Minutes of the first annual meeting of PlayByWeb, Inc. DATE: April 2003 PLACE: Pbw Management Forum PRESENT: Coin Man, High Inquisitor, JohnB, MJ, Fatman Over the weeks before the meeting, we used the Members Forum to collect members' thoughts about PBW. These ideas, along with our own, formed the starting point for our discussions and decision making. A method of selecting and/or replacing officers is needed. It was decided that positions should be filled by appointment by those currently holding office. A three-tiered structure was devised by JohnB, full details of which can be seen on the officers page. Fundraising and financial concerns were raised. Coin Man provided a list of estimated annual expenses and a cash flow statement. Work will be done to implement a PayPal means of donating as well as looking into re-establishing the Amazon associate link. Reinstate message boards with moderation. It was felt that restoring the open message boards was very important to the sense of community that we wish to have at PBW. However, remembering past experience, means of moderating disruptive behavior was considered an equal priority. At this time, we have decided to reinstate two boards: Advertisements and PBW Issues/Bugs. TOU applies to posts in those boards, and a moderation tool has been established in the event of a TOU violation. Additional boards may be added in the future, and volunteer moderators may be recruited in the future. Picture gallery concerns have been raised. Many people have wanted to add new graphics to the galleries, which were not organized in any discernible manner. High Inquisitor began the task of sorting through the graphics currently in the galleries to weed out duplicates and poor quality graphics. Subsequently, discussion of becoming a sister site with RPoL and sharing a graphics database was raised, and the plan is to implement this change. It is noted that the changeover will require a re-selection of graphics for all users, but the benefit of the increased gallery size and ability to submit new graphics was considered well worth that one-time inconvenience. Next, we considered the then-existing reports. Based on user feedback in the Members Forum, the New Games report was considered useful as a starting point for those users in search of a new game. The Old Games report was of minor utility, but the sense was that a long-running game was deserving of the minor recognition by appearing on such a list. The active boards/users lists appeared to have little to no support, and considerable opposition. Mention had been made of one game in a complaint in the Members Forum which had players openly spamming the game by strings of multiple posts with a single word each for no purpose other than to boost that game and its members to the top of the respective lists. It was felt that these lists were not in the best interest of PlayByWeb, and should be dropped. Voting for admins and players were considered, and again with feedback from members the consensus was that while voting had been well-intentioned, in practice it was not providing the desired results. It was, however, noted that the list generated of boards run by an admin did help users who wished to research a game's admin before joining. Therefore, new reports were created, listing the admins by game and the games by admin. Voting was dropped. Ugot as a means of providing a humorous FAQ was raised. It was decided to recruit volunteers to write for Ugot. Many code changes were suggested. It was decided that as our codemaster, Fatman should prioritize the code changes for importance and ease of implementation. Additional volunteers with appropriate coding knowledge may be sought to assist with these code changes. Adoption of a formal policy for lost passwords was considered. After discussion, we decided that the password would be sent only to the email address associated with the account. Users should ensure that their registered email is up-to-date. During this discussion, the number of idle accounts was raised, but it was decided to leave these accounts along unless/until a problem arises with the number of inactive accounts. As a request for a new category had been made in the Members Forum, we looked at the current list of categories. A number of these categories have been vacant for some time, and it was felt that restructuring to better meet the needs of the PBW community was a good idea. Discussions will be held as to what categories should be added/deleted, seeking general member input before making changes to the current category structure. An offer to sister with RPoL was made while the management meeting was taking place. This offer is endorsed by the PBW board of directors in the hopes of starting a broader web-based role-playing community. It was also noted that when changes were made, there might be resistance to the change and a desire to return to the way things had been. Therefore it was decided that time would be taken to allow the users to get accustomed to the way things work before considering reverting to the way things had been before a given change.