Community website, getting IR's content to a wide audience.

[rockinliam]

We are a great community, easily one of the nicest internet communitys on the entire internet. Think. How many times has there be a bitter hate war or a really mean comment against someone? I can't think of one incident of the Ban hammer coming into play. And i think this comes from our smaller size compared to other forums.

But i feel that there is one major drawback to our size, with the exception of halls tutorials, most of our tutorials can easily get buried and forgotten. And this is shame since the last time i looked our tutorials section was pushing 100 different tuts, and i think you would agree that, that is quite a lot of great content.

So here is my idea for getting this content to a wider audience, and increasing the traffic to our forums, hopefully allowing us to gain more skilled people.

Community website. We could get a domain called say... "How-to-build-mmorpgs.com" or something, we could all have accounts on that site, and we could turn it into a huge repository of tutorials and articles on how to produce games or whatever. Like someone could make a load of realmcrafter tutorials, other people could make a load of unity tutorials, we could have tutorials on php programming etc.

Just i think as a community we could create a huge amount of info. I think this would be great because questions like "How do a produce a text based game?" could be answered by one google search that doesnt lead to a random forum post on some random forum but instead would lead to a place where the question of how is not only shown but taught and demonstrated.

Also say if the site was hosted on the IR server, which is possible, it wouldn't cost anything extra, and i guess if halls did say that it would be a cool idea for it run of his hosting, he could get some ad revenue or something.

This is just an idea, sorry if i didn't put it across well enough but i think it could work.

Just an idea...
Liam.

[Baseball435]

thats actually a good idea. The only hard part is finding the people who will lead as making different tutorials. Obviously we have some already, like halls for php, you for flash, spiritwebb for unity, me for websites , and maybe some more people. I totally agree this would be a great idea. I would only say that we should have a seperate forum away from the tutorials but on the same website regarding questions on those tutorials or just talking about projects they had. But yes i agree, good idea!

~baseball435

[rockinliam]

Well i wouldn't say that we would need just one person to do each type, like i was thinking completely community based, so say one guy does the basic syntax of php then someone else could talk about mysql query's, all in a gaming context. Obviously i'm sure halls's tuts cover thos but hehehe

It's not like we can't invite other community's to help out, some of the dudes over at mmmorpgmaker.com maybe?

[Baseball435]

Yeah I think that would work. Before we start anything though we have to have halls see this topic hahaha

[rockinliam]

I'm sure Halls will see it soon enough haha

[Callan S.]

I think Jacks idea of a site that you can choose from drop boxes and it produces the code, would be good (particularly if it can give a demo of play). People are more inclined to stop and post when they've already gotten some goods.

[hallsofvallhalla]

the hardest part is getting anyone to actually build this stuff. I have offered the main site to people to work on and no one has time. I have wanted to re=do the main site but just dont have time. Using Joomla we could easily create a nice site with all the tutorials but I just have to get the time

[rockinliam]

the hardest part is getting anyone to actually build this stuff. I have offered the main site to people to work on and no one has time. I have wanted to re=do the main site but just dont have time. Using Joomla we could easily create a nice site with all the tutorials but I just have to get the time

Dude seriously i will build it, especially since joomla is fairly straight forward.

[PaxBritannia]

While you guys work on the Joomla, I'll work on finishing the CMS project I'm working on. The CMS is literally built for small communities like this one.

With the community size issue, I don't want this site to get that big. Personally. Here, there are no ads, no spammers, no flamers, no trolls. It is our small nook in the internet.

I would rather it stay like this, than grow into some ad-driven fast-pace forum, with every fifth post being a bump just to keep topics on the front page.

However, we could all benefit from a website overhaul, and better website structure. Of course, the issue with Joomla is that writing privileges may be a problem, if we have frequent content updates. If it is too hard to submit a tutorial, truthfully, don't expect much. Aside from that, lets start Joomla-ing.

ita Stet.

[kaos78414]

What is the site currently made in? I mean I know the forums are phpBB, but the main site looks like Joomla already. All you need is a design? Or do you need more features? If you are already using joomla, I suggest downloading one of the CCK addons. That might give you the tutorial video functionality you need. And as for design, http://rockettheme.com/ is all I have to say

EDIT: Oh look! They also make phpBB themes.