Welcome to Negative World. If you have any question, please read the following list and click to read an answer. If your question isn't in the list or if you have a suggestion, feel free to post a reply.

To be able to add more questions/answers to the list later, your participations to this thread will eventually be deleted to make room, after they've been answered.

Donations

Currently, the site doesn't bring in much money, and it costs about $85 a year to keep up. Not a whole lot, but the owner of this site isn't particularly rich, so every bit helps. Also, the web designer spent a lot of time and work to implement skins, navigation layout, make the site work quick and neat, and implement the options you asked him, all this instead of doing a paid professional site. The more you support the site, the better it'll run and the more potential its future will have.

Now, the FAQ...

General questions

What is "Negative World"?
What are the round icons at the corners of the site?
What are XP and user levels? Why do some features seem inaccessible to me?
Can I choose the looks and features of the site?
How does the private message system work?
Does the site have social network connections?
What is the Neverending Experience Quest?

Forum

Are there specific threads I should know about?
What do the lights on the left of the forum index mean?
What are the negative numbers on the right of the forum index? On the private message page? Level 99?
What are the little grey icons on the right of the main forum page? What are "news", "roundtables", etc.?
How can I search for specific posts?
Can you flag threads to spot them more easily?
Can I embed videos, resize an image? What's "Reference"? My links don't work, etc.?
What are the Terms Of Service?
Apart from the T.O.S. is there particular netiquette to observe with post formatting?

Game Database

How do you rate games? The games I want to rate aren't in the base? How do I write reviews?
Do you have a backlog feature? Can I see who is playing what?
How can I browse Negative World's game reviews?

User profiles

What are user profile features? Can I see who's online?
How can I browse user profiles/post history? I'm looking for a specific profile?
How can I check the system codes of other Negative World users (Wii, XBL, PSN, Steam...)?
My Steam system code on my Negative World profile doesn't link to my Steam profile!

Hmm... the activity log doesn't show any times when people weren't able to access the site. How long did this "explosion" last!?

@Abdooooo Oh I see what you mean. Our code parses any input breaks as a line break because that's how we can have it so users can

do

this

without having to know HTML. In theory some kind of tag could make it work the way you want but I think it's ok for now.

Is it possible to get a direct link to the PM's outbox, like so? Or is it just something I haven't found yet? Plus it would be great to be able to flag a thread from within the thread, not just from the threads list.

What do you say?

@Zero

It didn't last long, maybe about 10 minutes. But it coincided with another....incident. So we were speculating wildly. 'Too many requests' or something was the error. Like it was being overloaded or something.


Also, a request! :

Mr_Mustache said:

Hey! How come nobody is "Playing" this besides myself, WS, Gui, and FINlos?!

Fire Emblem: Path of Radiance in the database, and you're ignoring it!

C'mon, Club, represent! --And are 14 people still REALLY playing Donkey Kong Country Returns?? BAH.
Mannn, some of you guys don't even have this in your collection.. The database is our friend!

I want a new status option added to the database. Instead of marking a game as playing, given up etc, I want to be able to mark a game as 'Stache'.

It doesn't mean anything. But next time he game-stalks us, he will see a status of 'Stache', thus causing his head to explode .

Totally worth it IMO .

Related to what @Shadowlink said, I think it would be great if it displayed a message, something like:

"Are you still playing Super Metroid?" -Under the user's name, level & XP.

"Super Metroid" would be (of course) changed for the title of one of the games the user is playing(at random). The title of the game would be a link to the game's entry in the database thus promoting the use & constant update of this particular feature. If the user does not have any game selected as "playing now", it would say something like "You are not playing any games right now". With a link on "any games" that would link to the database's list of games.

So yeah. Just an idea. Tell me what you think.

@Zero

Like 4 minutes? It was that day that you were talking to me about replacing pictures with text. You were in chat, disappeared, and then the site wouldn't work. I can't remember who else was in there with me, sorry.

@Davoid

Users > PMs > Sent Messages? Thats the most direct route I know.

@Shadowlink

My head will NOT explode, it will only grow STRONGER.

--Now FIX your database games!!

@Davoid

Your "are you still playing Super Metroid" question; would it just pop up randomly? Or would it always be there asking you? If you want me to ask you in a month, I'll ask you, haha!!


OMG, I <3 the database! =p

Mr_Mustache said:

@Davoid
Users > PMs > Sent Messages? Thats the most direct route I know.

... thanks.

Mr_Mustache said:

@Davoid

Your "are you still playing Super Metroid" question; would it just pop up randomly? Or would it always be there asking you? If you want me to ask you in a month, I'll ask you, haha!!

Well, something I figured out, is that if there is something in your face all the time, it gets gradually less noticeable. So I guess 1/30 chance to display the message per refresh would make it stand out a bit more while not being too intrusive.

@Davoid

What if you're "Playing" 60 games? Would you get two a day in that sense?

I just don't know why its so hard for people to "police" themselves. I know I don't share the same viewpoint with everyone (obviously), but I freakin' love the database, and what its about. What a cool thing to do to see who is playing the same game as you at that time, and how you rank against each other, and blah.

I love our scores and all that jazz, but then I see some people with like 8 games in their collection. Come on, you've got more than 8 games.

When I finish a game, the first thing I do is come on here and change "Playing" to "Done" or whatever. Its exciting!

As for my giant list of "Playing," I count games that have "open" files as "Playing." So yeah, I'm still "Playing" a lot of games that I had started, but not touched for months (ie: Star Fox Adventures, ugh).

@Davoid If you click "PMs" up in the user menu it will bring you to your PM home, and then on the right side there is an arrow next to "sent messages" you can click.

@Davoid This isn't a bad idea in theory, but there really isn't room for it and the type of people who don't keep their game log status updated probably aren't visiting the game database much anyway. I sort of flirted with the idea a few times of having people brought to the home page when they come in every new session and on the home page messages about "are you still playing...?" and important site news and stuff could appear, but ultimately I think most people are here for the forums so now we have auto login and such and most people never see the "home" page anyway. And of course as Stache mentioned some people are "playing" a billion games.

It would be nice to have the game database more proactive. I'll have to think about it.

@Mr_Mustache Well I was doing a bunch of site editing that day so I probably accidentally killed something but I don't remember anything being down for more than 10 or 15 seconds or so.

@Mr_Mustache But obviously a lot of people aren't quite as interested in the feature as we are. It doesn't make any sense to point fingers, people set their own priorities and keeping an updated list / log / etc. of games they are playing on a site they come to hang out and relax on may not be one of them. I see it as a challenge on my part... how do I make the game database both A. more appealing and B. more of an ongoing presence in the lives of Negative World members?

Plus I know a lot of people don't want to bother until if/when we make it for more than just Nintendo platforms. And I totally get that point of view. It requires people to either keep their stuff updated in multiple places, or ignore like half of their game collection.

@Zero

I think that if people don't use the database now, they never will. I think its cool now; if they don't want to participate, they won't. A shame.

The site has been slow for me the past 24 hours.

@Mr_Mustache Not to get argumentative, but that attitude is kind of contrary to the way feature development works. Feature usage always has a LOT to do with factors like visibility, etc. I have a few ideas for this too.

@Secret_Tunnel Yeah and it died a bit once or twice too. Hmm.

@Zero

Why do you always argue with me?!

I'm not trying to argue! Just making it clear that my attitude for development is never going to be "if people aren't using it now..." because that flies in the face of everything I know about web design. You can get people interested in anything if you do it right.

@Zero

Your new task:

Make people use the sports thread, and love NASCAR.

Hmm. I dunno man, it's possible to make people love NASCAR but they already have half naked chicks laying all over the cars in all of the pictures, not sure what else I could add to that.

@Zero

If one of those girls comes to my house I promise I will watch NASCAR with her.

oh I'll show her some nads-scars if ya know what i mean

@Secret_Tunnel

Ouch. Sounds like a botched vasectomy...

Is the answer to Stage 5 of the NEQ actually only two letters, or is there something wrong with my browser that won't let me enter more than two letters?