Tech Support Best TMS for non forum?

[Husk]

What are the best tag management systems out there for a non forum website? Any favorites?

 

[Arantor]

What kind of tags and what sort of management?

I don't think I've ever seen anything standalone for this, but at best being widgets one could slot into something else.

 

[Husk]

So basically, I was looking to make tags instead of forums. Husband says they're not tags, they're categories so I might not need help with it after all. My thought was to tag each "thread" with a location and then click on the tag list to see everything written in that area.

 

[Arantor]

Some forums do work this way now, e.g. Flarum, but taxonomically they're still usually called categories.

As for standalone, no, because they're pretty fundamental to whatever you're classifying.

 

[Husk]

He mentioned Vanilla does this as well but we're already knee deep in this software and anyway, pretty sure Vanilla (not sure about Flarum) doesn't have character accounts. Our software just creates character profiles per user and roleplay ID, no sub account/logging in and out BS.

 

[Arantor]

The only platforms I know of that have character accounts baked in are Vesta, StoryBB and Solus Orbis. Vesta's gone, StoryBB is being rebuilt from the ground-up and Solus Orbis has been quiet for maybe a year. Everyone else just hacks subaccounts onto the core as real accounts that you glue together which is a 'good enough' approach for most people but it lacks a lot of finesse and has all sorts of hidden side effects.

 

[Husk]

Yeeeeah I've noticed that. The hacking of actual accounts glued together. I personally dislike it and find it annoying to have to "switch account" all the time. (Hence moving away from everything else). I don't think Nova worked that way, but it's been a hot minute since I used it. Nova

 

[Arantor]

Nova didn't (doesn't?) work like that, no, but Nova had a different vibe intentionally; it's geared at a different pace. Much more detailed around a single setting where each person plays one character in a lot more depth, e.g. half a dozen people writing a different role each on a spaceship venturing into deep space. Would be weird to see a Nova install with people writing even 2-3 characters each from what I saw.

One thing I will say, I actually intentionally set up StoryBB to have you switch personas when posting because I originally thought on a site where people played maybe max 5-8 characters, they might pick a theme to suit the character (e.g. the original site it was built for was a Potter RP, and there was a light/dark theme plus one for each of the Hogwarts houses). It's funny how wrong that particular factor ended up being, but people do seem to like actually switching characters before posting to get them in the right head-space.

I did consciously make it easy to move posts between characters if you got it wrong - it was never more than a click away (didn't even need to edit the post), and we also made sure the Discord notifications didn't go out immediate to allow people a minute or so's grace to fix obvious issues before it did that.

Personally, I've never been a fan of the dropdown-at-post-time, seems far too easy to me to post as the wrong character. I sometimes wonder if this is because of the different numbers of characters we play - I only play 6 at present - but the joy of RP is that everyone can absolutely find the place and pace that works for them, and you seem to have found yours which is awesome.