Forum Suggestions and Thoughts

[SQ]

I noticed a lot of my suggestions from another thread being implemented, but I didn't feel it appropriate to bump that specific thread, so I hope this is ok.
I wanted to say thank you advance though, everything looks great so far!

After taking some more time to actually be active here again, I've identified some more things to comment about. I've had several random thoughts so rather than making a bunch of threads about them, I thought I might make a bunch of posts in a single thread. I hope that's alright. Other people can feel free to chime in, too. =)

Is there a benefit to donating?
I'm an old member, so I know there's some changes when you donate, but I'm not sure what they are now since I haven't donated within the year. I haven't seen anything regarding donating and its benefits on the forum (to be fair I haven't looked super hard, I thought donation benefits would be a little more in your face), and on the main site the donation pages I've looked at are mostly about pledges and not what I might get if I donate. I know we're all supposed to feel really good about helping the site pay its bills by donating, but considering the pages do mention "My status hasn't changed" in the FAQs for donating, I'm wondering what that "status" is? Is it just a public title saying "donator" or is there more to it?
And on that note: Had the Org thought about moving to Patreon or Ko-Fi Drip for handling its donations? It's not super important, though.

Can we get some more recent emoticons?

Or even emojis? The current smilies are relics from an ancient time and most of them don't accurately reflect any emotions usually conveyed in discussions anymore.
On that note, ability to resize images with BBCode? I know that one might not be doable but a man can dream.

Centralized Discussion Forum?
I noticed you moved the general discussion forums to the top and grouped them all together, with general discussion being a parent and music and anime being children. But I was wondering if it might be more beneficial to just have one "general discussion" forum that covers everything, instead of separating it into the subforums? Meaning that anime and music discussion would all happen in the "General Discussion" forum. Maybe even combine that with AMV Discussion too? But that might be too much.

That's all I have for now.
Thank you guys (especially Kireblue) for being so active.
You've certainly renewed my interest. =]

[SQ]

Re: What we get for donating

OK so with a little more looking I finally found it, but whoah is it very easily glossed over.
The Pledge page is full of text and I think it's a little too much information.
The important stuff (to me, anyway) is in the second paragraph:

Donating gives you access to a number of features that improve site functionality. These include the ability to turn off ads, improved search options, a download queue, access to an off-topic forum (minimum $12 donation), and more. Some of these features can be previewed by non-donators on the 1st and 15th of each month. Your donator status will last one year from the date you make a pledge.

I feel like it might be better to be in list format (or at least link to a full list on the forum), and furthermore I think this description might be out of date, considering "General Discussion" is what I believe used to be the Off topic forum? Or is the donators' OT Forum an entirely different forum that still exists?

Regardless, it'd be good to have a breakdown of donation benefits somewhere on the forum-side, at least. Looking through the SIte FAQ there is absolutely no mention of what the benefits are, just how to donate, the difference between a pledge and a donation, and what to do if some common things go wrong.

[Kireblue]

You're defiantly right about the benefits of donating being outdated. There's also a number of other things in the Site FAQ that I need to get around to updating. Might try to tackle all of that sometime next week. Right now the main benefits of donating is that you don't get the donation page page interrupting you whenever you want to do a local download. Also, you get the ability to edit your posts on all the forums without a time limit. Lastly, the search features on the main site are a bit more comprehensive. Personally, I want to make the ability to edit posts a global feature for everyone, and so I'd love to be able to implement more donator feature in near future.

In terms of more emoticons, that's probably pretty easy to add. I actually have a list of forum features that I want to add, but there is still a bit of code that the site developers are working on bringing up to date before we implement them. I know that we've been saying that we're close to pushing out site updates for years, but we're getting REALLY close now.

For the centralized general discussion, I think that getting rid of the music and video game sub forums is a good idea. I think I'm gonna just go ahead and do that. I do want to leave general anime the way it is though. I feel that the general discussion chat would start to become too convoluted if we merged it with too much.

I'll also mention to the other admins and mods about updating the site pledge page and making it easier to digest

[SQ]

You are awesome.