Apols if this sounds a bit harsh, but publishers have a number of promo/discussion avenues open to them, and the ones here are not top for user-friendliness, so maybe folks are prioritising other channels.

Tim Gray
Silver Branch Games
www.silverbranch.co.uk

Actually, the least used bit of the site was the blog aggregator, which is why it went the way of the dodo and nobody noticed...

Tim's partially right, there are usability issues (if I had to go back,I'd not have used Drupal's format). But also the fact that a blog post and a forum post behave identically in Drupal means there's little to no use for one if you use the other.

I think part of it is how we expected things to work, and how they do. The site is much less about the individual, and more about the, well, collective whole. Maybe we shouldn't be surprised by that.

-Matt

Realms Publishing

Interesting. I like Matt's point that there's a positive side to this.

Well...to expand on Tim's point: perhaps if, a part of the site proves to be disused, we should think about abandoning it. Not as a snap decision, but after a while. After all, it's disused because people are putting their energies elsewhere.

Perhaps I'll start a separate thread about the Drupal thing.

Graham

I think it is actually a really positive thing that discussion isn't revolving around the founder members/people who pay for the site.

But yeah, it should be an evolution. There are things that are useful and things that are not, but you only find those through actual use.

Drupal is... yeah probably another thread (though some of it has been discussed before and I'd rather not go over old ground).

-Matt

Realms Publishing

Oh definitely - I wasn't saying "this is bad - let's use them more", more observing that they weren't being used. I prefer to post my games ideas in the main forums, not in my own ghetto.

I think phasing out the blogs might not be a bad plan. They sit there quite prominently but don't get used! Unless it could link to our own game blogs?

Yeah, it's definitely an option. Ironically the aggregator was full of links to blogs elsewhere...

Here's a task for folks. Rank your top six desired features of the site. Not technological doohickies, but things you'd like to be able to achieve with it.

-Matt

Realms Publishing

Here's what I use/like/would use most of all:

1. forums as are (albeit with wider columns :-)
2. calendar of events (i use this a lot)
3. maybe a blog aggregator that gathered our design posts in one place
4. page of useful links/friends of the collective (including to our own websites/sales sites maybe?)
5. some way to integrate the 'zine with the site - via a collection of articles, with the 'zine as the front page perhaps?

1. Forums
2. Upcoming events

That's pretty much it, really. Perhaps private messages, too, but I'm not too bothered.

Graham

Yeah, I'm looking for a Discussion forum primarily. A diary of events is neat too. Currently neither work terribly well.

As a group of people to discuss games, gaming, game design, publishing and whatnot with, I think that the Collective Endeavour is the best thing ever in the whole world*. I've had more interesting discussions and better feedback here than anywhere else, on line or off.

As a website, it's a bit pants. The forum is flaky, badly laid out and has a bunch of other problems. (Narrow columns, didn't even support BBCode until recently, often fails to log me in correctly, loses a way more posts than is acceptable, gives me a massive database error whenever I start a new thread etc)

The look & feel graphical stuff is nice though.

I appreciate that most of this comes down to Durpal just being no good for what it's being used for here. Bear in mind that internet users are all used to vBulletin/phpBB, they know how that works. So any like it or not, any site which wants to be user friendly and gather a decent following needs to have similar functionality to vBulletin. Vanilla doesn't for example, it doesn't display separate sub forums "properly". Beehive Forum is arse in the implementations I've seen/used because, again, the layout is all wrong (and by "wrong", I mean "Not like vBulletin". I saw two or three messages a week from confused new members on The Engine who couldn't figure out how to navigate the site).

* OK, maybe that's hyperbole.

I do think there's an argument for changing the forum software. I think I'd spend more time here if it was Vanilla or phpBB.

(With apologies for prising the wormcan open further. Conversations like this often sound bad, coming across as criticising something that someone's spent a lot of time on).

Graham

I spend all day building sites, so I've a pretty thick skin. I'm first to admit that Drupal was a fairly arbitrary choice based on perceived needs and a short timescale. If those needs have changed, then we have to evolve too.

Some issues should be addressed in the redesign that's sitting on my Mac waiting for me to turn it into a template.

Keep in mind though, that what people complain about and the actual problem are rarely the same thing in web design. Web fora are an imperfect medium for holding this kind of discussion, because it's harder to tease out the real issue from gut reactions.

-Matt

Realms Publishing

May i suggest that on occasion we may all want to confernce call of sorts over skype or equivalent. Just an idle thought.

Cheers

Iain

Mob Justice now available!

'The Giant Brain':Small games, big ideas.

Matt, I'm also extremely grateful that you built the damn thing in the first place.

I know what it's like, I spent 6 years as a web developer before being temped away by more lucrative work.

Usually:

What people want =/= What they think they want

Something put together in a hurry with a wooly spec is bound not to be all that great (subjectively) a year later, regardless of the level workmanship. Even the best marksman usually misses his target if he has no idea what it looks like, where it is etc etc.

Iain, great idea. AK knows more than me about conferencing stuff, Skype has a 5 user limit which might cause problems.

We (that is our online roleplaying group that includes Andrew, Jan and myself) have a Teamspeak server that Jan maintains that could easily be used instead of skype. It allows rather more than 5 people.

We have the ultimate woolly spec, in that we didn't know what the focus would be beyond "Indie game in the UK!!!".

Hence my question about ranking tasks, trying to dig into what people need rather than think they want... I'm loathe to alter the site to look like any other forum, cos then folks start to treat it like any other forum.

We could always boot up thinkature and have a group brainstorm for future site developments. It handles voice, IIRC. I'm about tonight.

-Matt

Realms Publishing

While I remember:

1. I'd really like the "New mail" messages to be accurate. The forum keeps saying I've got new mail in a category when I haven't.

And, often, the number of new messages in the forum, as shown on the Forum Overview page, doesn't match the number when I go to the forum.

2. I just posted two posts in a thread. Then I went and edited the first one I'd posted. The software then reversed the order of the posts. Obviously doing something funny with a Creation Time field or something.

Matt, I realise you can't fix these immediately, but I wanted to note down specifics, rather than my usual whining about the forum software.

Graham

Teamspeek would be good for me, I could host it on a friends server as well.

Cheers

Iain

Mob Justice now available!

'The Giant Brain':Small games, big ideas.