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Post by The Duchess on Jan 11, 2012 18:27:19 GMT -5
2 Proboards features I am curious about:
Calendar and Live Chat.
Can we implement these, and now?
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Post by Raphael diSanto on Jan 11, 2012 22:48:50 GMT -5
I see you already got the Calendar working. I'll get live chat set up soon  |
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Post by The Duchess on Jan 12, 2012 9:23:14 GMT -5
Ah, I finally saw the calendar. It's probably not going to get much use though. Sadly SWTOR-RP.com, which uses the (commercial?) Enjin CMS framework, has more of a CMS-ey feel with the calendar and chat integrated into the front page UI.
That is a far more ideal design, and I was hoping people would go to one site more for newsy updates, and here for forum use - but it looks like swtor-rp.com is VERY barren with regard to anything BUT Lord Ardraas related content. I suppose that makes sense, but it ends up leaving everyone lacking a bit.
User experience-wise, people are of course drawn to what's immediately visible and typically respond to that rather than wanting to dig. You can see it on the official forums, where certain sections get VERY little love - the more clicks required to get to a subforum, the less traffic it will always have.
On my former WoW social-site (also had the CMS layout), there was a live chat feature that was initially tied to a pop-out on the home page. Got TONS of attention and inspired a lot of people to regularly visit. When the admin switched sites and buried it to a sub-page, its usage went down to almost nil. Even though people had been using it all along.
Perhaps this all just reinforces the fact that internet geeks have VERY short attention spans and need a lot of regular stimulus to stay inspired. ;-)
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Post by Raphael diSanto on Jan 12, 2012 14:27:00 GMT -5
Unfortunately, we're limited to what proboards can give us - I can investigate further. I wasn't sure about how much money/time I wanted to put into this site at the start, because I didn't know whether or not it would be a roaring success, so I opted for a fairly quick and cheap solution. Moving to a full joomla/drupal style CMS would give us a lot more freedom, but would necessitate some (a lot of) work.
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Post by The Duchess on Jan 12, 2012 15:09:07 GMT -5
And we still don't know. I think I make up for 50% of its traffic currently, but some of that is due to Republic folks being largely non-cognizant of the site still.
Have you looked at Enjin (what SWTOR-RP.com uses)?
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Post by Raphael diSanto on Jan 12, 2012 15:52:10 GMT -5
I hadn't... that actually looks really interesting.
Of course.. I don't want to make the few people that we have re-register on yet another site....
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Post by The Duchess on Jan 12, 2012 16:48:04 GMT -5
It still seems lacking, anyway. It doesn't have a place for stories per character, for example - which is one of the best ways to inspire forum RP and writing.
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Caldari
Junior Member
Yes. You can haz.
Posts: 39
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Post by Caldari on Jan 12, 2012 20:17:10 GMT -5
Swtor-rp.come has a wiki. I have an articles on it for my character. But an Ebon-Hawk exclusive wiki would be great too. We can keep track of all the stories and characters without having to sift through the other servers' info.
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Post by The Duchess on Jan 13, 2012 11:36:48 GMT -5
Wikis end up being a reference more than something regularly used, in my experience. And we -could- probably switch over to using their forum system. It's just extra work and requires getting people to re-register.
I'm not even that big a fan of Enjin since it still lacks many custom features that faciliate RP scenes, like blogs/journals, fan fic organization, etc. Most MMO website generators are pvp-centric.
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