I have BYOND on my mind a lot, and over time I've come up with a few suggestions I believe would be worth considering. I'll list each one below.

1: When installing BYOND, there should be a second checkbox that controls whether the BYOND 101 page is auto loaded; just like the one for the Games page.

2: On the homepage, in the bar along the top of the website, or anywhere else frequently visible there should be some sort of Like us on Facebook link. I suggest this simply for bringing more attention to the existence of the correct page, and hopefully improving it and BYOND's views in search engines.

3: Everyone seems to crave updates and information regarding what is going on with BYOND's development on a fairly frequent basis; why not give it to them? A very basic blog-like page could be made, and maintained by the same people that maintain the forum, and it can be used for quick and basic updates, official quotes from Tom that are made in topics not everyone would see, etc. An option to follow these updates the same way we do forum posts would be awesome, too.

4: I believe that during hub creation there should be information added about games that absolutely will not ever be able to be visible because of Cease & Desist's. I believe Tom mentioned doing something like this, but similar information should also be shown when someone tries to search for or load a hub page that was removed for similar reasons. A simple disclaimer that appears when no search results come up in the game search might work, or just a little paragraph above the results after any game search.

5: If the right conditions are met, like for example accounts being recently created, or the accounts first new topic in the Developers section, there should be something that causes the post to not be posted and a message to appear that offers a little information and links to the Hints & Tips sticky and possibly BYOND Whitepaper too. The poster could submit the post again to succeed, but the point of this is to nearly force the reading of these posts; it should hopefully help reduce the amount of times people have to link to the DM Guide or old Developer help posts.

Any variation on this that still promotes the reading of these, or similarly informative pages would be a welcome alternative.


I think that about wraps things up. I imagine not all of these suggestions are sure fire additions, but if even just one of them is implemented I'll be glad I made this post. The last one might seem a bit odd, but I lurk around a lot and it's crazy how easily important getting started posts are missed, skipped over, or ignored. Maybe this will help, maybe it won't, but it should be a quick add so what would it hurt? That's my logic in mentioning it.