Explorer’s Journal subforum – would this be a good idea?

[Mengy]

I often see people make threads for themselves as online journals of sorts, a place where they can talk about their own personal expeditions and post pictures and such. I’ve thought about doing this myself a few times, but I think part of me felt like it would just clutter the Explorer forum somewhat.

This weekend I played some Microsoft Flight Simulator (FSX) for a bit. I’ve been using a utility called Flight Sim Economy (FSE) for over a decade now with FSX, it’s a program which adds a virtual economy to FSX where you can fly jobs for money and buy planes to own, it turns FSX into an actual game, similar to Elite actually. FSE is pretty much a virtual flying club for the most part with a very active community. On the FSE website we have a separate forum called “Player PIREPS” where people can post PIlot REPorts to keep as online journals, and everyone can peruse them and comment on them together, but all consolidated into one neat and tidy subforum. It works well, and it’s a fun place to read, as some pilots put a lot of work into their threads making it both entertaining and full of great pictures.

Could something like that work for the Explorer’s Forum? Make a sub forum here where commanders can keep online pilot logs of trips they go on? It would even make a nice home for large multiplayer expedition threads too. Plus it might help liven up the explorer community somewhat, encouraging people to communicate in a positive manner while enabling people to see where others are flying, maybe even inspiring more deep space meetups between explorers simply due to knowing where others are by their journals.

This explorer community is one of the best aspects of Elite Dangerous for me, and I think a sub forum like this could really be beneficial and interesting in so many ways.

 

[Dad Rock]

It'd be a cool idea. Having said that, there is already something like this on Inara - and a lot of Commanders are already using that to come up with interesting and varied content. Might be worth checking out. If you already know of it then my apologies

 

[Redfox]

Despite liking the idea of topical grouping in general I'd suggest not moving these journals behind a 'wall'.

I think we're currently not getting too many of those threads, thus I can't see any upsides to this. The popular ones prosper, but most lack active participation and eventually die - even now with the full explorer forum traffic. If moved into a separate subforum they'll get even less attention and overall we'd probably get less interesting stories posted.

 

[ThomasWJames]

Sounds interesting, but I'm one of those people that uses Inara to log my trips since I'm on XBox One and can't download my logs.

 

[Mengy]

Sounds interesting, but I'm one of those people that uses Inara to log my trips since I'm on XBox One and can't download my logs.

Interesting, I'd not seen that section on Inara before. After browsing it a bit though it's not quite the interactive area I imagined; looks like most people post something there and then it just sits without any discussion or follow ups. An actual forum would be more interactive and easier to post up media.