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hey guys, just made my own forum and can i get some people to look at it and make sure it looks clean, everything works, there isn't anything you think I should add. Thanks.

http://minitotalwar.freeforums.org

I did this once. No one used it, and I got bashed like crazy for advertising a forum no one would use on a forum everyone's already happy with.

Looks cool though. The banner at the top... the text is a little off.

At first glance, the interface could use a lot of work.

Thanks I'll advertise it later, right now it's a work in progress and I just need some fresh eyes.

Disclaimer: I'm not trying to be an ass. Seriously.

I'm unimpressed, to be honest. Your logo doesn't line up properly. Your theme is... not friendly. I was groping for something beyond just saying "bad". I don't care for the color scheme. I don't feel it's very high contrast, but I'm colorblind, so I would seek a second opinion on that. Other than that, I think that your borders are way too huge. I actually read the description of the "War Room", and then thought to myself, "Where the hell is the 40k forum?". There was such a border in the bottom of my window that I honestly didn't think there were additional subforums beneath "General Wargaming Discussions".

Additionally, you have some 600 or so pixels dedicated to your logo, a realtime clock, and a bunch of buttons that do things I genuinely don't care about. A forum does not need flashgames, no matter what Facebook thinks. I'm sorry, but it's true. Compare this with Dakka which has links at the top of it's (roughly about 300px) banner that I've used all of at least once, and not just for the sake of clicking on them to see what they do.

Also, and this may just be me, but $RANDOMNAME.freeforums.org doesn't inspire much confidence as far as branding goes. Back in the day, we used to say "How do you think you matter when you have a tilde in your url." It was our (programmers, hackers, "computer people") way of poking fun at the fact that you're piggybacking on someone else's service rather than being committed enough to have your own complete setup. You have no commitment to it.

If it sounds like I'm trying to discourage you, then to be honest, I kind of am. Again, REALLY not trying to be an ass; just hate to see people beat their heads against something that's already been done thinking it's going to go somewhere. It looks like you started this with some inkling of an idea though, even if it was just "I'ma start me some wargaming forums!" Why did you start this? What are you trying to accomplish here that hasn't been done better by Dakka, Warseer, LIbrarium, B&C, Freebootaz, or the hundreds of other forums out there I'm not even aware of? Not to mention that most stores have a forum with their token local 10 users on them.

I'd like to add something more constructive to this, but I think those questions need to get answered first. We already have such services, and, with no offense meant, they've already been done much better than what you have so far. What do you bring to the party?

daedalus wrote:Disclaimer: I'm not trying to be an ass. Seriously.

I'm unimpressed, to be honest. Your logo doesn't line up properly. Your theme is... not friendly. I was groping for something beyond just saying "bad". I don't care for the color scheme. I don't feel it's very high contrast, but I'm colorblind, so I would seek a second opinion on that. Other than that, I think that your borders are way too huge. I actually read the description of the "War Room", and then thought to myself, "Where the hell is the 40k forum?". There was such a border in the bottom of my window that I honestly didn't think there were additional subforums beneath "General Wargaming Discussions".

Additionally, you have some 600 or so pixels dedicated to your logo, a realtime clock, and a bunch of buttons that do things I genuinely don't care about. A forum does not need flashgames, no matter what Facebook thinks. I'm sorry, but it's true. Compare this with Dakka which has links at the top of it's (roughly about 300px) banner that I've used all of at least once, and not just for the sake of clicking on them to see what they do.

Also, and this may just be me, but $RANDOMNAME.freeforums.org doesn't inspire much confidence as far as branding goes. Back in the day, we used to say "How do you think you matter when you have a tilde in your url." It was our (programmers, hackers, "computer people") way of poking fun at the fact that you're piggybacking on someone else's service rather than being committed enough to have your own complete setup. You have no commitment to it.

If it sounds like I'm trying to discourage you, then to be honest, I kind of am. Again, REALLY not trying to be an ass; just hate to see people beat their heads against something that's already been done thinking it's going to go somewhere. It looks like you started this with some inkling of an idea though, even if it was just "I'ma start me some wargaming forums!" Why did you start this? What are you trying to accomplish here that hasn't been done better by Dakka, Warseer, LIbrarium, B&C, Freebootaz, or the hundreds of other forums out there I'm not even aware of? Not to mention that most stores have a forum with their token local 10 users on them.

I'd like to add something more constructive to this, but I think those questions need to get answered first. We already have such services, and, with no offense meant, they've already been done much better than what you have so far. What do you bring to the party?

I want to enter into competition with above said forums because I have a desire to bring miniature wargaming more into the mainstream of America and perhaps globally. I would like to see mini wargaming as more of a sport video game tournaments, Let's look at the video games, 20 years ago if you played a video game you were a nerd, now ever if you don't consider yourself a video gamer you'll still sit down for some Madden 2012 or Tiger Woods and so forth. There is Even a TV network devoted to video gaming, well not to much anyone seeing as how they play ''Cops" for six hours a day.

I am piggybacking off of Freeforums because well, it's free. I decided that the first step to achieving that goal was to learn to design a forum community. And I'm back there, monkeying with the controls. Saying "oh, what does this button do."

Hit me, hit me as hard as you can, so that I can make it better. Learning how to design a forum, and learning how to populate it is just to first step in what I have planned.

And to be honest, there was a bit of greed in the idea when I learned how much revenue a site can make in ads alone. Not to mention the revenue from marketing, eCommerce, member subscriptions, and selling tickets to offline events.

One weird idea I have is to re-market the wargame as a gambling game. Can you imagine WH40K at Caesar's Resort lol? Maybe that's to much but, if you to see the hobby become more mainstream let me know.

broodstar wrote:
I want to enter into competition with above said forums because I have a desire to bring miniature wargaming more into the mainstream of America and perhaps globally. I would like to see mini wargaming as more of a sport video game tournaments, Let's look at the video games, 20 years ago if you played a video game you were a nerd, now ever if you don't consider yourself a video gamer you'll still sit down for some Madden 2012 or Tiger Woods and so forth. There is Even a TV network devoted to video gaming, well not to much anyone seeing as how they play ''Cops" for six hours a day.

Well, people will watch anything, as long as it's other people embarrassing themselves or hot chicks talking about the latest EA release. I really doubt you're going to get the public to be okay with the idea of listening to two nerds argue the validity of mathammer or watching a neckbeard with no public speaking background pushing toy soldiers around on a grass mat. Worthy of discussion though those topics might be, I want to reiterate that the classic quote is, "Nobody ever went broke underestimating the intelligence of the American public."

Also, Beasts of War has tried to go mainstream, and they get a lot of hate from their target audience, let alone people outside of it.

I am piggybacking off of Freeforums because well, it's free. I decided that the first step to achieving that goal was to learn to design a forum community. And I'm back there, monkeying with the controls. Saying "oh, what does this button do."

Hit me, hit me as hard as you can, so that I can make it better. Learning how to design a forum, and learning how to populate it is just to first step in what I have planned.

No shame in going free, if that's your budget, but be aware that it's hard to build anything out of nothing. Also, make sure free is something you can divorce yourself from at some point in the future, and be aware that people will judge you accordingly for it.

Frankly, 15 years ago, I'd have said that you're right on track, but creating forums and messing around with controls and all of that stuff was a challenge for anyone unaccustomed to it back then. Nowadays, you can practically drag and drop a forum engine into a web server and have it work out of the box. Hell, my grandmother can start up her own blog. The technical is trivial.

The first step should be develop the plan and (as much as I hate myself for saying this) market it. You need an actual business model. You need to know how you're going to reach out to people and get them hooked. Even if you build the most technologically advanced platform to manage all the things you've mentioned, but no one knows of it, it's not slick, and no one is on it, it's going nowhere. That's the problem that G+ has with Facebook: getting user buy-in, and that's going to be your biggest hurdle.

Getting borders to line up and making links flash the color you want them to is kid-stuff. It's taken me an embarrassingly long amount of my life to figure this out.

And to be honest, there was a bit of greed in the idea when I learned how much revenue a site can make in ads alone. Not to mention the revenue from marketing, eCommerce, member subscriptions, and selling tickets to offline events.

One weird idea I have is to re-market the wargame as a gambling game. Can you imagine WH40K at Caesar's Resort lol? Maybe that's to much but, if you to see the hobby become more mainstream let me know.

Well, that's honest. At least you're not pretending that you're not at least partially interested in money.

The gambling idea is interesting. There'd be a lot of legal encumbrance on that which I couldn't even begin to speculate on, but it's certainly not something I've ever considered before.

Okay, so, if you really want to do this, I think my very best advice is to find someone else who's already working on this, join up with them, and help contribute there. The community is fragmented. Maybe that's how it should be, or you could argue that it's somehow better off, but if you look, there's dislike of Warseer here, people rip on BoW, the rest of the "community" typically considers Dakka to be "The GW Complaint Box" from what I've heard. I'm not saying we should all be one big happy family, but it occurs to me that if you could get more of the community unified, going mainstream might happen by itself. I'm not sure how you go about that though.

I think to do what you're looking for at the scope you're wanting, you'd have to develop some sort of social network on par with Facebook or G+. I know I just got done saying that the technological portion of it is trivial, but by the same token, it's not. The design for it is non-trivial. I don't think a forum is going to cut it. At least not on the scale you're looking for.

I hope this helps and my disjointed rant makes some sense.


Automatically Appended Next Post:
I'm enticed by the idea of a 'one-stop shop'. I like the idea of a site that let's you do the following:

- Communicate (like a forum, but maybe live chat also)
- Host pictures (dakka has the best implementation of this I have ever seen)
- Arrange games (possibly with a mechanism for formal announcement for others to attend, target it to people in the area.)
- Make battle reports easier. I like the idea of a specialized phone app that live-uploads pictures with an easy to use text template that lets you cliff-notes a game with the intent of adding to it later)
- Relatively secure and reliable W/L/D tracker. Develop some way to confirm games, and a means of arbitrating records when necessary. This might require buy-in from local game stores. I like the idea of free tournament organizing software that uploads and tracks individual player stats and armies used.
- Develop a secure and reliable swap shop. This is going to be enormously difficult, due to the number of people involved. Ebay can do it, but I'd imagine owning a bank makes it easier.

I think the biggest issue I see, other than the obvious one of needing manpower to handle something of this scope, is finding some way to prevent multiple accounts. If you can find some way to track people by their accounts and prevent them from gaining multiple accounts, and this idea becomes the only shop in town, then you should be able to sanction users as appropriate to keep them honest on their games and trades. Now, there's numerous other issues involved in this, but such is life.

If I was going to make a forum, I would allow an anonymous section, for random people to start threads, and random people (or users) could post on them. It's dangerous, but obviously, put up a warning or something.

daedalus wrote:

broodstar wrote:
I want to enter into competition with above said forums because I have a desire to bring miniature wargaming more into the mainstream of America and perhaps globally. I would like to see mini wargaming as more of a sport video game tournaments, Let's look at the video games, 20 years ago if you played a video game you were a nerd, now ever if you don't consider yourself a video gamer you'll still sit down for some Madden 2012 or Tiger Woods and so forth. There is Even a TV network devoted to video gaming, well not to much anyone seeing as how they play ''Cops" for six hours a day.

Well, people will watch anything, as long as it's other people embarrassing themselves or hot chicks talking about the latest EA release. I really doubt you're going to get the public to be okay with the idea of listening to two nerds argue the validity of mathammer or watching a neckbeard with no public speaking background pushing toy soldiers around on a grass mat. Worthy of discussion though those topics might be, I want to reiterate that the classic quote is, "Nobody ever went broke underestimating the intelligence of the American public."

Also, Beasts of War has tried to go mainstream, and they get a lot of hate from their target audience, let alone people outside of it.

I am piggybacking off of Freeforums because well, it's free. I decided that the first step to achieving that goal was to learn to design a forum community. And I'm back there, monkeying with the controls. Saying "oh, what does this button do."

Hit me, hit me as hard as you can, so that I can make it better. Learning how to design a forum, and learning how to populate it is just to first step in what I have planned.

No shame in going free, if that's your budget, but be aware that it's hard to build anything out of nothing. Also, make sure free is something you can divorce yourself from at some point in the future, and be aware that people will judge you accordingly for it.

Frankly, 15 years ago, I'd have said that you're right on track, but creating forums and messing around with controls and all of that stuff was a challenge for anyone unaccustomed to it back then. Nowadays, you can practically drag and drop a forum engine into a web server and have it work out of the box. Hell, my grandmother can start up her own blog. The technical is trivial.

The first step should be develop the plan and (as much as I hate myself for saying this) market it. You need an actual business model. You need to know how you're going to reach out to people and get them hooked. Even if you build the most technologically advanced platform to manage all the things you've mentioned, but no one knows of it, it's not slick, and no one is on it, it's going nowhere. That's the problem that G+ has with Facebook: getting user buy-in, and that's going to be your biggest hurdle.

Getting borders to line up and making links flash the color you want them to is kid-stuff. It's taken me an embarrassingly long amount of my life to figure this out.

And to be honest, there was a bit of greed in the idea when I learned how much revenue a site can make in ads alone. Not to mention the revenue from marketing, eCommerce, member subscriptions, and selling tickets to offline events.

One weird idea I have is to re-market the wargame as a gambling game. Can you imagine WH40K at Caesar's Resort lol? Maybe that's to much but, if you to see the hobby become more mainstream let me know.

Well, that's honest. At least you're not pretending that you're not at least partially interested in money.

The gambling idea is interesting. There'd be a lot of legal encumbrance on that which I couldn't even begin to speculate on, but it's certainly not something I've ever considered before.

Okay, so, if you really want to do this, I think my very best advice is to find someone else who's already working on this, join up with them, and help contribute there. The community is fragmented. Maybe that's how it should be, or you could argue that it's somehow better off, but if you look, there's dislike of Warseer here, people rip on BoW, the rest of the "community" typically considers Dakka to be "The GW Complaint Box" from what I've heard. I'm not saying we should all be one big happy family, but it occurs to me that if you could get more of the community unified, going mainstream might happen by itself. I'm not sure how you go about that though.

I think to do what you're looking for at the scope you're wanting, you'd have to develop some sort of social network on par with Facebook or G+. I know I just got done saying that the technological portion of it is trivial, but by the same token, it's not. The design for it is non-trivial. I don't think a forum is going to cut it. At least not on the scale you're looking for.

I hope this helps and my disjointed rant makes some sense.


Automatically Appended Next Post:
I'm enticed by the idea of a 'one-stop shop'. I like the idea of a site that let's you do the following:

- Communicate (like a forum, but maybe live chat also)
- Host pictures (dakka has the best implementation of this I have ever seen)
- Arrange games (possibly with a mechanism for formal announcement for others to attend, target it to people in the area.)
- Make battle reports easier. I like the idea of a specialized phone app that live-uploads pictures with an easy to use text template that lets you cliff-notes a game with the intent of adding to it later)
- Relatively secure and reliable W/L/D tracker. Develop some way to confirm games, and a means of arbitrating records when necessary. This might require buy-in from local game stores. I like the idea of free tournament organizing software that uploads and tracks individual player stats and armies used.
- Develop a secure and reliable swap shop. This is going to be enormously difficult, due to the number of people involved. Ebay can do it, but I'd imagine owning a bank makes it easier.

I think the biggest issue I see, other than the obvious one of needing manpower to handle something of this scope, is finding some way to prevent multiple accounts. If you can find some way to track people by their accounts and prevent them from gaining multiple accounts, and this idea becomes the only shop in town, then you should be able to sanction users as appropriate to keep them honest on their games and trades. Now, there's numerous other issues involved in this, but such is life.

-Well there is a button to have your own IM service. and then when I build my own site create an IM application for that.
-A photo gallery hell yes and not just for everybody but separate user by user as well.
-Maybe a system that you can enter your zip code in and it will send an in-site mass email to everyone within 100 miles.
-That I'm not sure on.
- Actually I remember back when I played Magic the Gathering, Wizards of the Coast had a system like that.
-Maybe we can use Ebay's engine for that, but that will come later.