The State Of The Website - Feature Request Edition!

[bjlsurfer]

Here's my opinion:

What the website should not be: Just another OMG HARDCOAR GAMARS WATERCOOLING COD site.  And that includes the design; ie don't make it look like this.

What the website should be: As other people have said, it should reflect our community.  Event announcements and wrapups (I like the map voting idea).  How-tos for gaming, pc building, hammer, etc.  But also the other parts of our community- articles based on stuff from the book, music, freeware and lulz threads.  Funny quotes from the IRC could go there too.
For the community profile side of things, here's an idea: it'd be super cool if stats could be integrated into that.  So for example, if I go over to Geoff's profile, it could say somewhere "Geoff has killed you 119 times." or "You've killed Geoff with a bat 17 times" or something like that- not obsessive stats, just fun ones.

[Geoff]

[quote author=Geoff link=topic=2065.msg60245#msg60245 date=1231186977]
[quote author=cbre88x link=topic=2065.msg60244#msg60244 date=1231186194]
[quote author=Dëiv link=topic=2065.msg60230#msg60230 date=1231181822]
its all been done before
the internet doesnt need another game review website.
i thaught we were aiming at a community site to go with the forums?

2. How To's on Hammer (plus screens)
[/quote]

It's been a lot easier to teach people directly, (talk to Bobo or Dave) and I think they understand it more.

Perhaps I could try and write some How-To's?


[/quote]

Teach me bitch.
[/quote]




> I'm not a miracle worker, I'm a janitor <

[fyre]

What the website should not be: Just another OMG HARDCOAR GAMARS WATERCOOLING COD site.  And that includes the design; ie don't make it look like this.

I agree. There are even more of those than there are review sites.


Regarding content, do we really have to decide whether we're gonna do reviews now? It doesn't seem like it really makes a difference to the website construction, since we're gonna be doing articles of some kind anyway. Text is text, no?

[cbre88x]

It def. won't look like that. I believe the first design was by Joel..and it looked really good..



also another one of Joel's



there was one I think Killer made, but I can't find it.

[ainmosni]

The thing is, I don't want our site to be too tf2/steam/etc specific. If anything I want it to give us a broader range over more games. The reviews we will have are mostly for the community, if other people like how we review games that's great.
Hammer how-to's will be awesome as well...
Original content will be our thing... I want to write a series about gaming on alternative OSes. About games that run natively on Mac OS X and Linux but also on how popular games run with wine/crossover/cedega.

But as I said many times this is a thread about TECHNICAL FEATURES not content or design... That stuff will come later.

So does anyone have any input on the features they'd like to see?

[x]

So does anyone have any input on the features they'd like to see?

I think you already mentioned it and said it won't be implememnted at the start but if there's a log-in for the main page, that needs to link to the forum. So fucking annoying when sites make you log in twice.

[ainmosni]

[quote author=ainmosni link=topic=2065.msg60373#msg60373 date=1231245970]
So does anyone have any input on the features they'd like to see?

I think you already mentioned it and said it won't be implememnted at the start but if there's a log-in for the main page, that needs to link to the forum. So fucking annoying when sites make you log in twice.
[/quote]

Yah I totally agree with you there but I have to see how feasible this is with two different user databases etc... It's something I want to do but it could get a bit hairy to implement so I'll do it after the first version.

[fyre]

if there's a log-in for the main page

There shouldn't be.

[ainmosni]

[quote author=Arnie's Right Bicep link=topic=2065.msg60378#msg60378 date=1231248367]
if there's a log-in for the main page

There shouldn't be.
[/quote]

There will be but not to read the content... just to post.

[Surf314]

On topic: I think your features list is perfect as listed.  Looking forward to it.

[Dave]

Dont make the forum a stand alone window like UMLan do.

[cannedpeahes]

We can do reviews in such a way that they're our own, you forget. We basically do it here. All it needs to be is like a thread with some of the more vocal people in BRBU bitching at each other until a consensus is reached. Win!

[copulatingduck]

Dont make the forum a stand alone window like UMLan do.

It doesn't have to be

[copulatingduck]

I have one: an option to subscribe to individual threads/subforums so that I'm only watching those. With a growing population, the signal:noise ratio is only going to get worse for my personal tastes, a feature like this would make it a much more pleasant experience sifting through the forums to see what folks have been up to. I hope that's a reasonable feature, and not something ridiculous to do

[ainmosni]

I have one: an option to subscribe to individual threads/subforums so that I'm only watching those. With a growing population, the signal:noise ratio is only going to get worse for my personal tastes, a feature like this would make it a much more pleasant experience sifting through the forums to see what folks have been up to. I hope that's a reasonable feature, and not something ridiculous to do

Hmmmm, that's more a forum feature and less a website feature but I think that's already an option...

[CaffeinePowered]

[quote author=CopulatingDuck link=topic=2065.msg60686#msg60686 date=1231426563]
I have one: an option to subscribe to individual threads/subforums so that I'm only watching those. With a growing population, the signal:noise ratio is only going to get worse for my personal tastes, a feature like this would make it a much more pleasant experience sifting through the forums to see what folks have been up to. I hope that's a reasonable feature, and not something ridiculous to do

Hmmmm, that's more a forum feature and less a website feature but I think that's already an option...
[/quote]

You can collapse any forums that you don't want to see, however, the design of these forums is pretty much fixed, I don't see modifying it much except possible adding another forum for a particular game like we did for L4D if we get heavily involved in it.

[ScottyGrayskull]

I have one: an option to subscribe to individual threads/subforums so that I'm only watching those. With a growing population, the signal:noise ratio is only going to get worse for my personal tastes, a feature like this would make it a much more pleasant experience sifting through the forums to see what folks have been up to. I hope that's a reasonable feature, and not something ridiculous to do

Here we go. When replying to a thread expand "Additional Options". There's an option to be notified of replies. Never tested it though, and not sure if there is anything for a particular subforum. Will look into it either tonight or this weekend.

[copulatingduck]

[quote author=CopulatingDuck link=topic=2065.msg60686#msg60686 date=1231426563]
I have one: an option to subscribe to individual threads/subforums so that I'm only watching those. With a growing population, the signal:noise ratio is only going to get worse for my personal tastes, a feature like this would make it a much more pleasant experience sifting through the forums to see what folks have been up to. I hope that's a reasonable feature, and not something ridiculous to do

Here we go. When replying to a thread expand "Additional Options". There's an option to be notified of replies. Never tested it though, and not sure if there is anything for a particular subforum. Will look into it either tonight or this weekend.
[/quote]

Yea, but I thought that was email notifications. I was thinking more along the lines of "subscribe to thread -> whenever I click 'Show Unread Posts' it shows me posts from subscribed threads/forums only."

Either way, I'll give that a shot and see what it does.

[copulatingduck]

Err, forgot to do that "Notify me of replies" thing the first time....

[ScottyGrayskull]

Err, forgot to do that "Notify me of replies" thing the first time....

lol

I'll try and get some time this weekend to look into it more. There's some other things I want to look at for the forums as well.