Wanted to give a quick explanation and tour of the site for the launch. I'll sticky this for now but not forever.

First, a quick FAQ:

Q: Why did you make a forum?
A: Right now there just isn't a good alternative to Discord. It's the anchor of our community and it is abusing us. I'm not going to wait any longer for a feature-to-feature competitor to arrive that is straight up better, it may never exist. Discord took the world by storm in 2015 and we were happy with it for a while, but now it is our prison. By moving threaded discussion to our own site that we control, we can survive whatever venture capitalist bullshit is ahead for Discord. They are going to run out of money and probably sell off to some company that will run it into the ground. We've seen that happen before too many times.
I'm aware that this forum might not take off right away either. I'm hosting it as a passion project. As we get more of our existing community on board, and new people find us here and contribute posts and threads this website will accrue in value over time. We've been on the same Discord server since 2015 but going back and looking at messages in 2015 is a terrible experience and you'll never do it. Forums make historical viewings of old posts easy. It will pay off in time.

Q: What forum software is this?
A: Flarum --> https://flarum.org

Q: What plugins are running on this Flarum instance?
A: Most of the popular ones. Below is a picture that's accurate as of 9/21

Q: Why can't I upload pictures/video?
A: I haven't set it up yet! I will implement this, just need to launch the site first. I decided image uploads weren't part of my 'minimum viable product' for Melonmancy Cafe. Hopefully it won't take long to sort it out!
SIKE I got it working before launch day suckas

Q: What can I share if I can't upload?
A: The post editor should have a picture button in it that let's you specify the links to things. Also one of the plugins we are using (should) converts image and video URLs to embeds. So if you want to share a video, just past the link like you would on Discord and it should embed. If it doesn't let me know, I did test this and it was working before.

Q: What are the rules?
A: See thread: https://melonmancy.cafe/d/2-da-rulez (its also in the banner at the top of the page)

Q: Are there DMs?
A: Yes! They look like forum threads, just private between users. However I think admins (so me and ironee) can still read them, I am not sure at the time of writing. So private message responsibly.

Explaining the layout

The default page of Melonmancy Cafe is the Categories page, shown here:

Let's go down the list.

Announcements

Staff Only posts

New Episodes

Threads here will be posted (by me) for each new episode. Links to the episode, where podcast apps can be found, links to the shownotes, etc will be in the OP. In the replies we can discuss the content!

Meta

This category is hidden to all but users with the Founder and Subscriber roles. Founders know who they are, be them the truest of OGs from the Herocraft days, or our recent pickups. If you knew about Melonmancy before Melonmancy Cafe was launched, and contributed in our previous shenanigans we will award you Founder. Just ask. We will share more details on the Subscriber role later once we get our Podcast monetization in order. Purpose of the Meta category is to discuss the podcast, and plan the agendas/talking points of the upcoming episodes.

Vidya

The video games category. I suspect most of the posts are going to be in here. Over time at least. All things vidya go here. At least ONE secondary tag is required to post in the Vidya category, and as of now the secondary tags are all descriptions of types of games. If we end up with a lot of discussion on a particular topic we can make sub tags under Vidya (similar to New Episodes and Politics).

Tabletop

We still play tabletop on our Discord server and that won't stop. We can talk about any tabletop subjects in this category. In the future we may make but tags for ongoing campaigns and restrict those tags to only the players of that campaign, giving them a private subforum. If the DM wants that of course.

Anime and Manga

Do I really have to explain this?

Off Topic

For discussions that don't quite fit anywhere else

Cringe

I'm going to be real with you. I only created the cringe category so I could nest the Politics tag inside of it, and hide it from non-logged-in users. I'm on the fence with keeping it this way and I may delete Cringe and just make Politics a top level tag (but keep it hidden from anonymous view). This is meant to emulate our #politics-and-cringe channel on Discord, which is also hidden behind a role (and contains political posts, which are all cringe). I might change this in the near future and may not update my screenshot attached above. So if it doesn't look like that when you read this, that's why.

Decided to merge them anyway, so if you have something spicy to post that's not video game, anime, or tabletop related, put it in there. Requires login to view.

Now go forth and post!