I've been thinking about this for a while. Quite a few factions have their own forums hosted somewhere, be it on some crappy for-free-hoster like Invisionfree or their own server. Couldn't we give factions their own subforums here on the GC boards?
I think this would bring a number of advantages to the faction (obviously), but also to the general public. You could have both public and internal sub-subforums; the public one would contain information like the faction writeup, the member roster and the recruitment thread and other information of use to interested people (like, in case of the Keepers, the Lore document), nicely accessible and all in one place instead of scattered over a ton of other forums. The internal forums could contain, well, internal discussions, such as who-to-recruit, event planning and similar things; this would benefit official factions in that they would no longer have to use external forums and give people another incentive to go official, too (currently, official status isn't exactly connected to many benefits, sadly).
Oh, I'm perfectly fine after moving from free boards to my own physical server where I control it completely, can update everything I need, make own themes (actually I really need to do that, that green theme is getting annoying already), run any OS, any software (hooray for dedicated UT3 server), do whatever I want. I see zero advantages I get from having faction forum here, but a royal pain in the head for this forum administrators to set up everything right, given variety of factions and each having unique stuff (for example our recruitment system requires two sections each having own special permission set).
Well, yeah, it's working fine for us - because we actually have somebody with the resources and expertise (not that running a small forum would be difficult, but meh), but most other factions don't (*coughs*GRN*coughs*). I've just taken the Keepers as an example because we have a very well done forum;).
I think it might obviously be a bit hard with the number of factions present, however possibly having a board for official factions within a given house or region, like Gamma, or just the omicrons as a whole, but not Omega as no npc faction is based there. Factions like GMG would be included to Kusari and IMG to Bretonia, zoners to Omicrons.
Though thinking about it, what purpose would the forums be for? I frankly find the external forums use currently as not that big anyway, RHA is the only faction that I'm in that has a forum. I guess it contains policies and rank restricted sections for things like account codes, the forums would have to be made to do these things with the same ability and no loss of control.
Besides, I don't suppose the external forums would even be abandoned either way?
