With announcement of Rikus and the transfer of the domain name to clickteam, some things got stirred up in the community. Or my understanding of English is that bad and nothing got stirred up, but the comments and the newspost does mean something, don't they?
I wanted to bring up the idea of refreshing TDC's website, because I believe the frontend has some glitches and I have no idea of the backend.
My idea is simple: use a forum with subtopics like articles, downloads, projects, reviews, arcade and gotw.
The forum can be powered by phpBB http://www.phpbb.com/ or IP Board http://www.invisionpower.com/products/board/
And alongside maintain a front- or homepage for the website with the news, latest downloads, articles, etc...
See for example gbadev http://gbadev.org/ or eurobricks http://www.eurobricks.com
There is no need to reinvent or improve the wheel sixteen times.
But too bad I don't have the time or knowledge yet to setup all this.
I think that would be a big step backwards, in all respects.
The frontend may not be much to look at, but it doesn't have glitches. If you changed to one of those systems, you'd have all the extra work of making the new site, and working out how to migrate the vast amount of existing games/reviews/articles/etc - and you'd still be left with something less functional than the current design.
Personally, I think the biggest problem is the lack of organization and a decent search function.
New klikers are always going to go to the Clickteam forums first, just because it's the official site - so how do we get them to come here instead / as well?
* More helpful and knowledgeable forum users - not much we can do about this, apart from trying to increase the overall number of forum users, which is exactly what we're trying to do in the first place.
* More and better downloadable games - again, not much we can do about this, apart from trying to get more non-klikers to post their games here (eg. Construct-users).
* More helpful articles - there are a lot of great articles here, but it's extremely hard to find what you're looking for because the search function sucks, articles aren't organized at all, and many articles are outdated (describing techniques made obsolete by newer software, updates, extensions, etc). If people can quickly get the answers they're looking for, they will keep coming back. If they can't, the whole articles section becomes a waste of space - noone's going to just browse through it all.
We're looking at the possibility of streamlining the site, maybe cutting out all the excess bloat, making it simple to navigate. My personal feeling (and this isn't reflective of the other admins) is that since we've allowed the users to submit anything they want (articles, reviews, etc) and the feeling of "privilege" of getting a mention on the front page has disappeared.
I remember when Planet Klik was around - it was partially interactive - you could post comments on news and write reviews on games already reviewed by the PK staff, and of course their forums too.
TDC was a blank canvas, allowing all the artists of the world to graffiti it. Some good graffiti, some bad, and now finding what you want can be a bit of a hassle. But we've also inadvertently caused laziness in the community.
Take the reviews system - since we introduced the 5-star rating in the comments, far fewer people have bothered to write actual reviews and have instead found it much easier to rate the submission out of five, and give a quick comment.
We need to make the users feel that their contributions are valued
Like I said though, these are just my thoughts. The other admins may have other opinions and mine do not represent TDC.
It's not much, but from time to time I do get emails asking me how I made Hasslevania and I always give CT / MMF2 a lot of accolades in how powerful it is and how easy (relatively-speaking) it is to work with. Hopefully things like that will help produce new members here and there.
--
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"To be a true ninja you must first pick the most stealthy of our assorted combat suits. Might I suggest the bright neon orange?"
DXF Games, coming next: Hasslevania 2- This Space for Rent!
Originally Posted by The Chris Street But we've also inadvertently caused laziness in the community.
Not so sure it's TDC's fault but yeah people are really lazy. They never used to be though. well, more people were less lazy. I see far too many members claiming to have never finished a game for my liking. It really can't be that hard. I'm as lazy as hell and ive released loads. Ive released about 9 since you started on Mr. Stump's dentures 2... you bum.
Relaunching TDC would be a lot of work to get it done right. In all honesty, you're looking at taking a site that is 10 years behind modern standards... every little change would help, but you've got to have a well organized plan.
If I were to approach this problem, here's what I would do at minimum:
Adopt web standards
TDC's front-end code is a mess. There's inline styling, tables, inline javascript, uncompressed assets (CSS and JS are not minified)... the list goes on. You have HTML5 doctype and some CSS3 border radiuses... but that's it. Use AJAX to reduce page loads and increase usability. Modal windows for alerts and basic actions would dramatically drop the number of page loads required to do basic actions.
Switch to a LAMP environment.
Windows servers are expensive, ASP Classic is extinct, and MS Access databases are slow and buggy. Linux servers are cheaper and Apache is easy to configure. Using a MVC Framework like CodeIgniter or Zend, you could build a cleaner, easier to manage code base using Object Oriented programming. Database calls or entire pages can be Cached for long periods of time to relieve unneeded database load. Auto-lock and cache old forum topics forever.
Offload Images
Store your interface and user uploaded images on something like Amazon S3 to decrease load times even further. Use sprites to combine HTTP calls for things like Smiley's and interface elements. Every icon on this site could probably be stored in one big sprite.
Use SEO best practices
Download pages like http://www.create-games.com/download.asp?id=8546 should be more search engine friendly like http://www.create-games.com/games/bottled-water-man-bash -- Meta descriptions and keywords should be different on every page. Come up with a list of target keywords like "create games" or "multimedia fusion games" and reuse those phrases everywhere. Add interlinking to all content, from news articles, to forums, to articles. Use words like games instead of downloads, RPG instead of "Role Playing Game".. put yourself in the shoes of someone who would be searching for free games or free game tutorials and use those keywords everywhere. Make sure that those keywords appear at least 10% of the time in pages dedicated to them..
Report Broken Links
Use your users to help moderate broken links to old downloads, broken images, bad links, dead projects.. etc.
Improved Sorting
Add more sorting options to the downloads pages. Paging and categories are not enough. Add more fields to the downloads including development tool, supported OS, publisher?, tags, and custom fields. Let user's make lists of their top games or something to encourage more interlinking and ease of discovery.
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The nice to haves:
Responsive Design
The Boston Globe has adopted it. Responsive Web Design is the hot new trend.. get in on the ground floor ahead of time. Build a site like: http://responsivewebdesign.com/robot/ that changes as you resize the browser. Based on preset break points the site's design and images collapse and optimize. Smart phone or tablet visitors get tailor made experiences for their specific screen size.
Kill the Arcade
Instead of an arcade, I would write an Score tracking API for developers to use to post scores into TDC's database. Then any game (online or not) can do a post to TDC API and save a user's score. Download pages would have score boards, user's profiles could show off their top scores and achievements. Extension developers could build custom integration into the API to allow less techie developers to use the system too.
Projects to Devlogs
Anyone remember Planet Klik, 83rd Stasis and TFGF devlogs? Basically each user gets their own blog to talk about whatever they want, but preferably game development. Each user can have an RSS feed and a comments section on each post.
Lift upload restrictions
Allow users to upload screenshots and downloads to TDC. With a pre-approval system in place for each upload and each version update there would be very little risk of viruses.
I could keep going... The upside is that TDC has a ton of quality content.. it's just a matter or organizing it into a usable, easily expandable site.
I know using wordpress/joomla, and phpbb is nice,
but I love the way TDC is using its own engine and is simple to use
I own some phpbb sites and I don't really like how it looks like any other orum, but its great anyways
PS:hackers will be up to date about hacking the free CMS and stuff, so that's also why I like the unique TDC code
Well I don't know what any of those blog types that Brad spoke of, but I personally beleive that TDC has some of the coolest project pages. I remember Gamebuilder just had those blogs they used, which were nowhere near as cool. The project pages on TDC have forums, private forums, devlogs, devlog comments, and somehow it doesn't seem like too much stuff. I think the TDC project pages should definitely remain unchanced
Kill the Arcade
Instead of an arcade, I would write an Score tracking API for developers to use to post scores into TDC's database. Then any game (online or not) can do a post to TDC API and save a user's score. Download pages would have score boards, user's profiles could show off their top scores and achievements. Extension developers could build custom integration into the API to allow less techie developers to use the system too.
Yeah, great Idea. Ive always thought it would be good to allow non arcade games to access the high score system.
Personally, I've felt that many of the changes made the site worse. People stopped reviewing not because of laziness, but because the new review system didn't allow for good reviews. Plus that whole bit where some people used to report low reviews
I think a lot of the features weren't well thought out. Sort of a lot like klik culture in a way, people who think it through don't do it, people who just do stuff are the most prolific and popular, but you get a mess that's hard to improve/maintain.
I agree with many of Brad's suggestions, except the devlog. I dunno, I really like the projects system. It just needs to be more legible, since TDC's fonts aren't really web friendly. Articles do need an overhaul too. I'd be willing to draw up some details in a few weeks, if there's the slightest chance they'll be implemented.
I don't like the idea of TDC going bare bones, though, since some of the best stuff here is in articles and projects. I could live without the downloads tbh, if it's good, it's on every other site I visit.
Disclaimer: Any sarcasm in my posts will not be mentioned as that would ruin the purpose. It is assumed that the reader is intelligent enough to tell the difference between what is sarcasm and what is not.
Personally I just like going basic, but actually I wanted to start this topic on refreshing TDC. Some sort of brainstorming thread with ideas, suggestions and ultimately: implementations.
I want to help and do something other then submitting articles (which might need some more meta info like version of mmf/tgf) projects and downloads.
My basic idea was just: all information resides in the forum and this information can be transformed into different web views depending on what's needed. The forum is merely functioning double like the main database with all the info. Off course this database can be implemented in many more ways. It's about separation of content and presentation, like html+css or xml+xsl+css.
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