New Stuff?

[Zerthick]

It’s not just you, the wiki was unusually slow for me today as well.  I wonder what could be causing the slow loading times? I visited the wiki last week and it wasn’t nearly as slow.

[drenrin2120]

It’s not just you, the wiki was unusually slow for me today as well.  I wonder what could be causing the slow loading times? I visited the wiki last week and it wasn’t nearly as slow.

lack of visitors? 0_o can a web page be so underused it goes into shock when it gets a sudden increase in traffic?

[A Forgotten Legend]

I like the idea of promoting flash games as well. There are tons of huge flash communities out there, and we could probably get a lot of deleeshus fresh meat by drawing them into another place to publicize.

A lot of what draws me back to Charas time and time again is the longevity of the members, though. I still see people active who were here when I first joined, and you don't get that just anywhere. So I also like the game spotlighting. In fact it might even give me that push I need to work on something.

Maybe even a push for some kind of, I dunno, project blog thread idea. Like building off the threads people post for their projects, but with updates on things like story dev, characters, coding, maps, all of that. Things that would be updated a lot, and be place for people to see what really goes into the crafting of these things. Not just for games either-- even for portfolios of art, writing, that kind of thing, you know?

Am I the only one who noticed that Phayre posted?!

[ellie-is]

I did. But hey, all Charasians come back sooner or later, so I didn't really think of it as anything too special.

[MissingName]

Am I the only one who noticed that Phayre posted?!

...holy ****!  We ARE drawing people (back) in again!

DAMN U LUCAS YOU POSTED WHILE I WAS POSTING

[Ben]

So..... who wants to do a Game Blog for the site?

[SaiKar]

Also why is it that many of the links on the main page are broken?

They were links to the old version of the forum so everything broke when we switched over. Also, some jerk deleted a bunch of historic posts a while back.

[rox.13]

So..... who wants to do a Game Blog for the site?

I do.

[Ben]

The flash embedding is making my brain bleed. Its not working, allthough Im sure Im just missing something vital...as it stands, I SHOULD be able to post flash movies and games to my posts.

[drenrin2120]

So..... who wants to do a Game Blog for the site?

elaborate?

[fruckert]

Soo...what other plugins besides the spell check do you have for the forums?
Are we just going to have to find that out?

[Ben]

First and formost comes a SMF  update, and new visual theme. Then you can expect to see new features roll in over the weeks following.

[Cerebus]

Oh, little suggestion. Moderators and Administrators' names should be shown in Orange and Yellow in topics, just like it did before.

[Kilyle]

A blog here?  That'd be awesome.

I'm afraid that the only sort of suggestions that come to mind are those based off other cool sites that I frequent.  Let's see:

1. Game Blogs

I keep up with Zero Punctuation (a game critic hosted by Escapist Magazine alongside several other video and non-video features) and The Nostalgia Critic (a movie critic whose site, That Guy with the Glasses, hosts a variety of critics).  I've thought a few times about starting a piece for the review of retro games such as Dragon Warrior III, Phantasy Star IV, and Ultima: Quest of the Avatar.  Part of what holds me back is that I'm just plain lazy and it'd be a lot of work hosting a review blog.  Also, I'd be the new kid, as it were, whereas here I'm the kid who shows up every now and again with a burst of enthusiasm and then runs off and forgets about the place for a couple years.  (Inasmuch as "kid" can be applied to a person who discovered this site in college.)

But if we got one game blog started here, and eventually others started creating their own features centered on different facets of the gaming world, then perhaps I'd find my niche here in a written blog reviewing retro games.  So if we got set up to host a variety of blogs from different authors, I think that'd be awesome.  I'd be glad to be able to sign up for something like that, have my own space where I could post and some areas for reader comments, all that stuff.  (And maybe eventually, if we got more traffic, we could see about hosting video features as well... but, y'know, start small.)

2. Game Theory

Periodically I look up information on game theory itself, from the definition of "game" (interactive plaything with specific rules and uncertain outcome and a condition whereby you can lose) to discussions of how the game medium differs from literature, film, and TV series, to explanations of how to best serve the player through appropriate output connected to his input.  I think we could hunt down and centralize a lot of this information, either via links or, more usefully, via tutorials that collect and categorize the info.

Related: A lot of times I'll be reading something and see a reference to a book on gaming that I really ought to go read, but then I check the library and it's not there (either because it's too old or because the library isn't interested in a comprehensive collection of gaming references).  Perhaps some of the older and/or more useful works could deserve a thorough review here... the sort that could hand out the more important information without making people hunt down a book that's rare or out-of-print.  (It would of course require someone to have access to the book.)

3. Game Tropes

I frequent TVTropes.org, a great site (especially if you want to completely lose track of time for a few days as it sucks you into its gaping maw).  Anyway, it has a whole section on game tropes.  While I wouldn't advocate just copying the whole section over here in any fashion, it might be useful to have the biggest and most important tropes (patterns in media) up on our site somewhere, described in our own way and discussed by our members.  For example, "Gameplay and Story Segregation" is a big topic for discussion, as are the Player Archetypes, and the four gaming styles named for card suits (clubs, diamonds, hearts, and spades).

So... I guess that's all my suggestions for the moment.  Hope some of them fly.

[SaiKar]

These are actually really fun ideas. The blog thing could be very cool, and I have always been interested in Game Theory myself so I might be able to write things up about that.