Okay, so this has been on my mind recently.. or rather, for a while.

The forums are in need of a revamp, and well, with being frank the ingame chat needs something too.

So, at the moment I have 2 website projects on the go, however after these 2 I >should< have a free schedule. Now, there is 3 options at this point.

1. We don't touch the forums.
2. We redesign the current forums.
3. We completely redesign the entire website.

Elaborating.. There is a poll attached to this post to see how many people would like something happening to the forums. This being, Do you want any updates to the forums? you're more than welcome to flat out refuse.

Now, for the "meaty" part of the reason of this post.

If the vote above returns as a yes.. Then, we have some more options to consider..

The first of the options being, we just make a new theme for the current website, maybe do what we were talking of a while ago and make a homepage.

However..

I personally, would like to take what we have left of global chat and design an entire website to enable us to expand into a gaming community, rather than a Runescape community. A new website would enable us to practically do anything we want in terms of design, encouraging new users being the main focus.

That's all i'm going to say for now, because there's no real reason in outlining everything that could happen.

Thoughts?

I don't see any harm in trying to grow the community. There's nothing really bad that can happen, so we could give it a try. It'll be a lot of work though

Vanilla990 wrote:Well I own the current forums and I also own the domain name for the rest of life as well as it's a rolling yearly subscription.

I am already in the progress of clearing out a lots of the old forum categories, removing old ranking system and upgrading all the forum categories to allow for further expansion. A new theme was also considered but I'm not sure I would keep the current colour scheme if that was to happen and people are very fond of the grey colours as its become a part of us.

This made it sound as if, you are against developing the website into a website? (I know that you said earlier that you don't want to develop it into a website, are you against me doing that though?)

What would be the point in turning the website into a website? Isn't that sort of defeating the point a little?

People have always said they liked it here, even when I suggested moving to a brand new website nearly 2 years ago now because they don't like having to move and create new accounts all the time and they don't want to lose all their post count etc etc.

I've been working on an overhaul to all the threads and stuff on the forums for a long time and it's ready to be rolled out, I've even been working on it for the last week slowly making changes here and there so I don't see the huge appeal to start fresh when work is already being done.

No matter what the outcome of this poll I will be making all the improvements to this site that I mentioned about ages ago which were what people were suggesting at the time.

Okay, so as i'm sure pretty much everyone knows that I have wanted to advertise/expand global chat for a long time now. Not solely just the rs chat, but the entire community. There's really only.. 2 things we need to do to do that -

1. Expand to other games and recruit from them.
2. Have the website built to accommodate that.

I don't really want to talk about this too much because.. if nobody wants to expand then.. this is a completely wasted effort in explaining.. but without explaining I can't really explain the benefits >.>

The current forums aren't designed for different games to be taken into consideration. Yes, they could probably be moulded into something to allow them to become adapted.. but currently, they're not. Nor do they currently provide any reason for anyone to stay on them, to explain, we have a Runescape section that nobody posts in, which leaves.. "General" I could go to any forum on the internet and probably have general conversation. Don't get me wrong, I do like the forums, i'm merely saying.. They're not designed to accommodate other games, nor give any reason for new members.

This leads onto the website design argument where.. Do we want an entirely new website or an entirely new feeling forums. Assuming.. people are acceptable of expanding to other games and/or growing the community.. Which again, is why I don't particularly want to explain very much about "what if.." but, if they do, our choices are.. new website entirely, or adapt the one we have currently. I'm very much.. These forums were built to do what they did, let's make them even better. Staying with forumotion doesn't really allow us to improve drastically.

Now i'm starting to feel like i'm typing too much, since it's all hypothetical.

let's get 'er done, eh

I'm going to take this opportunity to thank Owen and Van for all the work and thought they put into this place, for which they get little to no recognition. For all the differences we might've had, I think I speak for the entire Global Chat community, old and new, when I say that we actually really appreciate what you guys do here, and I don't know where we'd be without you.

But yeah, anyway, as I've already said in some other thread (which some may have read) it's clear in my head that none would see red if we were to tread into moving ahead. I.e. if we expanded the forums to accommodate other games it would be an addition, rather than a change, to what we have now. However, I don't think adding a homepage is necessary until the community has actually significantly expanded on the forums.

So, forum updates good, adding homepage or additional website features bad/superfluous.

Shad wrote:I'm going to take this opportunity to thank Owen and Van for all the work and thought they put into this place, for which they get little to no recognition. For all the differences we might've had, I think I speak for the entire Global Chat community, old and new, when I say that we actually really appreciate what you guys do here, and I don't know where we'd be without you.

But yeah, anyway, as I've already said in some other thread (which some may have read) it's clear in my head that none would see red if we were to tread into moving ahead. I.e. if we expanded the forums to accommodate other games it would be an addition, rather than a change, to what we have now. However, I don't think adding a homepage is necessary until the community has actually significantly expanded on the forums.

So, forum updates good, adding homepage or additional website features bad/superfluous.

Thanks.

When I talk about a new website, I am talking about essentially re-inventing/re-launching global chat as we know it, with practically no focus around Runescape. Do you not think additional website features may bring in additional people? & is additional people what you want? (I know some of you prefer a small community)

Any more feedback? Since, this is probably the biggest decision for Global Chat in a long time.

There is practically no focus on Runescape on the forums as it is anyway, apart from some of the sections' titles, so yeah go ahead and change them.

And I'm all for additional people, I'm just not sure what 'website features' would attract them especially when the community is as small as it is at the moment. But they can't hurt, I suppose.

The changes would be nice, but if Van already has a lot of time invested on changes that he was planning on implementing already, I don't see anything wrong with using the work he's already completed and just changing it slightly to accommodate different games instead of just Runescape. Maybe we should try to also recruit in game Global Chatters onto the forum more as well.

NickVo wrote:The changes would be nice, but if Van already has a lot of time invested on changes that he was planning on implementing already, I don't see anything wrong with using the work he's already completed and just changing it slightly to accommodate different games instead of just Runescape. Maybe we should try to also recruit in game Global Chatters onto the forum more as well.

My problem is that we've tried this before, it never succeeds. People from RS generally don't want to go on forums for the fear of being hacked.

My biggest question is, how are you going to expand on the user-base of Global website/forums? I'm happy to help any way I can if you guys are to try and expand but people will only join if they feel like it has some relevance to what they like. So I can let a few guildies or friends know from wow know about it, but they may or may not be interested depending on what it offers them to make them stay. (I know quite a lot of them love anime so that might be a point to think on).

The other thing that just occurred to me is that as far as I know we've never tried to use other social media as well. I know we've tried youtube a bit but without a dedicated person to consistently do content it becomes difficult to maintain.
I'm more thinking of things like a flickr group (could host images/screenshots from users), perhaps even a hashtag to follow. Twitter would be another probably with a hashtag.. an actual account is probably not so much of a good idea as it'd require someone to actively maintain it.
There's also stuff like tumblr and whatnot that let you make groups and stuff. Or even a facebook group, people can make alternate personas if they don't want to use their real account. The real key it seems for getting awareness for online groups or webpages is to maximize on network tools. I've been writing on a blog for wow since I had to make one for an assignment for web studies @ http://preydrive.wordpress.com (and for it I had to accompany it with several other linked web tools), and I was thinking, if you're going to make a new webpage anyway, what about a blog? Could get a different person each week to write a guest post, so it's not just one person who has to do it all the time. A lot of wow fan forums have a blog as the main page, with a list of links at the site for their twitter feed and so on.

Anyway, if there's any thing at all I can do to help, let me know. Global was a really important community to me and even though I don't really feel like playing RS anymore I still would like to be a part of the community.

Eshtaol wrote:My biggest question is, how are you going to expand on the user-base of Global website/forums? I'm happy to help any way I can if you guys are to try and expand but people will only join if they feel like it has some relevance to what they like. So I can let a few guildies or friends know from wow know about it, but they may or may not be interested depending on what it offers them to make them stay. (I know quite a lot of them love anime so that might be a point to think on).

The other thing that just occurred to me is that as far as I know we've never tried to use other social media as well. I know we've tried youtube a bit but without a dedicated person to consistently do content it becomes difficult to maintain.
I'm more thinking of things like a flickr group (could host images/screenshots from users), perhaps even a hashtag to follow. Twitter would be another probably with a hashtag.. an actual account is probably not so much of a good idea as it'd require someone to actively maintain it.
There's also stuff like tumblr and whatnot that let you make groups and stuff. Or even a facebook group, people can make alternate personas if they don't want to use their real account. The real key it seems for getting awareness for online groups or webpages is to maximize on network tools. I've been writing on a blog for wow since I had to make one for an assignment for web studies @ http://preydrive.wordpress.com (and for it I had to accompany it with several other linked web tools), and I was thinking, if you're going to make a new webpage anyway, what about a blog? Could get a different person each week to write a guest post, so it's not just one person who has to do it all the time. A lot of wow fan forums have a blog as the main page, with a list of links at the site for their twitter feed and so on.

Anyway, if there's any thing at all I can do to help, let me know. Global was a really important community to me and even though I don't really feel like playing RS anymore I still would like to be a part of the community.

Expanding the user base of global is practically impossible at the moment with these forums, which means drastic action, in my opinion. Even if it doesn't work in the end, we won't have lost anything. I like the concept of having people from certain games run the sections of the website dedicated to that game, which in turn are also responsible for recruiting from that game. I'm not entirely sure that would work, but there's other ways, as you said social media. etc. It would probably be a case of trial and error.

Regarding blogging, as long as people are willing to do it, sure. This is the kind of feedback i'm looking for I guess, peoples general willingness to help, as in.. is the new website something they want or will help & work to create.

Your last line summed up why I want to do this. There are others that don't visit global anymore because they're not interested in RS.

P.s. Nice to see you posting on the forums ^.^

I remembered these forums exist