As I spoke about in my last post we finally have some money to put towards CPN improvements and as of last night the work began. There is a lot going on behind the scenes right now and hopefully very soon we’ll be able to roll out several new things, some that will be good for the RPers others that will be good for the management and community. It’s very important that the managers and members of our groups participate in this process, failure to do so will mean in the future CPN will not grow and at some point your groups will die and CPN will die, so get involved! Now lets move onto some of the things that are happening.

Changes Already In Place:
›› Dashboard Overhaul: As of last night I made some changes to the standard group dashboard that will show at least the last two main page posts there for all managers, managers need to stay involved with the community as it is in the best interest of their groups.
›› Limited Spam Protection: The first phase of what hopefully will be several measures taken to stop all the spam groups was put in place last night, now when signing up for a username and a group you must input a math question to show you are human. This technique will hopefully be in place on all sign up processes soon and will hopefully greatly reduce the spam groups.
›› Gravatars Enabled: Wordpress uses a blogging avatar system known as “gravatars” which you sign for and host on a central site and load that avatar on any wordpress or other blogging platform you use your email on. To set an avatar visit www.gravatar.com and sign up with the email you use here and you’re avatar will show on all comments and can even be enabled on the forums.
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It’s been a few weeks since I’ve made a post here and I think it’s time to open up some communication with the members about features coming soon to CPN Groups as well as strategies to grow the community. First I’d like to touch on the news that we have received a check from adsense so we have some capital now to put into the site and how we use it is important, so feedback from the RPers is key on this, which I will come back to later.  First one the agenda for site ideas is one to move the current main forums to a group like everyone else uses, the benefits of this would be there would finally be just one account for everything on CPN plus we could use that group as kinda a “community help group”. I’d like to know what everyone thinks about that idea, or what they would propose.

Now onto the important issue of how to spend the adsense money, the first thing that comes to mind is chatrooms, however as of right now there is a irc chat plugin for wordpress (which is what CPNs base code structure is) that I’m going to attempt to use so that the chats could actually be integrated into the groups. If that doesn’t work we will then probably start looking at other chat software, even though through that route actual integration probably won’t be possible, what’s important is that we get chatrooms here soon. We’d also really like some feedback about the groups service so far, we can’t make improvements if nobody gives us feedback so please let us know what you think.