I'm personally quite happy that @OmgMrGrim posted here. It's one thing to create some group out of a community need, and another to create a group out of wanting power and to demand respect. Julian's behaviour reminded me of a number of other admins, including previous administrators of our local game and art communities, where his own ego seemed to me to be far more important to him than the needs of the community. You can see it in how every single post he's ever made here has been about self-promotion.
I think there are a few things that our community might learn though. From a casual glance at ZAGD's membership, while there is a small handful of (inactive/lurking) professionals that are members there, there are many, many (also inactive/lurking, though that's not unusual I think) members that I've never heard of before, people who are novices, and people who likely discovered the Facebook group because of Facebook's social features. Their games generally don't look very good at all, but we all started there at some point! And we got better, in a large part due to communities like game.dev.
I think I share Danny's concerns about our not being very active outside of very game-focused events, where ZAGD has easier organic reach (your Facebook friends see you posting in Facebook groups); and that while we arguably give pretty good advice here (especially now that we're kinder to one another too) and have active professional developers here with decades of game dev experience, and who have a strong personal interest in developing our local talent and in creating an atmosphere that supports our businesses, ZAGD seems to give comparatively poor (or, worse, erroneous) feedback, from people who have never shipped a commercial title, but have Dunning-Kruger'd themselves into being authorities. The result is that there may be a vast number of potentially great game developers who are being led astray, and who aren't in the sort of easy contact with experienced devs that they would here. Danny's been super aggressive about ZAGD's failures, and while I sometimes cringed about it with the ammo they he gave them for character-assassination, I can understand where he's been coming from.
I'm not sure what to do about that.
- Join ZAGD, and increase their newbies' exposure to experienced developers. Unfortunately, we'd simultaneously be giving an egotist more things to brag about, and increase the value of a brand that's being used for commercial use, rather than being community-first the way MGSA is.
- Increase our visibility on Facebook by making better use of the MGSA-related page(s). I really don't like the idea of having to post both there and here though, and to have to search and reply in multiple places.
- Improve our forum platform. There are a number of newer platforms that are more modern and responsive, that are built with social features in mind. This is enormously painful to implement I think, in the sense that we don't want to lose the existing forum's posts, and have already struggled with manpower with doing just our front page. I'd be willing to put money into paying someone good to do this though (and I'm quite sure others would too).
I mean, if ZAGD was run by someone who actually knew anything about game development, or who actually cared about fostering young game developers, and wasn't so obsessed with marketing speak and stroking his own ego, I think I'd be quite happy to have things continue as is, leave them be, and just be happy that we're serving different needs. Some competition would be nice after all, and communities having competitions against one another is part of what made Dominance War so much fun for artists. But that's not my impression of ZAGD at all, with @Julian's shitty behaviour both there and here completely putting me off.
I also don't think it was wrong for @OmgMrGrim to have posted here. I welcome postings like that, i twas only about revealing truths, really.
So basically we're asking - how much time/effort/money do we have to put into: a) Making the MGSA platform better so that it can reach further/better than it does right now as only a forum. b) Competing with ZAGD in terms of exposure so that we can try to better influence potential young game devs that MGSA hasn't been able to reach before
As for @Elyaradine's three specific routes mentioned, 1) is no go for me. And it wouldn't work even if anyone here tried, tbh. We can already see the kind of actions being taken against people with competing ideas/ideals by zagd's admin. 2) I think is doable - it's not that we should duplicate content on here and fb, but rather formulate content suitable for facebook. I think cross-posting content from the forum to facebook is doable and something to explore. Maybe weekly summaries, a couple links to hot topics from the forum to fb, or something. But definitely having a facebook management who posts frequently might help. Though I'm not 100% sure what the content plan should be... I'm pretty active on fb personally, but my pages are abysmal :P 3) I think needs to be done and we've tried several times already. There's a body of designs, mine included, that's hung around for a while. So it comes down to... Time and money commitment from those with those resources available.
Just regarding @Tuism's last point. I think the money angle is covered, there have been numerous offers of cash to solve the problem. But someone has to actually do it (hopefully in exchange for money).
We (Clockwork Acorn) have offered our services to finish the new front page design & implementation, and get everything transitioned to a point where the community can take things forward by themselves. We can't do this for free, but the money angle is covered. Currently we are waiting for an authoritative figure, one with access to the backend and the power to give everything the go-ahead, to give us the greenlight. We've been waiting for that for a while now.
Personally I want to put in some effort to change things from a "maintaining" position (which it seems to currently be in) to an improving position, but that requires some personal time commitment that I will only have in Jan 2017 at the earliest.
I've been using a Discourse-based forum elsewhere that I'm quite jealous of personally. :P
It has several features that I prefer over Vanilla, with the downside being that it runs on a Rails backend (which is what gives it so much of its dynamic functionality, but Rails servers are generally more difficult to find and are more expensive). It's dynamic though, with replies and new topics having indications without having to refresh a page. When you click a user's name, you see their bio, location, badges, etc. without having to leave the page either. (I find that sometimes someone here says something that I don't really agree with, so I want to see who they are to be able to say what they do with so much apparent authority, and end up looking for their introduction post in the Welcome thread to find them... :P)
You're also able to make it so that members who've reached a particular "level" are able to edit certain posts. So, for example, if someone created some kind of resources thread that we'd use as reference (e.g. kind of like a wiki, list of schools, list of contractors, etc.), anybody who's been a member who's been vetted would be able to edit the post with new content, so we can all contribute to updating as we go, or adding our own company's information. So, rather than having to visit a separate wiki, or have to contact a moderator, or the starter of the thread, we get to do it ourselves (as long as we're not brand new members/spam).
The down-side is it doesn't technically have Facebook integration, though apparently it's pretty easy to make cross-posting work. (It's hard to make things sync fully, but that's okay I think.) It's not as if the current forums do this anyway.
I know I'm asking for a bit much, in the sense that things have been delayed so long that it kind of sounds dumb to be asking for more. :P I just... kind of feel like if we're going to pay for it, that I'd like to pay for a great solution, rather than a stop-gap. I'm expecting some resistance to this, and I understand, but I really think this would be a big step in making the forums more user-friendly, accessible and more enjoyable to use. Please just take a look at existing Discourse forums (they're mostly the similar-looking I think), try the setup demo, and see how things work before you call me crazy! :P https://realtimevfx.com/http://discuss.emberjs.com/
And if we're worried about migrating our existing data, I'd be happy to try it out with a dump of our vanilla database, so that we can see how it'd work in action while this one's still live, in case we don't like it, at which point we've lost nothing. If we agree to that. And whoever we should be talking to about getting that kind of access. @DaveRusselSA@LexAquillia
I have a friend who's a full stack developer. He's been full stack for only about 6 months or so, but he's responsible, trustworthy and has a great work ethic, and he could help with any modifications or integrations we want.
I too frequent a community that uses Discourse, am actually one of those people with a sufficient trust level to edit topics. It's a really nice platform and has a ton of features, only downside is that it doesn't cope well with high volume of posts, which shouldn't be an issue here as this forum also uses a single main page and doesn't get overwhelmed. Please do have a look at it if the decision of what platform to go with has not been made yet.
Thanks for the really in-depth post with practical talking points @Elyaradine :)
To add my 2c, I think I agree with most on point (1). Against the advice of wiser voices I tried in the past engaging with ZAGD, but that proved fruitless and I also don't think giving them (well, the owner/creator specifically) any more attention is helpful. His actions so far make it seem highly unlikely that he is motivated by the best interests of the local gamedev community.
Is there any way to roll (2) and (3) into one issue? @elyaradine is right that double posting is a pain, and I doubt anyone would do it. However here are benefits to using a FB group over a forum, and benefits to using a forum over a FB group. Maybe we can get the best of both? While looking for alternative forum tech, is there not perhaps one that offers some kind of FB group/Forum post syncing, directly or through a plugin? I looked briefly for something like that for vanilla but didn't see anything.
Edit
The down-side is it doesn't technically have Facebook integration, though apparently it's pretty easy to make cross-posting work. (It's hard to make things sync fully, but that's okay I think.) It's not as if the current forums do this anyway.
Yeah something like this at least, where posts to the forums draw people in due to facebook activity. Though a full sync would be ideal.
@francoisvn It sounds like a chat with @LexAquillia and/or @DaveRusselSA could get this thing started (unless there really is a reason it is held up, which I can't see). Maybe a chat can be had at the next Cape Town Meetup? Maybe January is a good month to make this finally happen!
@Elyaradine Damn, those Discourse-Forums have some nice features, though it's really only the collaborative editing that excites me, it'd be great if this forum could be a better resource repository. (Regarding the other feature you highlight: I find opening a new tab after clicking on someone's name an okay feature, it's not exactly holding me back, the discourse forums allow a little bio to be written, which I imagine is a feature we have actively disabled on these forums, and things happening in realtime seems like a nice to have).
No idea what would be involved in a migration, but not loosing data would be my main concern.
I'm not sure really what Vanilla forums can do (nor what Discourse-forums can do), but a quick search shows there are ways to allow post Vanilla posts to be shared on to Facebook?
@EvanGreenwood: Regarding opening a new tab, that's what I'd normally do. Just, without having profile pages, looking up where someone works and for how long is quite painful at the moment. I remember we had this feature some time ago, but I think it was a plugin we were using that got nuked during some forum update. I believe this works really well out-of-the-box with Discord.
There must be Vanilla plug-ins that cross-post new discussions/threads on Facebook, if we go that route. (I haven't looked, but it honestly sounds fairly trivial to me, where full sync doesn't at all.) I'd just really like to investigate Discord anyway, have it running on a temp board with the data migrated, just for a week or two to see if it's actually an improvement. That way, aside from maybe the month or so of hosting costs (which imo are relatively trivial) and the little bit of time into setting it up (which either I can do, or I can ask my web dev friend).
Anyway, if we were going to lose our data, it'd be a really big deal and I wouldn't want to move then. I really think it's worth testing, in case it makes forum use friendlier and more modern. I'll ping Nick and Dave on Twitter since they don't seem to be replying here. It doesn't help that this thread seems to have some tag on it that locks its timestamp, forcing it down the list despite our efforts to turn it into a productive discussion. :P
@Elyaradine Yeah, if we can test Dsichord then we could make the best decision. (And while I didn't express excitement about all the features, I was never particularly excited about Vanilla).
I think regarding Facebook. What I'd ideally like is sharing a post to the Make Games SA Facebook feed. I'm not sure what a "full-sync" would mean, but I don't think everything that gets posted here is all that suitable for Facebook (I definitely wouldn't want most of this discussion on Facebook, and knowledge repository stuff is a waste of time, I'd prefer just posts about games or interesting things going out to Facebook).
Yeah, I think the goal for now is just that when there's a new post here, either a bot or a user account (if you've connected your forum account with your Facebook account) posts to the MGSA group/page, and/or vice versa. I agree that Facebook and the forum are likely to attract different kinds of value.
I'll look at getting a Discourse board set up in the mean time, while I wait on Nick's mailing me.
[edit] Okay, I got the Discourse board set up on a DO droplet, but struggled with getting my mail working, so I couldn't receive the admin email. :P I'll try again later this week.
I disagree. The advantage with facebook is the visibility for posts, and ability for people to easily comment on those posts. By just posting initial posts from a thread to FB, you'll get the visibility/shareability but you essentially have the same problem of having to manually double post: you have to follow and participate on the conversation in two places.
@EvanGreenwood "full sync" would mean that when a post starts here, it generates a post on the facebook page, and further posts on the comment are added as comments on the FB post, and comments from FB are posted as replies on the forum. But I'd imagine that as @Elyaradine said, that's a really hard problem, especially with comments on comments. So I wouldn't be surprised if none of the forum software options has really solved it.
The problem with talking about "full sync" or "cross pollination" is that a forum is intrinsically completely different from facebook, different use cases and different structures.
How would a "full sync" look like? Having each topic here generate its own fb post? When people post here it posts there too? When people post there it posts here too? That's insane. Does that mean people who post here must have a fb account linked? If not, the middleware generates a user? Or posts under its own identity? There are simply too many variables, and the usecases are never going to be 1:1. I've never seen that done, nevermind done successfully. If I'm wrong, I'd be happy to see this successful implementation. I haven't seen it yet, and I'm on facebook a fair bit.
Or, are we talking about a 3rd party forum integration into facebook, so you have a tab that's basically this forum wrapped into facebook? Noone is going to bother with that. People use facebook's reply and such, not to go there and then get into a forum software.
I think any cross pollination would have to be some kind of selective cross-post and content digest, either by a person or by software (like magazine generators such as... I can't remember the name of it anymore, there's a thing that took tweets and compiled them into some kind of digest based on a bunch of variables).
But I'd imagine that as @Elyaradine said, that's a really hard problem, especially with comments on comments.
But the closer we can get to leveraging FB's strengths (reach and interaction) without the inconvenience of monitoring a discussion in two places, and users being required to have FB logins, or for that matter FB users having to create a separate MGSA login,, the better. No I don't have a tech suggestion for that, but it would (IMO) be the ideal.
And what I'm saying is that leveraging FB's strength isn't going to come from a "full sync", but curated content. If there's a curated content system we can use automatically, sure. If not, it'll have to be human.
I doubt that building an actual platform that does the curation automatically is within the scope of what we're trying to do - if that's a problem that's not solved by dedicated builder of software in social, I doubt it's something a bunch of people can solve on the fly with a community budget/time constraint.
I'm not at all suggesting we build something like that. If it's out there (unlikely), great. If it isn't but there's something near to it, maybe it's at least worth a try.
I think we may have a different idea of how a more active facebook group would be useful. Your approach sounds like using it as a broadcast medium, am I understanding you correctly on that? Whereas I'm talking about extending where conversation happens to outside of the MGSA forums.
There are people out there whose web interaction basically happens exclusively on Facebook (or other social networks). They seem to be more likely to take the less-resistance route of posting their project progress or other things of interest to MGSA users on Facebook and just won't click through to visit a forum. If MGSA doesn't offer them that ability, they will simply go somewhere that does and we lose out on people that are actually doing stuff and could benefit from our interaction.
I'm not anti-conversation - and I'm not saying use facebook exclusively for broadcast. Conversation on facebook happen in a very different way than it does here. Just imagine any of the facebook threads that you've seen happen, and imagine what that would be like here. And now vice versa. It would be chaos in either direction.
So from that perspective, trying to have the exact same conversation on fb and on a forum is a really noble goal, but that's like trying to have the same conversation on email and whatsapp with some people being on email and some on whatsapp. The platforms themselves create their best-use content and scenarios. We can try and wrangle that, but uh, I don't see how easily. Or feasibly.
So it's entirely possible to have conversations on facebook. And I don't advocate against it. But it'll likely be separate from the forum conversation. And that's just the nature of the beast, unless someone wants to cross from fb into forum or forum to fb, vice versa. How we curate to cross that gap would have to be artful, and most likely not automateable.
But again, if there are actually solutions already to this, I'd be glad to see them :) Not discounting it, just saying unless we do have a solution, saying "solving this really really hard problem is the ideal" would probably slow down everything else we need to do. Pretty much to where we've been sitting for the last x while. We need to actually move forward now.
- Look at how other forums handle the forum/fb cross pollination. There might be ways we haven’t even thought of. Ideally, the less admin work it needs, the better.
- Add a link to the current FB page on the MGSA website.
- Currently, the FB page feels like a “company” page, because it seems most posts are done by MGSA. A group page might work better, and feel more welcoming. (I can’t remember the exact terminology when you create a FB page, e.g. “company”, “group”, etc.)
Right, so the closest I've found searching for actual FB auto syncing is this for vbulletin, and that brings posts in from FB: http://vbsocial.com/facebook-groups-with-vbulletin-sync/ Which would be useful on it's own, but no conversations, and doesn't post in the other direction.
It does seem from forum conversations that vanilla built in FB integration allows forum posts to be posted to FB, but I couldn't pick up if there was anything auto there, or if it was just an option for OP.
In addition to FB login integration, xenoforums allows specifying how your posts will be formatted when sharing them to facebook, but again, this is manual posting: https://xenforo.com/help/facebook/
So yes, apparently no solutions for any kind of sync, so that's a moot point. We would have to leave it to users to post their threads to FB and/or periodic sharing of interesting threads to FB with encouragement to get involved on the forum itself. The bulk seems to be around: 1) allowing users to easily login if they have a Facebook account (worthwhile to lower barrier to people starting to post for the first time). Of course this has to be optional, some people don't use FB, and some prefer to remain anonymous in forums. 2) admin control over how posts appear on facebook when they are actually shared
To any webdevs reading this, there's an opportunity in the market here :)
I agree that a forum and Facebook provide for different types of interactions. Even the design of the "space" in Facebook discussions discourages large amounts of text.
I think @Dipso makes a good point about having a group instead of a page. I've created a placeholder one so long, just in case, and for testing.
I envision new threads having a checkbox for "Post to MGSA Facebook group" or something that posts a copy of your post if you've got your Facebook account linked. That way, you're opting-in to checking in in both places if you're promoting your game are needing feedback. I dunno, I'm no web developer. :P
Out of interest, MGSA currently seems to be hosted in California. I'd be looking at getting a droplet in London for slightly faster pings to SA in case that makes a difference. The "ideal" droplet costs about $20/month (a bit more if we enable auto backups), though I'm testing on a cheaper one.
If you want to be involved (designing/building/paying for hosting), let me know. I don't want to be some dictator calling the shots or anything, but I do want to be a relatively active person who's (for now) responsible for this, because I believe that's what gets things done.
Hi, Another option for a forum technology to use is mvcforum.com/.
Sorry if it has been mentioned before. It is free. Has some powerful forum features (OpenAuth/login with another website/fb/google etc) and can easily be extended. It uses a Microsoft tech stack (ASP.NET MVC, MSSQL), is easy to style (Bootstrap) and add custom features to the main site other than the forum... I.e. Landing/showcase pages etc.
One would have to look at migrating the current posts across to the MS SQL database etc.
Just adding another option to consider if not already mentioned.
Oh, on the group vs page thing - since the facebook intervention on how they decide what goes on the feed, yes, pages have become much less prominent. Pages are good for a centralised location to find things, but groups are much, much more social. And much better for running events from. So yeah, I agree, we might look into going to a group. We can keep the page open and redirect to the group from there, there's no reason to kill the page.
As I understand it, this discussion has started because members of MGSA think MGSA could do a better job of helping fellow developers over on Facebook than the existing groups do.
I bring this up again because this is only really worth doing if a MGSA Facebook group is run better than the existing groups. This means some people actually need to put time into it.
The kind of thing we're talking about as falling short with current SA game developer Facebook groups are lack of good advice and feedback (as I understand it, I think @AngryMoose brought that up). There's plenty of game posts happening on the existing Facebook groups, but it's mostly a show and tell environment (and I don't think that's of much value beyond self-promotion).
I'm happy to push some of my posts to Facebook (and I think everyone agrees that all our posts going to Facebook is a terrible idea), I'd like to duplicate some of my updates to games and some post-mortem kinds of posts, but I'm not going to spend time on Facebook giving advice or feedback, and if I did, that would mean I spend less time doing that here (so it would be cannibalizing from our value here).
I guess I'm saying, we all have limited time, and I'm not sure where the time is going to come from that enables us to be better than existing Facebook groups if we've got a fairly low interaction rate at MGSA already. I guess if the MGSA Facebook group cuts into time people were going to use watching cat videos on Facebook that could work, but then who is going to watch the cat videos?
If we're really trying to be more useful on Facebook than existing South African communities like us we need to find time, and that's probably got to come from the following places:
1) Time that would have been used to interact on these forums. 2) Time of members who aren't currently spending time on the forums (so new members who join from Facebook or ones that don't use forums much). 3) Time that would have been spent on other Facebook activities. (eating into cat video watching time I assume). 4) Time away from working on our video games (or other jobs). 5) Time of someone we hire to act as a community manager (although I guess this isn't the kind of thing that adds the value we want).
I do think that if groups are better at being able to organize our meetups better that's already reason enough to start a group. And I do think that if we funnel a few developers into interacting on a forum (where they get playtesting and useful feedback) and if we send them to MGSA meetups then we'd already have added significant value.
Also, I agree with @AngryMoose that this conversation should be branched off into it's own thread.
@EvanGreenwood What you're saying about splitting effort and attention is 100% true, but (I think) to some degree necessary. Facebook is just how many people expect to interact with a community, or at least find a community. The ideal would of course be that they found our group/page/whatever and it funnels them into actual forum interaction. I say that simply because Forums still have the advantage when it comes to longer form discussion and persistence.
To do that, though, I suspect there would need to at least be some level of interaction on- and definitely more content posted to- Facebook. Even if it's a case of "this cool topic has started on the forums, come and interact with us there".
I personally way, way prefer the forum format, but my concern is that by neglecting Facebook, in particular, we're losing potential members to facebook-centered groups that just aren't aimed at helping them or growing the industry. Of the two you linked to, one is actually quite positive and helpful. The other, as many of us discovered the hard way, is less so.
@Elyaradine: you have landing page under wishlist. Does that mean that discourse also doesn't really support static pages? Wasn't that one of the biggest issues with the current setup?
@francoisvn, there are a few ways to achieve that. I believe that @elyaradine is meaning the actual design/code of the page.
As a side note, I'm really impressed with discourse so far in our test environment. There are a lot of nice little things it does better than what we have now. Data migration is my biggest concern.
@roguecode: I also saw that Discourse is able to preserve old URLs too, so that migrating (in theory, if I set up the domain right) doesn't break any old links (whether internally, or from search engine results and stuff!).
I pinged Nick about migration earlier this week, but haven't heard from him yet.
@francoisvn: That functionality doesn't exist out-of-the-box unfortunately, though there are a few tuts/guides/plugins that add that sort of thing. And I'll ask/pay a full-time web-dev friend of mine to give my changes a look-through to make sure I haven't done anything stupid/dangerous. I kind of think I just want something up for now, and making it awesome might be some iterations later on.
Any thoughts on using slack? We use it for an art game collective in Berlin. Can easily make channels and rooms and such. Works well for collaborating.
I use Slack a lot, and it works really well for collaboration (during game jams etc.), however, it would be very hard for general public to come and join the community, or get real information.
@roguecode yeah, but if you pin it at the top and offer easy access to forum members I think it can be very useful to keep conversations going, albeit more chaotically. So it would, indeed as you might suggest, be auxiliary at best.
@LexAquillia your OP is using HTML instead of BBCode so the link isn't working ;)
It's this has been a really cool discussion, and I don't really have much too add outside of one nitpick: given the new data laws passed in the UK I don't think it's the best place to host the droplet, or any other potential server. I think Frankfurt would offer comparable access while having better data rights.
Oh gosh, I forgot about that. Thanks! The test server is currently in the US (marginally easier for me), but I'll set the live one up in Germany. :)
I'm crunching at work, but I'll be migrating the old content this weekend (unless putting out fires at work), and if everything goes smoothly, setting it free to you see how you like it and what we can improve.
I'm open to that. The main thing that was kind of a limitation was finding a place that hosts a Rails server, where local ones are pretty much exclusively PHP (or whatever the Windows one is). I couldn't find a local Rails host the last time I checked (which admittedly was about a year ago), and setting your own one up, while possible, is complicated (to me anyway, as a web-dev noob).
I was fairly sure RSAWeb did, but links to it on their site seem dead. Either way, I'm sure we can find something locally, and it would be really nice to have the site a bit faster.
Yeah, faster would of course be better, but I'm also wary of going with a place that doesn't have sort of an established reputation (uptime, won't disappear, etc.). I've been rather dissatisfied with how the current forums sometimes go down for a short while for no apparent reason. If you find a place, do let us know! :)
(I think this all becomes less of an issue if we've got a dedicated server that we're managing Rails on. I just feel like the setup and maintenance would be a pain.)
Regarding this site going down, I remember I started recording the times a while back and came to the conclusion that the DB has a daily auto-backup, and it was going down during that. Could be wrong of course.
Comments
I think there are a few things that our community might learn though. From a casual glance at ZAGD's membership, while there is a small handful of (inactive/lurking) professionals that are members there, there are many, many (also inactive/lurking, though that's not unusual I think) members that I've never heard of before, people who are novices, and people who likely discovered the Facebook group because of Facebook's social features. Their games generally don't look very good at all, but we all started there at some point! And we got better, in a large part due to communities like game.dev.
I think I share Danny's concerns about our not being very active outside of very game-focused events, where ZAGD has easier organic reach (your Facebook friends see you posting in Facebook groups); and that while we arguably give pretty good advice here (especially now that we're kinder to one another too) and have active professional developers here with decades of game dev experience, and who have a strong personal interest in developing our local talent and in creating an atmosphere that supports our businesses, ZAGD seems to give comparatively poor (or, worse, erroneous) feedback, from people who have never shipped a commercial title, but have Dunning-Kruger'd themselves into being authorities. The result is that there may be a vast number of potentially great game developers who are being led astray, and who aren't in the sort of easy contact with experienced devs that they would here. Danny's been super aggressive about ZAGD's failures, and while I sometimes cringed about it with the ammo they he gave them for character-assassination, I can understand where he's been coming from.
I'm not sure what to do about that.
- Join ZAGD, and increase their newbies' exposure to experienced developers. Unfortunately, we'd simultaneously be giving an egotist more things to brag about, and increase the value of a brand that's being used for commercial use, rather than being community-first the way MGSA is.
- Increase our visibility on Facebook by making better use of the MGSA-related page(s). I really don't like the idea of having to post both there and here though, and to have to search and reply in multiple places.
- Improve our forum platform. There are a number of newer platforms that are more modern and responsive, that are built with social features in mind. This is enormously painful to implement I think, in the sense that we don't want to lose the existing forum's posts, and have already struggled with manpower with doing just our front page. I'd be willing to put money into paying someone good to do this though (and I'm quite sure others would too).
I mean, if ZAGD was run by someone who actually knew anything about game development, or who actually cared about fostering young game developers, and wasn't so obsessed with marketing speak and stroking his own ego, I think I'd be quite happy to have things continue as is, leave them be, and just be happy that we're serving different needs. Some competition would be nice after all, and communities having competitions against one another is part of what made Dominance War so much fun for artists. But that's not my impression of ZAGD at all, with @Julian's shitty behaviour both there and here completely putting me off.
Thoughts on what we can do better as MGSA?
So basically we're asking - how much time/effort/money do we have to put into:
a) Making the MGSA platform better so that it can reach further/better than it does right now as only a forum.
b) Competing with ZAGD in terms of exposure so that we can try to better influence potential young game devs that MGSA hasn't been able to reach before
As for @Elyaradine's three specific routes mentioned,
1) is no go for me. And it wouldn't work even if anyone here tried, tbh. We can already see the kind of actions being taken against people with competing ideas/ideals by zagd's admin.
2) I think is doable - it's not that we should duplicate content on here and fb, but rather formulate content suitable for facebook. I think cross-posting content from the forum to facebook is doable and something to explore. Maybe weekly summaries, a couple links to hot topics from the forum to fb, or something. But definitely having a facebook management who posts frequently might help. Though I'm not 100% sure what the content plan should be... I'm pretty active on fb personally, but my pages are abysmal :P
3) I think needs to be done and we've tried several times already. There's a body of designs, mine included, that's hung around for a while. So it comes down to... Time and money commitment from those with those resources available.
Personally I want to put in some effort to change things from a "maintaining" position (which it seems to currently be in) to an improving position, but that requires some personal time commitment that I will only have in Jan 2017 at the earliest.
It has several features that I prefer over Vanilla, with the downside being that it runs on a Rails backend (which is what gives it so much of its dynamic functionality, but Rails servers are generally more difficult to find and are more expensive). It's dynamic though, with replies and new topics having indications without having to refresh a page. When you click a user's name, you see their bio, location, badges, etc. without having to leave the page either. (I find that sometimes someone here says something that I don't really agree with, so I want to see who they are to be able to say what they do with so much apparent authority, and end up looking for their introduction post in the Welcome thread to find them... :P)
You're also able to make it so that members who've reached a particular "level" are able to edit certain posts. So, for example, if someone created some kind of resources thread that we'd use as reference (e.g. kind of like a wiki, list of schools, list of contractors, etc.), anybody who's been a member who's been vetted would be able to edit the post with new content, so we can all contribute to updating as we go, or adding our own company's information. So, rather than having to visit a separate wiki, or have to contact a moderator, or the starter of the thread, we get to do it ourselves (as long as we're not brand new members/spam).
The down-side is it doesn't technically have Facebook integration, though apparently it's pretty easy to make cross-posting work. (It's hard to make things sync fully, but that's okay I think.) It's not as if the current forums do this anyway.
I know I'm asking for a bit much, in the sense that things have been delayed so long that it kind of sounds dumb to be asking for more. :P I just... kind of feel like if we're going to pay for it, that I'd like to pay for a great solution, rather than a stop-gap. I'm expecting some resistance to this, and I understand, but I really think this would be a big step in making the forums more user-friendly, accessible and more enjoyable to use. Please just take a look at existing Discourse forums (they're mostly the similar-looking I think), try the setup demo, and see how things work before you call me crazy! :P https://realtimevfx.com/ http://discuss.emberjs.com/
And if we're worried about migrating our existing data, I'd be happy to try it out with a dump of our vanilla database, so that we can see how it'd work in action while this one's still live, in case we don't like it, at which point we've lost nothing. If we agree to that. And whoever we should be talking to about getting that kind of access. @DaveRusselSA @LexAquillia
I have a friend who's a full stack developer. He's been full stack for only about 6 months or so, but he's responsible, trustworthy and has a great work ethic, and he could help with any modifications or integrations we want.
To add my 2c, I think I agree with most on point (1). Against the advice of wiser voices I tried in the past engaging with ZAGD, but that proved fruitless and I also don't think giving them (well, the owner/creator specifically) any more attention is helpful. His actions so far make it seem highly unlikely that he is motivated by the best interests of the local gamedev community.
Is there any way to roll (2) and (3) into one issue? @elyaradine is right that double posting is a pain, and I doubt anyone would do it. However here are benefits to using a FB group over a forum, and benefits to using a forum over a FB group. Maybe we can get the best of both? While looking for alternative forum tech, is there not perhaps one that offers some kind of FB group/Forum post syncing, directly or through a plugin? I looked briefly for something like that for vanilla but didn't see anything.
Edit Yeah something like this at least, where posts to the forums draw people in due to facebook activity. Though a full sync would be ideal.
@Elyaradine Damn, those Discourse-Forums have some nice features, though it's really only the collaborative editing that excites me, it'd be great if this forum could be a better resource repository. (Regarding the other feature you highlight: I find opening a new tab after clicking on someone's name an okay feature, it's not exactly holding me back, the discourse forums allow a little bio to be written, which I imagine is a feature we have actively disabled on these forums, and things happening in realtime seems like a nice to have).
No idea what would be involved in a migration, but not loosing data would be my main concern.
I'm not sure really what Vanilla forums can do (nor what Discourse-forums can do), but a quick search shows there are ways to allow post Vanilla posts to be shared on to Facebook?
There must be Vanilla plug-ins that cross-post new discussions/threads on Facebook, if we go that route. (I haven't looked, but it honestly sounds fairly trivial to me, where full sync doesn't at all.) I'd just really like to investigate Discord anyway, have it running on a temp board with the data migrated, just for a week or two to see if it's actually an improvement. That way, aside from maybe the month or so of hosting costs (which imo are relatively trivial) and the little bit of time into setting it up (which either I can do, or I can ask my web dev friend).
Anyway, if we were going to lose our data, it'd be a really big deal and I wouldn't want to move then. I really think it's worth testing, in case it makes forum use friendlier and more modern. I'll ping Nick and Dave on Twitter since they don't seem to be replying here. It doesn't help that this thread seems to have some tag on it that locks its timestamp, forcing it down the list despite our efforts to turn it into a productive discussion. :P
I think regarding Facebook. What I'd ideally like is sharing a post to the Make Games SA Facebook feed. I'm not sure what a "full-sync" would mean, but I don't think everything that gets posted here is all that suitable for Facebook (I definitely wouldn't want most of this discussion on Facebook, and knowledge repository stuff is a waste of time, I'd prefer just posts about games or interesting things going out to Facebook).
I'll look at getting a Discourse board set up in the mean time, while I wait on Nick's mailing me.
[edit] Okay, I got the Discourse board set up on a DO droplet, but struggled with getting my mail working, so I couldn't receive the admin email. :P I'll try again later this week.
@EvanGreenwood "full sync" would mean that when a post starts here, it generates a post on the facebook page, and further posts on the comment are added as comments on the FB post, and comments from FB are posted as replies on the forum. But I'd imagine that as @Elyaradine said, that's a really hard problem, especially with comments on comments. So I wouldn't be surprised if none of the forum software options has really solved it.
How would a "full sync" look like? Having each topic here generate its own fb post? When people post here it posts there too? When people post there it posts here too? That's insane. Does that mean people who post here must have a fb account linked? If not, the middleware generates a user? Or posts under its own identity? There are simply too many variables, and the usecases are never going to be 1:1. I've never seen that done, nevermind done successfully. If I'm wrong, I'd be happy to see this successful implementation. I haven't seen it yet, and I'm on facebook a fair bit.
Or, are we talking about a 3rd party forum integration into facebook, so you have a tab that's basically this forum wrapped into facebook? Noone is going to bother with that. People use facebook's reply and such, not to go there and then get into a forum software.
I think any cross pollination would have to be some kind of selective cross-post and content digest, either by a person or by software (like magazine generators such as... I can't remember the name of it anymore, there's a thing that took tweets and compiled them into some kind of digest based on a bunch of variables).
I doubt that building an actual platform that does the curation automatically is within the scope of what we're trying to do - if that's a problem that's not solved by dedicated builder of software in social, I doubt it's something a bunch of people can solve on the fly with a community budget/time constraint.
It's like indies trying to build Skyrim :)
I think we may have a different idea of how a more active facebook group would be useful. Your approach sounds like using it as a broadcast medium, am I understanding you correctly on that? Whereas I'm talking about extending where conversation happens to outside of the MGSA forums.
There are people out there whose web interaction basically happens exclusively on Facebook (or other social networks). They seem to be more likely to take the less-resistance route of posting their project progress or other things of interest to MGSA users on Facebook and just won't click through to visit a forum. If MGSA doesn't offer them that ability, they will simply go somewhere that does and we lose out on people that are actually doing stuff and could benefit from our interaction.
So from that perspective, trying to have the exact same conversation on fb and on a forum is a really noble goal, but that's like trying to have the same conversation on email and whatsapp with some people being on email and some on whatsapp. The platforms themselves create their best-use content and scenarios. We can try and wrangle that, but uh, I don't see how easily. Or feasibly.
So it's entirely possible to have conversations on facebook. And I don't advocate against it. But it'll likely be separate from the forum conversation. And that's just the nature of the beast, unless someone wants to cross from fb into forum or forum to fb, vice versa. How we curate to cross that gap would have to be artful, and most likely not automateable.
But again, if there are actually solutions already to this, I'd be glad to see them :) Not discounting it, just saying unless we do have a solution, saying "solving this really really hard problem is the ideal" would probably slow down everything else we need to do. Pretty much to where we've been sitting for the last x while. We need to actually move forward now.
- Look at how other forums handle the forum/fb cross pollination.
There might be ways we haven’t even thought of.
Ideally, the less admin work it needs, the better.
- Add a link to the current FB page on the MGSA website.
- Currently, the FB page feels like a “company” page, because it seems most posts are done by MGSA.
A group page might work better, and feel more welcoming.
(I can’t remember the exact terminology when you create a FB page, e.g. “company”, “group”, etc.)
.
Which would be useful on it's own, but no conversations, and doesn't post in the other direction.
It does seem from forum conversations that vanilla built in FB integration allows forum posts to be posted to FB, but I couldn't pick up if there was anything auto there, or if it was just an option for OP.
In addition to FB login integration, xenoforums allows specifying how your posts will be formatted when sharing them to facebook, but again, this is manual posting:
https://xenforo.com/help/facebook/
So yes, apparently no solutions for any kind of sync, so that's a moot point. We would have to leave it to users to post their threads to FB and/or periodic sharing of interesting threads to FB with encouragement to get involved on the forum itself. The bulk seems to be around:
1) allowing users to easily login if they have a Facebook account (worthwhile to lower barrier to people starting to post for the first time). Of course this has to be optional, some people don't use FB, and some prefer to remain anonymous in forums.
2) admin control over how posts appear on facebook when they are actually shared
To any webdevs reading this, there's an opportunity in the market here :)
I think @Dipso makes a good point about having a group instead of a page. I've created a placeholder one so long, just in case, and for testing.
I envision new threads having a checkbox for "Post to MGSA Facebook group" or something that posts a copy of your post if you've got your Facebook account linked. That way, you're opting-in to checking in in both places if you're promoting your game are needing feedback. I dunno, I'm no web developer. :P
Out of interest, MGSA currently seems to be hosted in California. I'd be looking at getting a droplet in London for slightly faster pings to SA in case that makes a difference. The "ideal" droplet costs about $20/month (a bit more if we enable auto backups), though I'm testing on a cheaper one.
If you want to be involved (designing/building/paying for hosting), let me know. I don't want to be some dictator calling the shots or anything, but I do want to be a relatively active person who's (for now) responsible for this, because I believe that's what gets things done.
Sorry if it has been mentioned before. It is free. Has some powerful forum features (OpenAuth/login with another website/fb/google etc) and can easily be extended. It uses a Microsoft tech stack (ASP.NET MVC, MSSQL), is easy to style (Bootstrap) and add custom features to the main site other than the forum... I.e. Landing/showcase pages etc.
One would have to look at migrating the current posts across to the MS SQL database etc.
Just adding another option to consider if not already mentioned.
As I understand it, this discussion has started because members of MGSA think MGSA could do a better job of helping fellow developers over on Facebook than the existing groups do.
I bring this up again because this is only really worth doing if a MGSA Facebook group is run better than the existing groups. This means some people actually need to put time into it.
The kind of thing we're talking about as falling short with current SA game developer Facebook groups are lack of good advice and feedback (as I understand it, I think @AngryMoose brought that up). There's plenty of game posts happening on the existing Facebook groups, but it's mostly a show and tell environment (and I don't think that's of much value beyond self-promotion).
I'm happy to push some of my posts to Facebook (and I think everyone agrees that all our posts going to Facebook is a terrible idea), I'd like to duplicate some of my updates to games and some post-mortem kinds of posts, but I'm not going to spend time on Facebook giving advice or feedback, and if I did, that would mean I spend less time doing that here (so it would be cannibalizing from our value here).
I guess I'm saying, we all have limited time, and I'm not sure where the time is going to come from that enables us to be better than existing Facebook groups if we've got a fairly low interaction rate at MGSA already. I guess if the MGSA Facebook group cuts into time people were going to use watching cat videos on Facebook that could work, but then who is going to watch the cat videos?
If we're really trying to be more useful on Facebook than existing South African communities like us we need to find time, and that's probably got to come from the following places:
1) Time that would have been used to interact on these forums.
2) Time of members who aren't currently spending time on the forums (so new members who join from Facebook or ones that don't use forums much).
3) Time that would have been spent on other Facebook activities. (eating into cat video watching time I assume).
4) Time away from working on our video games (or other jobs).
5) Time of someone we hire to act as a community manager (although I guess this isn't the kind of thing that adds the value we want).
I do think that if groups are better at being able to organize our meetups better that's already reason enough to start a group. And I do think that if we funnel a few developers into interacting on a forum (where they get playtesting and useful feedback) and if we send them to MGSA meetups then we'd already have added significant value.
Also, I agree with @AngryMoose that this conversation should be branched off into it's own thread.
To do that, though, I suspect there would need to at least be some level of interaction on- and definitely more content posted to- Facebook. Even if it's a case of "this cool topic has started on the forums, come and interact with us there".
I personally way, way prefer the forum format, but my concern is that by neglecting Facebook, in particular, we're losing potential members to facebook-centered groups that just aren't aimed at helping them or growing the industry. Of the two you linked to, one is actually quite positive and helpful. The other, as many of us discovered the hard way, is less so.
Still to test:
- migrate current data
- Facebook (and other social media?) cross-posting
Wishlist:
- sweet landing page
As a side note, I'm really impressed with discourse so far in our test environment. There are a lot of nice little things it does better than what we have now.
Data migration is my biggest concern.
I pinged Nick about migration earlier this week, but haven't heard from him yet.
@francoisvn: That functionality doesn't exist out-of-the-box unfortunately, though there are a few tuts/guides/plugins that add that sort of thing. And I'll ask/pay a full-time web-dev friend of mine to give my changes a look-through to make sure I haven't done anything stupid/dangerous. I kind of think I just want something up for now, and making it awesome might be some iterations later on.
(happy to make one if everyone is busy)
http://makegamessa.com/discussion/3314/zatech-slack-game-dev
http://makegamessa.com/discussion/4385/mgsa-slack-channel-https-gamedevsa-herokuapp-com-or-https-mgsa-herokuapp-com
It's this has been a really cool discussion, and I don't really have much too add outside of one nitpick: given the new data laws passed in the UK I don't think it's the best place to host the droplet, or any other potential server. I think Frankfurt would offer comparable access while having better data rights.
I'm crunching at work, but I'll be migrating the old content this weekend (unless putting out fires at work), and if everything goes smoothly, setting it free to you see how you like it and what we can improve.
(I think this all becomes less of an issue if we've got a dedicated server that we're managing Rails on. I just feel like the setup and maintenance would be a pain.)