What is MarseyWorld ?
MarseyWorld is a forum software package that is aimed at redefining and enhancing the way online communities function from the ground up. We are a highly motivated team of extremely driven, dysfunctionally autistic developers from around the world, but we've all grown up online. From Usenet BBS, to traditional "bump-style" forums, to vote-based "nu-forums" in the vein of Digg, Reddit, et al, to instant messaging and chat software ranging from AIM and IRC, to MSN, Kik, Snapchat, Skype, Discord and Matrix, we've used it all, watched it all grow, become tedious and antiquated, collapse and be replaced. And MarseyWorld is here to integrate the best parts of everything that's come before, leveraging modern technology with beloved mechanics and features of yesterday's internet to enhance and improve them in fun, unprecedented ways by blending them with the some of less-terrible mechanics of modernity. The MarseyWorld software package is free, open-source, easy to customize and deploy, and in a constant state of development. The ethos behind that development is a mixture of user wants—many of the existing features were requests from users who saw a way something could be improved, or thought of something that would be fun to have—or, more often, by a developer just getting frustrated or bored with something on another platform and realizing it doesn't have to be frustrating or boring. Some of the novel features included in the MarseyWorld base software are...
Native Economies
You are surely aware of the common "karma" or "rep" system on forums, whether that's Reddit, GameFAQs, Imgur, or any of the thousands of spinoffs of these communities and their systems. These values are pejoratively referred to as "meaningless internet points" by users because they do nothing except transparently attempt to gamify participation. MarseyWorld addresses and resolves this by making users' internet points valuable and fun: there are two currencies, generic names "Coins" and "Marseybux". Marseybux are intended to be used as a secondary, premium currency with no real functional difference than coins, but part of recurring monthly packages for supporters, and given out by administrators as incentives or rewards. Each upvote (and each downvote, to dissuade bad actors, although operators can change this) pays the user receiving the vote one (1) Coin. Events, such as for holidays, can feature limited time modifiers to these values. Coins can be given to and from users creating a localized economy for favors, shows of appreciation, crowdfunding endeavors, and so on for use in the defining feature of these native economies:
Shop and Casino
MarseyWorld software includes myriad ways to spend the currencies above to keep inflation under control, and to give users goals to strive for and further reason to participate. Users can buy awards, vaguely similar to what Reddit users can buy with real currency, except these awards actually do things. Awards can summon a swarm of flies to a post, they can make custom emojis bounce around the screen, they can force a user to type in 140-characters-or-fewer for a day, they can upgrade the site experience with pseudo-administrative privileges by allowing a user to become Unblockable, or to see others' alternative accounts, and so on and so forth. Currency can also be used to buy avatar adornments known as Hats, of which the base software includes around 1200 at the time of this writing. Users can also try their luck in the casino, with games like roulette, blackjack, slots, and a weekly lottery.
Robust Profiles
Do you miss the days of MySpace? We do. MarseyWorld software channels what we remember most fondly from those days: deep profile customization options. Users have full control over their profile CSS, and ad hoc profile layout communities of enthusiasists tend to spring up on websites running the MarseyWorld software, both charitably to help users and develop their own skills, or for a small fee of the native currencies briefly detailed above. There are also a growing number of WYSIWYG options, allowing even the most technologically-impaired users to easily set background images, a theme song, a friends list, color schemes, and more.
Advanced UI Customization
With two clicks into the Settings menu of all MarseyWorld software, users are able to fully tailor their experience on the platform to be exactly what they want it to be. Do some of your users not want to see profanity? There's a toggle for that. Are the cosmetic awards overtaxing their Windows XP laptop from 2005? There's a toggle for that too. Is someone complaining about all the discourse surrounding some current event? They can just go to their settings, type the word or phrase they want to filter out, and they'll never have to see a thread about it ever again. Users are even able to customize their CSS for the site itself if they don't like any of the 12 different default themes (ranging from Tron, to Win98, to Dramblr, and so much more).
FUN
The driving force behind all things MarseyWorld is fun. If it's stupid, annoying, garish and pointless, it's probably fun and so we've added it. Users do tend to enjoy that. Does the software need 8,000 emojis, most of which are user-made creations? Absolutely not. Do they all get used, and often? You bet. Does anyone really need the ability to create an unlimited number of persistent chatrooms on demand with an unlimited number of participants of their choosing? They sure don't, but they really like being able to. Are leaderboards and stat tracking for every single thing people can do at all necessary? Again no, but don't tell that to the users, because they rather enjoy trying to bring up their Votes-Per-Comment ranking, or the Biggest Losers at the Casino score. Even losses are wins, in a way. Fun, is the point. So many things can be made fun if the people creating them want them to be fun, and when you have actual, real, fun-minded people creating and not committees driven by shareholder demands and HR insanity, quite literally anything can be made fun. And that is what MarseyWorld has been doing for almost four years now and will continue to do: We create fun and ways for people to have fun. Help us make the internet fun again. Whether that's simply using one of the growing number of websites built on MarseyWorld software, starting your own, or funding the ongoing development of our software, if you'd like to have fun online again, we're here to help.
MarseyWorld is open-source and completely free to use, as such it relies solely on your donations to stay in development.
Please donate here if you like what we do: https://donorbox.org/marseyworld
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