A place to call home.
Hello there, I am a lilian! I have always wanted a place on the Internet to call my home, where I can meet new friends and talk to them about cool, fun, and special things. I drifted for a long time hoping that I would find that place, but I never did. I know now that for that place to exist, I have to be the one to make it.
“oh, I see, I see, I understand, it has to be me. There isn’t anyone else.”
― Meg Murry, A Wrinkle in Time
I’m glad you found your way here. I hope it’s really fun and special for you.
Why a forum?
I made a forum because I find public Discord servers a little bit too overwhelming to participate in, and it’d be a little weird if I couldn’t participate in my own community!
I also just have a lot of fondness for forums in general. They remind me of a time when the internet was more fun and less corporate, and some forums have really helped me in the past. A sibling of mine even met their spouse on a forum!
Getting started.
Okay, from here on out there’s going to be a lot of information. Take your time if you need to. There’s no rush to try to get through this all in one sitting.
Your account
First off, you’re going to want an account so that you can follow topics and post! You can make one right here.
Once you have an account, you need to give yourself permissions to access the whole site. You do that by going to the groups list and clicking Join on the Community Members group. I know it’s a little bit fiddly, but this extra step lets me keep parts of the site out of the eyes of the general public so that you can appreciate a little bit of privacy. There will be more about how I do that later in this guide.
Customizing your account
Once you have an account, you’ll probably want to make it your own!
If you go to your account you can set your avatar and in your profile you can set your About Me text.
You can also choose a theme! Isabelle is my favorite, but pick one that feels right for you.
You can also get some neat little badges and titles through Patreon, but that’s totally optional. Just to be super clear: there are no paywalls. The Patreon rewards are just for fun! If you’re curious, they look like this:
Orienting yourself
Okay, now we’re ready to start learning the layout of the site.
In Bulletins, you’ll find announcements made by me! I strongly recommend you check out:
- Safety Tips
- Moderation Guidelines (these double as community guidelines!)
If you’re feeling ready to share something, a good place to start would be the Introductions topic over in Blanket Fort.
Why is it called Blanket Fort? Well you see, every category except Bulletins and General require you to be part of that Community Member group to be able to see anything, so Blanket Fort is kind of our little hideaway. I wanted to keep the introductions in a place where they felt the safest, hence putting them there.
If you’re feeling ready to start your own topic, you have a few options:
- Blanket Fort is there for whatever you want to talk about and it’s outside of the eyes of the general Internet.
- General is there for whatever you want to talk about, but it can be seen by anyone browsing the internet and it will be crawled by search engines. Of course, that means it’s also the first thing most people will see when they check this place out! So if you’re feeling brave, having some nice conversations there would help, but please don’t feel any pressure if you don’t feel up to it.
- Interests and Projects is there for you to share things about your interests, hobbies, and projects! A grand infodump, a project write-up, future plans, wistful thinking, it’s all good there.
- Twitch and YouTube is there for you to talk about things relating to the Twitch and YouTube channels.
- Group Games is a new category where you can talk about playing games with your fellow garden-dwellers! That’s where the Minecraft server and VRChat group live, so be sure to check it out if that’s something that interests you.
Oh and lastly for those of you who just want to say something and don’t wan’t to go through all the fuss of making or finding a topic and then writing out a post, there is a Blanket Fort chat room! It’s like Blanket Fort in that it requires you to be part of that Community Member group to see it. It does have the quirk that it only retains messages for 7 days because I miss ephemeral chat boxes like in Runescape and World of Warcraft.
Phew, that was a lot.
Yikes! I hope that didn’t totally cook your brain. Really, I’m just glad you’re here and I hope you have a really nice time. I’ll leave you with this bit of music that’s been in my head as I wrote all of this:
- a_lilian