Test out a potential new home for MGSA!
Hi everyone,
There's a new copy of this forum. You can reach it at http://104.131.121.2. (It technically doesn't have a domain registered, because if we go with it I imagine we'd be redirecting our current domain, but in case you want something easier to remember, I'm redirecting there via http://forum.techartjon.com.)
It is a test forum. We don't have to switch. If you don't like it, please let us know. If you like it, please let us know. If you don't really care either way, still please let us know. While I'm pushing to get us to have various upgrades around here, I want to involve as many of you as possible in where we take our community. I'd like you to post there and explore the new forum's features as much as you can, be aware that if we do choose to go with this, you may (probably will) end up losing anything you post there.
Your current username and password should just work.
Noteworthy features
Many thanks to @roguecode for helping out with testing the forum's features and getting emails working, and @LexAquillia for getting me the data to import.
edit: Known issues:
There's a new copy of this forum. You can reach it at http://104.131.121.2. (It technically doesn't have a domain registered, because if we go with it I imagine we'd be redirecting our current domain, but in case you want something easier to remember, I'm redirecting there via http://forum.techartjon.com.)
It is a test forum. We don't have to switch. If you don't like it, please let us know. If you like it, please let us know. If you don't really care either way, still please let us know. While I'm pushing to get us to have various upgrades around here, I want to involve as many of you as possible in where we take our community. I'd like you to post there and explore the new forum's features as much as you can, be aware that if we do choose to go with this, you may (probably will) end up losing anything you post there.
Your current username and password should just work.
Noteworthy features
- Wiki posts. A post can be marked as a "wiki" post, allowing any normal forum member to edit the post! In this way, we as a community can curate our Resources.
- Editing posts has history. We can see post history, and roll back changes.
- Better profile management. Clicking someone's name lets you see a whole bunch of information if they've entered it, e.g. real name, studio, shipped titles, link to project/prototype/art thread, etc.
- Embed lots of media. Just post a link to something on its own line, and Discourse will embed it in your post. This can be loads of different stuff, from Youtube videos, to gifs, to tweets, to products on the Steam and Google Play, to comments on Github.
- Manage the forum yourself. There's a "trust" system that Discourse uses. Based on how much you've used the forum (e.g. you've spent some time reading posts, or received hearts, or replied to other peoples' threads), you gain more and more privileges. People who're regulars would be able do extra things eventually, like rename or recategorize topics, or immediately hide spam posts, or create wiki posts, and other moderator-like things.
Many thanks to @roguecode for helping out with testing the forum's features and getting emails working, and @LexAquillia for getting me the data to import.
edit: Known issues:
- If your password doesn't work, please try resetting it.
- The number of hearts a post has didn't make the migrate, but it's something we can work on fixing.
- We'd ideally want the new forum's URLs to match the old forum's URLs to preserve search engine links.
Comments
1) I can't sign in and I'm 500% sure I'm using the correct password
2) I posted a thread a few days ago and another a few hours before that. I can see the earlier thread but I can't find the later one on the new website. Strange that it would be one not the other, no? later one has no comments, perhaps it's that, It's the only thing that is different about it that I can see)
[edit: and big thanks for setting it all up for testing! <3 ]
Unfortunately the old and new forums hash passwords differently, and there is no realistic way we'll be able to get around that.
Basically, to try out the new forum you'll need to click sign in then hit "forgot my password".
Sorry about this!
And just to be clear, if we were to go through with the migration, all users would need to do this.
(@Elyaradine, maybe add this to the OP)
- Share button - it'll rarely be used.
- Invite button - just mention someone
- Suggested Topics at the bottom of posts - I'm not really convinced it works well in the context of this small forum.
I moved things over so that http://104.131.121.2/ takes you to a temp landing page, and http://104.131.121.2/forum takes you to the forums. (Obviously the real forums would be using a domain name instead.) It looks like anything uploaded before then (e.g. previous posts' images, maybe avatars) got their links broken, and trying to fix the links didn't seem to have any effect. In the future, I imagine we'd have the board set up to use the subfolder or subdomain correctly before importing our old data. Thanks for your patience!
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http://104.131.121.2/forum/t/studios-contractors-offering-game-services/14/1 <-- this is a wiki post.
(You should all be able to edit it, but in case you can't, it might be because the forum thinks you're a new user. New users can't edit wiki posts until they've spent 10 minutes reading through other topics and posts on the forum. Or let me know, and I can take a look for you.)
That said I still find having all the users who posted in a thread being listed in the top to be kinda weird.
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Giving up on the broken images for tonight. Running a search on the server to try and find where the _working_ images actually are, because I can only find the location of the broken images at the moment. :P ...so I'm leaving that running while I sleep.
Also love the temp landing page :) @Elyaradine thank you for all the hard work, and everyone providing financial and technical help. The new website feels really nice.
Ps, will there (or is there) be an option to have a black theme like we have currently? No vital, it's just easier on the 'ol eyes :)
There's a hacky workaround that I just tried that shows some promise (i.e. the switching works most of the time), but it doesn't always stick (like if your cookies get cleared or something), and requires writing another set of css tags. I'll get to that eventually, seeing as that falls somewhat in the realm of what I'm actually half-capable of doing. :P
Landing page
This is the most commonly requested thing and the biggest need IMO. @Elyaradine has managed to get a static one up, and that is awesome. If we went ahead then I'd like the page to pull from a wiki or something that multiple people can edit. I would love something like http://nzgda.com/games/ as our landing page. The first thing people would see is the awesome games that local people have made, and that is pretty encouraging.
If we structure the wiki page that the landing page is tied to in a pre-defined way, the landing page can use the data and lay out the stuff properly.
Finding People
Not the biggest deal, but I love that each person can now write up who the hell they actually are. I'm sure lots of members have spent a lot of time in stalker-mode trying to work out that ChompieChomperson84 is Joe that they met at the meetup.
Social linking stuff
I don't think anyone has a solid plan here, so I have no idea if Discourse will help at all.
Event management/visibility
I just tested and it is possible to embed a Google Calendar into a post: http://104.131.121.2/forum/t/event-calendar-test/5827
We could have an event post locked with a calendar, which would make it much easier for casual newcomers to see what is happening around them.
It would be nice if the related posts were more related though. A lot of the time it seems to pick random ones. Maybe that just means our thread titles should suck less :P
Feels, spiffier for lack of proper technical terms.
Thanks for the effort on this. Really nice.
The current setup feels better for me than that test site that you made and it doesn't really feel like anything changed towards what I personally feel the website should be like. I think the current setup works fine for now until we really do something properly about it. Those designs that I think @Tuism did early in the year looked more in the direction I would vote for than the test site.
I agree with @roguecode with something more like http://nzgda.com/games/
There's still a lot to do, and if I had to write up a more formal list:
- makegamessa.com should take us to a landing page, while a sub-URL (e.g. /forum or /discussions) takes us to the forum.
- The landing page would be something like these (Nitrogen | NZGDA | meh). (Especially the NZGDA one.)
- The landing page would pull events from either the forum or some other community-edited list (like a Google calendar?)
- It would pull recent noteworthy posts from the forum data too. (Using some criteria of hearts vs recents.)
- Links taking you to further information (e.g. lists of studios, lists of games, lists of schools, get started making games tutorials, etc.) would link you to wiki posts in the forum that the community itself can curate. (This doesn't sound very elegant to me, but I think it can be made better by making sure the landing page and forum have a consistent aesthetic design.)
- New threads can optionally be posted to the Facebook group with a link to the forum thread if the person's connected a Facebook account.
1. My understanding is that overall it'd be much easier to do the above with our current Vanilla forums (with the exception of the wiki posts. I don't know how we'd solve that, as no plugins for that appear to exist, and doing it from scratch sounds hard), purely because lots more developers are familiar with PHP/SQL. I far prefer Discourse in terms of its other functionality and UX (I personally feel like Vanilla's aged), but I realise that it's more difficult to work with because just about nobody seems to have Rails experience. :P2. This is a pretty big job. :P When I described the list to my full stack friend, Jacques, he was like, "...holy shit. :P". And while I'm willing to put in hours here and there for dumb things like setting up a forum or painting a Facebook cover image, this is beyond my knowledge, and beyond what any sane person would be donating. Jacques doesn't have professional Rails experience (he's dabbled with it before out of interest) but with the amount of work this is I don't want him to be doing this as a hobby project. And if we're going to be paying someone, I feel like maybe Clockwork Acorn's more established, with strong rapport with this community, and may be a better choice.
3. @francoisvn (or Clockwork Acorn), @MoonPanda and @roguecode have expressed willingness to help, but my understanding is none of them have used Rails either.
Is Discourse cool enough to be worth the extra work? :P
Possibly raise the funds to do it but first lets get an idea on what it will cost.
The choice I see us facing is:
1. If our developer(s) have to learn Rails while also doing the above, it'll probably take longer and be a bit riskier (inexperience breeds potential problems). The community already being able to edit wiki posts and curate our resources and information is a pretty big win though.
2. If we continue to use Vanilla, then we've got to solve the problem of the community curating its content and the various lists of pages for the landing page. So while there are more people with solid experience with Vanilla's underlying tech, having it so that we're all curating the resources seems difficult too. I mean, unless we want to try maintaining a wiki again, because that didn't go so well the last time.
I do feel a bit as if I'm losing a sense of the bigger picture, and maybe making things more complicated than they have to be.
Why the focus on wiki posts? I understand that the static content should be community-maintained, but why not just with a few editors on Wordpress? Wikis have their own issues, like very low participation rates. Wordpress makes it relatively easy to have a few ppl with the necessary access, and if you really want to go the wiki route, there are plugins for that. Maybe I missed something about wikis?
I can understand that there might be some reasons for switching from Vanilla to Discourse, and earlier is better than later, but I'm not very familiar with Discourse so I'm not sure what benefits it provides over Vanilla, besides being a bit more sleek and smooth in general. If Discourse doesn't really offer functionality for static content, then how will we go about incorporating that? It seems like it would be somewhat difficult to efficiently mix that with Wordpress, and rolling our own CMS sounds like a "really bad idea" (tm).
Regarding Ruby on Rails and Clockwork Acorn: we have more PHP experience, but RoR is not impossible - we have some very limited exp and we do frequently learn new dev stacks for projects. That said, unless we have a good reason otherwise, if I have to choose I'd say we should probably stick to more ubiquitous technologies that future generations can maintain, and so far PHP is much more established IMHO.
I think our previous wiki was taken down because (1) it was flooded with spam bots (it was terrifying how much spam there was), and (2) it was very much a separate website, so there was no reason to go there unless you were looking for something specific. I feel that wiki posts that are built into our forum itself are easier to maintain (you don't need multiple accounts), are searchable with the same structure for searching forum posts themselves, and can be edited by anyone who's a regular forum user. I think that's super powerful, especially if we want to be using the forum as a knowledge repository.
The reason this is important is that you get threads like the two "my 2016 summed up in gifs" and they are something like 30MB+. Along with having to load all that data, gifs are just pretty crappy compared to even a quarter size video.
Showing lots of pretty moving stuff is very important to a game dev community - so we should probably help with that.
Copy that's SEO ready. Use it. Don't use it.
NZGDA's layout looks pretty but I'm not sure if it fits what we need right now - who's going to generate the news? Would it be as simple as an admin marking a post as news and it'll show up? Or would it be more involved? That's a big deal right now since we're decentralising. Also then, we need front-page representation of categories, like events, and perhaps featured published SA games, or something, right?
I think our old designs could be improved in terms of layout, spacing, etc, but it functions better than the the very minimalist NZGDA one...
What're we pulling the trigger on? Is it just the Discourse, or are we talking about a landing page too?
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Whether we use Discourse affects the landing page's functionality, in the sense that pulling the data out of Discourse would be, as far as I know, more complicated than pulling it out of Vanilla. There are developers who'd figure it out, of course, but Ruby on Rails is much less widely known than PHP.
I do envision the landing page being populated with data pulled from the forum, where moderators or senior members (in the case of Discourse where members who've contributed more naturally get given mod-like powers) can change a topic's tag or category or something.