolutely must post it, try Facebook or Twitter instead*?

*(Not our Facebook or Twitter though)

On disagreements
Disagreeing is fine, even encouraged at times. Just don't be a dick about it. If you can't make your argument without resorting to personal insults, your argument isn't worth making, nor is it welcome on the forum.

No one is saying you can't dislike Star Trek (or other scifi shows) or voice that dislike, but if you can't get that point across without resorting to name calling and waging some pointless culture war against the libs, I'm afraid you're going to have to do it somewhere else.

Sketchfab is pretty neat, right? We've actually had some form of Sketchfab embed since the forum migration, but I just got around to adding a profile fields as well. So, if you have a Sketchfab profile, just add your username in the field (just the username, no need for the rest of the URL, similar to most other profile fields). I also re-sorted the profile fields, because they were in a weird order and were bugging me.

The embed is a little temperamental, since they changed the URL format slightly but basically, what you need is the embed URL so, hit the embedbutton and grab this bit:

https://sketchfab.com/model/[long number]

and ignore the stuff after the slash following the long number, and it should embed fine. I'm looking for a better implementation, like a bbcode or something.

https://sketchfab.com/models/d08045aeacdf487096a4b2cd1ed8845f#UNIQSKFBVANILLA