Because a lot of the major encounters of a character should be with kids their own age group (remember how scary someone one year your senior was when you were 11?) I think it would be beneficial to have channels for each of the years. Like a "incoming 21-22" where only those students that joined in this year.
That way, even those that join in later in the year can immediately find active users that would be in their IC circles and have threads.

This has been suggested previously and denied since it would be a huge mess to moderate, especially when people's characters never went into index or they got a new character

As Lucia said, it was something that was previously requested in the past but it required an incredible amount of moderation - we have 32k + accounts on Hogwarts, on our discord we have about 600 accounts. We also have a lot of channels already, most students see about a third of the channels we actually have because we have staff areas, sport teams, moderation areas and house specific areas. You can see the actual number of channels in a screengrab a few posts above to get an idea of the actual size of our discord. We have also gotten requests to add other channels (see above also) and have struggled to find a good end point because everyone has good reasons for wanting an additional channel, we just have a finite staff size and a long scroll as it is to monitor the areas we already have also.

That said, will see what can be done.

Unfortunately we used to have something like that but the site owner and code master (Zach) removed the feature. He is way smarter than me in terms of code, I can only modify existing code where that guy creates. I do not know what issue it was having (or recall at least) but I know he chose to remove it. I -think- it might have caused site slowing. That said, I -think- that a user created a browser add on that does similar. I do not have it and only saw screen grabs of it doing its thing but if they see this post hopefully they can offer some assistance. This would of course be a download and require a certain browser to be used (I technically cannot advocate for either of these things in case they one day use their brains for evil) but if you both privately discuss this without my involvement then by all means...

I am old and clueless, @zachary winslow is much smarter than me. I have tagged him here, he is often busy but I know he checks for tags regularly (this is not an invite for people to tag him please).

Subject: [Help Us] Forum Suggestions

Elisabeth Erner wrote: 25 Aug 2021, 14:23

I understand. What I meant is, both the address book in the owl system and the tag system would be exactly the same feature; so instead of having two separate name-recognising feature as before, now we'll have just one, only that it will be linked to two.

I'm afraid I can't express my meaning clear enough in the paragraph above, so I'll try this... hopefully it's better.

The Old Feature Used on Hogwarts.io

if "Choosing Owl Recipient" is clicked
then
linked to "Address Book"
OR
if "Tag" is clicked
then
linked to "Automatic 3-Letter Matching"

Features used: Recipient, Address Book, Tagging, Automatic Matching
in conclusion, four/4 things are in active use here

The Proposed New Feature Used on Hogwarts.io

if "Choosing Owl Recipient" OR "Tag" is clicked
then
linked to "Address Book"

Features used: Recipient, Tagging, Address Book
in conclusion, now there are only 3/three things are in active use here

I do hope this makes sense and is clear enough. But of course I'm not a computer programmer and it's been more than 10 years since I last studied it, so if in coding this proposed solution can't be implemented I can understand.

So I had an idea partly inspired by the writing competition which was running for a while (where players could submit writing to be used as setting descriptions) and by what I think is a similar idea running on the French site (unsure though, I haven't actually been on there for a while but remember the crests being handdrawn).

It's centred around the crests used on the homepage to show which house has won the house cup (these). The same crests are used every month, and I thought it would be cool if the player base could have a go at making some new ones.

They wouldn't have to be the original crests - they could be a remaster of the house crest (example 1, example 2, example 3, example 4), or a piece of art based around their house founder, symbols, attributes, ect (example 1, example 2, example 3, example 4).

My idea would work something like this:

• Once every six months, or however often you think would work, the competition would be announced.
• Players would have a set amount of time (eg. a fortnight) to send in original works to the gamemaster account. There would be set rules, such as having a transparent background or having the image a specific size.
• Players would only be able to send in an artwork based around their own in-game house.
• Players would be able to re-enter art which they'd entered before as long as it hadn't already won, as long as they hadn't told anyone that it had been made by them (so as to keep anonymity).
• After the deadline, the community would be able to vote for each house, as with the writing competition.
• After the voting time had passed, the four winners would be announced. They'd receive some sort of prize.
• For the next six months (or however long until the next competition), these arts would be used in place of the current crests. (With credit, of course.) This would add another aspect to the house cup since the winners would want to see their artwork on the front page, and will likely try to earn lots of points.

I think this would be a cool way to add an arty sort of aspect to the site. It would probably take quite a bit of organising though, and of course these are all suggestions, which you could change however you needed to. Just putting the idea out there

Not a bad idea, the only issue I see is us wasting some good art if a house did not win and we had a brilliant art piece. But most of the time we use the same few pictures because they are built into the side and we use the url quickly on the first when we update the splash page. That said, I always like seeing artists show their works. It broadens their profile and enriches our community.

I did think of that, and the only thing i can think of is to either only have a new competition once every house has won the cup, or to have a gallery-type thread somewhere where past winners would be shown