Good evening and welcome to our latest Bell Tree Direct! In this Direct we're announcing multiple new features that will greatly improve trading on The Bell Tree. Some of these changes have been in progress over the last couple of months. We also looked closely at how our current setup was being used and took all of your input from our May 2020 survey into consideration. In addition to trading updates, we have a few other announcements to make and we'll start with our most anticipated one, The Bell Tree Fair!
TBT Fair: Coming August 16th
After three years, we are excited to announce the return of The Bell Tree Fair! The Bell Tree Fair is our largest forum event series. It consists of several contests and events which you can participate in to win both forum and physical prizes. This year, the Fair will be starting on August 16th! Like Fairs in previous years, the entire event has its own theme.
As you can see from the screenshot above, eight of us staff members got together and spent a lot of time dreaming about the theme of our TBT Fair 2020. This will be our seventh TBT Fair in the site's history. The previous events took place in 2004, 2005, 2013, 2014, 2016, and 2017. In other words, you won't want to miss it!
New Horizons Trading Board Reorganization
The last time we reorganized our New Horizons trading boards, we separated The Airport into free visits and paid visits, which were moved to the new Dodo Business Class board. After trying this out, we decided to merge them back together into a single board to make it simpler and less confusing. However, this time we are adding a new feature that will allow you to filter threads based on entry fee. More about that will explained in the Trading Fields and Filtering below. The new merged Airport board also now has brand new prefixes which signify island visitors and happenings. Due to this change, we are also moving services back to the Nook's Cranny board.
One of the biggest takeaways from our May survey was that the majority of users want a dedicated turnip board. Our new Turnip Stalk Exchange board is finally here! This can be used for reporting both selling prices (Timmy/Tommy) and buying prices (Daisy Mae). Eventually, as turnips become less of a focus by most players, we'll move this board as a sub-board of The Airport. For now, we'd like to promote its use as much as possible, so feel free to start posting your turnip prices! Each price should have its own thread, so now that we have a dedicated board, our turnip thread will no longer be used for reporting prices.
Dodo Code Queue
This next announcement is for one of our most anticipated features and was teased at the end of the previous TBT Direct. We are finally excited to introduce our new Dodo Code Queue feature!
Dodo Codes are now enabled in all New Horizons trading boards. It allows the thread creator to control who has access to the posted Dodo Code, while adding other users to a queue while they wait their turn. To add a Dodo Code to your thread, click the Dodo Code drop down below the message area when creating the thread. If your thread is already created, click the down arrow (more options) to add a code to it.
The thread creator can then enter usernames or click "Allow Dodo" or "Queue Dodo" at the top right of any post in the thread to quickly add the user to one of the lists. Once the user is added to one of the lists, it will be highlighted in blue for allowed or orange for queued with buttons to move them between lists or remove them completely.
When a user is in the "allowed" list, they will see the code as displayed above. When a user is in the queue, it will show them their position in line, like the screenshot shows below. Users who are in neither list will only be able to see the amount of users allowed and waiting. Aside from the host and allowed users, moderators will also be able to see any Dodo Code.
This will make trading and online visits in New Horizons more efficient on TBT. PMing for codes will be reduced and third party queuing sites are no longer needed. Once you've tried this new feature for yourself, please let us know what you think or if you have any input!
Trading Fields and Filtering
In addition to Dodo Codes, our next big trading update adds fields and filtering to our New Horizons trading boards. This allows each listing to be organized and searched for far more efficiently. For example, if you're looking for people selling Raymond for TBT Bells in the last week, you can filter the threads to show only those exact results.
By connecting each thread to a specific villager, we're also able to update the New Neighbor Network board with villager images.
Let's take a look at our full list of prefixes and fields in the NH trading boards:
- The Airport
- Prefix: Redd, Celeste, Leif, Saharah, Kicks, Villager DIY, Meteor Shower, Item Dump, Island Tour
- Entry Fee: Yes / No
- Accepting (currency)
- Turnip Stalk Exchange
- Prefix: Sell, Buy
- Price
- Entry Fee: Yes / No
- Accepting (currency)
- Nook's Cranny
- Prefix: Buying, Selling, Trading, Auction, Giveaway, Shop
- Accepting (currency)
- New Neighbor Network
- Prefix: Selling, Auction, Cycling, Giveaway
- Villager: drop-down of all NH villagers
- Accepting (currency)
With the price field in Turnip Stalk Exchange, you can filter turnip prices to, for example, only show listings over 200 bells. There is a lot of potential for each of our trading sections and we will continue expanding on this in the future, which I will explain more in the next section.
The Future for Trading
As you've seen, we set up New Neighbor Network so that the specific villager being sold can be selected, which then displays the villager's picture in the board. Our goal is to set up a similar structure for item trading if possible. This is a bit more complicated due to the amount of items in the game and due to the fact that many item trading threads on The Bell Tree are created for multiple items.
One possibility is to use Nook's Cranny for shops, bulk buying, and services, and add two sub-boards underneath it. The sub-boards would consist of listings for individual, specific items; one board for selling and one for buying ("looking for"). Shops would be encouraged to list their items in these sub-boards in addition to their own shop threads.
We would like to see how this new feature is used in the other boards before working on this next phase. Let us know how it goes, what you think of the proposed setup for items, and how you think we can improve trading on TBT even more.
Enhanced Search
Another thing to help with trading is that we have upgraded our search system on the forum. This is a feature that was actually set up on the over a week ago, so some of you may have already noticed. When searching you should now get more results and in less time. This also addresses something that a lot of people have been asking for, which is the ability to search for words three letters or less. Dom and others are no longer stuck in the TBT search void!
Feedback Name Changes
The feedback categories of Buyer/Seller/Trader have been changed back to Visitor/Host/Trader. This is what they were originally called before we moved to XenForo in April. Some of you suggested we put these back to how they were, so hopefully it's now easier to categorize your feedback for unpaid gameplay. While the feedback that's been made since then may not match perfectly with the new category names, it doesn't actually affect much since they're just labels.
One thing that was clear from our survey last May is that The Bell Tree has the most trusted feedback system of all Animal Crossing websites. I want to close this section by thanking everyone who helped us build so much feedback data in the seven years since we first implemented the system.
Rule Updates
We have three rule updates today, all of which relate to trading.
1.1. Respecting Others
First, our unwritten policy against public blacklists is now a written rule. Our feedback system already gives everyone the same opportunity to warn others about in-game troublemakers.
1.3. Thread Bumping
Going forward we will disallow users to bump threads that don't belong to them. This has been used to circumvent post merging, which we have in place to prevent excessive bumping.
3.2. Prohibited Transactions
Our last rule change simply adds "services" to the list of prohibited Animal Crossing transactions for real money.
Security Updates
A user reported their account being breached recently, so we've made a few security updates. One change you may notice is a list of devices under the password and security page in your account settings. The data reported here may not be entirely populated until you log back into your account. We will also soon be resetting the passwords of older accounts, especially for passwords that haven't been changed since our data breach in February 2018. If this applies to you, please change your password on your own to be safe.
Seashell Transactions on Hold
In our April TBT Direct we mentioned that our Seashell system is still being worked on. Historically, our Seashell currency has been given to users when registering and after being a member for two years. It could then be used to purchase add-on items like username changes. Both earning and spending Seashells has not been enabled since we moved to XenForo in April. Other projects, such as the trading updates announced today, have taken precedence, causing this to be delayed even longer. During this time, users have asked us to manually send or spend their Seashells, but this takes even more time to go through each request. This is why we will no longer be processing these requests and all Seashell-related transactions will be on hold until further notice. Don't worry though, our next TBT Direct should finally bring this feature back!
Short Downtime on August 4th
The forum will be down for server updates on Tuesday, August 4th at 10:00 PM EDT. The downtime will last an hour or two. Feel free to join us in our Discord during this time.
The Bell Tree's Summer Build Event
As you may have already seen, we are hosting two build events in New Horizons. Some of the staff got so excited about the upcoming TBT Fair that they couldn't wait any longer to host it. That's how we ended up with two waves of Animal Crossing events before the Fair even starts! Wave one is still live, but hurry, submissions are due this Saturday!
In these events, you'll be tasked with building an outdoor area on your island for a specific topic, such as a campsite in wave one. Wave two will be announced and start after wave one ends. By participating in both events, you'll earn the blue summer shell collectible! If your entry is picked as a staff favorite in either wave of the event, you'll receive the very rare pink summer shell collectible! Of course, TBT bells are also given out for participation in each of them.
Thank you for taking the time to read these announcements! We especially hope that you'll make use of our trading updates and we look forward to hearing further feedback about them!
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