ID:181736
 
It would be nice if it were possible to link people to individual BYOND guilds, primarily the main guilds, instead of linking them to BYOND has a whole. This would allow people to be immersed in the genre along with people on similar interests, instead of being thrust into the BYOND community as a whole - which doesn't seem to appeal much to people who aren't already interested in what it offers.

But without getting into any debates about that, I'm wondering if anyone has ideas on how we can generate more participation in the main guilds. I see a lot of people making posts on their personal blogs about the progress of their games and such, but how could we get these people to submit posts like this to the main guilds instead? Wouldn't it be better if all of the information about BYOND games of a specific genre could be found in one guild based on the genre?

What can be done to encourage more activity around the main guilds? What are your ideas?
I'll say it once and I'll say it again, I have always thought that each Guild on BYOND should have their own website. Completely remove the Guilds from the main BYOND website.
In response to Ham Doctor
Ham Doctor wrote:
I'll say it once and I'll say it again, I have always thought that each Guild on BYOND should have their own website. Completely remove the Guilds from the main BYOND website.

How would that improve things?
In response to Foomer
The way I see it, a huge majority of advertising, forum posting, ect, still all happen on BYOND.com, if each guild was independent of the website, hopefully developers in their respective guild would simply look to their guild for help.

I've been wondering myself lately if the BYOND.com central forums should just be taken down, except perhaps for Announcements · BYOND Features · Bug Reports · Fixes and Features.

And then simply have a Developers guild where stuff like Code Problems · Design Philosophy · Creations could be listed or posted.
In response to Ham Doctor
Ham Doctor wrote:
I've been wondering myself lately if the BYOND.com central forums should just be taken down, except perhaps for Announcements · BYOND Features · Bug Reports · Fixes and Features.

And then simply have a Developers guild where stuff like Code Problems · Design Philosophy · Creations could be listed or posted.

Well, what you're referring to as "BYOND.com central" is actually mostly Dream Makers, aka the Developers guild. As for the other guilds, in the end, I don't think the address matters all that much to most people as everyone is using the site's link bar to navigate. The only way to cut off the guilds would be to change their navigation system, which would just make things more confusing for people trying to navigate the sites. It would also cut off those guilds from being able to advertise their latest posts on the members front page, so they might just get less traffic than they already do.

Also keep in mind that just because someone is primarily interested in one genre doesn't mean they're not interested in others. Just because someone mostly likes RPGs doesn't mean they don't want to play Strategy games once in a while. So it wouldn't necessarily be beneficial to cut off the sites from one another.

Foomer wrote:
But without getting into any debates about that, I'm wondering if anyone has ideas on how we can generate more participation in the main guilds. I see a lot of people making posts on their personal blogs about the progress of their games and such, but how could we get these people to submit posts like this to the main guilds instead? Wouldn't it be better if all of the information about BYOND games of a specific genre could be found in one guild based on the genre?

We need to give them an incentive to post their games on those blogs. Essentially, posting the progress of my game on my own blog will nearly get the same amount of attention as posting it on a main guild's blog. I have an idea though. Let's say I am a part of the BYONDStrategy guild, when ever this guild creates a new post it will stay on top of the members' page until I view it.



We have all had the problem of our post being bumped off the front page; this could possibly give people an incentive in actually posting in the main guilds.
In response to Foomer
For a start this would (presumably) enable these guilds to throw down their own site code that interfaces back to byond.com, veeery handy for bespoke guild-specific projects.
In response to Ham Doctor
Ham Doctor wrote:
I'll say it once and I'll say it again, I have always thought that each Guild on BYOND should have their own website. Completely remove the Guilds from the main BYOND website.

The problem with an idea like that is (aside from the costs of the domains, which I imagine BYOND could probably front), it'd require a lot of work (especially if you take into account Stephen's post above mine), and there's no guarantee that it'll pay off.

Then the powers that be will have spent hours (weeks, months) on such a system, that could just as easily have a negative effect in causing people who like the site the way it is to leave/complain (people will do this anyway, but still).

I personally don't believe that splitting the site up like that will have any real effect on the outcome at all. People will still go to http://www.byond.com/developer/forum to get to the dev forums, have their questions answered, show off their creation and advertise their games on their own blogs.

Calus has what I'd consider to be the right idea. More blatant guild advertising, shove the guilds in peoples faces more, and they're likely going to use them more. As I've previously mentioned:
And to counter the general argument "the guilds are inactive", well, they're only inactive because no one bothers to use them, it's a double edged sword.
I've noticed as of late that BYOND RPG's forum sees more use lately than it used to, which is good. I found this post to be well written and worthy of some attention from people in the RPG scene.
Foomer wrote:
It would be nice if it were possible to link people to individual BYOND guilds, primarily the main guilds, instead of linking them to BYOND has a whole.

Wait wait, what? Everything that was said in this thread notwithstanding, I was pretty sure that you could already do this easily, well, you know, for example by linking people to http://www.byond.com/members/BYONDRPG instead of to http://www.byond.com. But how weird, I guess all this time I've been living in a dream...
In response to Kaioken
You took the red pill, right? We all took the blue pill.
I've got a couple of ideas, and one specifically to bounce off of Calus' suggestion: If developers are posting game progress updates to their own blogs, instead of on the guild's page, why not give them the ability to post in both places? Perhaps give them some check boxes down at the bottom for "Also Submit this post to [ ]BYONDStrategy [ ]Sessions [ ]Etc".

The most effective thing that could be done is to give us the back-end that was discussed ages ago. Right now guilds are completely separate from games, but that doesn't have to be the case. I want to be able to easily identify who has what rank in what guild, and perhaps give out bonuses or populate teams differently based on the result.
In response to Kaioken
I wasn't suggesting it isn't possible, I was suggesting it would be nice if there was more meaningful content there to link to. As in, "I would rather have us linking to individual guilds than to BYOND.com all the time, but..."
In response to Calus CoRPS
I like the Recent Guild Posts idea. =)

I'd also like guild posts to be listed in the Home tab of the pager.

A news section on the start page would be cool as well. I've often thought that the start page looks a bit dead, but I've never been able to get any responses from non-BYOND people.
In response to IainPeregrine
IainPeregrine wrote:
[...]Perhaps give them some check boxes down at the bottom for "Also Submit this post to [ ]BYONDStrategy [ ]Sessions [ ]Etc".

Having linked posts generally sounds like a potentially good idea, if it's feasible. Sometimes, a topic is suitable to be posted in many places, the option to link a post to multiple places could be nice, instead of making separate posts, all of which get replied to separately. Either it could be replied to from every place in which it appears, or to reply you'd have to go to a certain central page.
That would be good to keep discussions undivided in situations where a post needs to appear in more than one place to get the desired attention, such as a post announcing a new RPG game, which could be posted in the developer's own blog, the Dream Makers forum (in Creations), and BYOND RPG's forum.

@Stephen: Hehe, nice reference.
In response to Foomer
I see, but what more content other than a game listing, posts, reviews and forums is needed? Do you have anything in mind? Perhaps a user listing and live games-only listing could be added.
Maybe you feel that a link to download BYOND right there is missing? Heh. While on that, Tom had an idea to have BYOND downloadable from the hub pages themselves of pages, so if that's added, adding download links to guilds won't be needed.
In response to Kaioken
Kaioken wrote:
I see, but what more content other than a game listing, posts, reviews and forums is needed? Do you have anything in mind?

You don't seem to be following what I'm saying. To answer your question - that! The guilds need more posts, more reviews, and more forum activity. People flock to where the activity is, and it isn't at the guilds. I'm asking for ways to bring more activity to the guilds - not bring more kinds of activity, but to make more extensive use of what is already there.

I see people writing reviews all the time (albeit most of them suck), but they write them on their own blogs instead of submitting them to the guilds. People blog about their games all the time on their own blogs instead of submitting any information to the guilds. And guild forum usage in general could be much stronger.
In response to IainPeregrine
It would be good if you could submit the same content to multiple blogs/guilds and have it display the content of the post, but in the format of the guild where its being read from.
In response to Calus CoRPS
Building off this idea, there could be a guild listing which would display all recent guild posts.

In response to IainPeregrine
IainPeregrine wrote:
I've got a couple of ideas, and one specifically to bounce off of Calus' suggestion: If developers are posting game progress updates to their own blogs, instead of on the guild's page, why not give them the ability to post in both places? Perhaps give them some check boxes down at the bottom for "Also Submit this post to [ ]BYONDStrategy [ ]Sessions [ ]Etc".

I've suggested before to completely remove the "front page" save for the popular guilds- it would send all relevant traffic through the guilds, increasing activity, and get rid of all the bullcrap that likely turns off quite a few people, old and new alike. The blogs already have a friend system for keeping track of blogs you'd like to keep up on, so I really don't get the frontpage at all. Unfortunately, the idea wasn't too popular.

Your idea seems like a good compromise- though I'm still partial to my own, of course ;]
In response to Airjoe
Airjoe wrote:
Unfortunately, the idea wasn't too popular.

I find that result to be very fortunate and will continue to argue against it until I'm blue in the face and bashing my head against a wall. ;)

I personally want something not unlike client.FetchGuildList() which would return a ckey()ed list of all the guilds the user is in, so something like this would be <s>possible</s> considerably easier:
#define BYOND_RPG       "byondrpg"
#define BYOND_ANIME "byondanime"
#define BYOND_STRATEGY "byondstrategy"

client
New()
. = ..()
if(BYOND_RPG in src.FetchGuildList()) world << "Welcome BYOND RPG user!"
if(BYOND_ANIME in src.FetchGuildList()) world << "Ew! BYOND Anime user!" // Sorry Stephen!


Giving incentives to people in games for being part of guilds might be helpful. Either that or people will just register to the guild and forget about it only for the bonus'. But that also gets the advantage of them always receiving pager notifications from blog posts.

I agree with ACWraith about having the guild blog posts in the Home tab of the pager, I suggested that idea once before and it got a good reception, but kinda died off in the wind.

I also suggest having pager notifications go out for official guild posts regardless of whether or not the user is a member of that guild. But it might be seen as invasive: "Why am I getting notifications about a guild I don't care about!?"
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