Agreed. Not sure what we should do about it.

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FizzBall, Professor Fizzwizzle, The Amazing Brain Train, and My Tribe!

cut and paste?

But what are we trying to be ?

• better than gamedev -- we want their content and more of our own. Because we want gpwiki to be a superlative source for game development articles.
  
• an alternative to gamedev -- we want to produce our own articles, equivalent to their articles. In some way, we're competing to gamedev. If they make a great article, we should respond by writing our own version of that article, to provide an equivalent and alternative online source for budding game developers.
  
• independent from gamedev -- it doesn't matter what articles they have. If people want to read those articles they can go to gamedev. It's not like we're going to be the only online source. Nor are we competing.

I think we should establish the wiki as 'independent from gamedev'.

A wiki that has more uptime then down and has new articles added.

How about we just re-enable the wiki. The whole point of it is that the community decides what is done with it and what content is there, so if someone feels enterprising and fancies cross-posting some wiki entries from gamedev then they can

And from then on, what will be, will be. Have a link to the gamedev wiki from ours, suggest to GD that it would be nice if this was reciprocated and let content be generated.

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God must love stupid people, he made so many.
theraje: 'God doesn't love stupid people, they're just easier to make'
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Independent is what we once were.

The Wiki at GD has been offline for the last two days.

I'm with Jasmine on the 'Independent from GameDev' approach. We're not competing with them, we're simply another Game Programming site.

The forum is slowing down and OT seems to be the only really active area lately. It'd be a shame to let this community die. It goes back way before I joined, and I've been here for a good few years.

Lets re-enable the Wiki and bring back the good times.

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10 PRINT "Bad Monkey ";
20 GOTO 10

Here here!

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Whatever the mind can conceive and believe, it can achieve

I can see the slow down too in just the few months I've been here. I do like the people here, and the feel of this place, so it would be a shame if it went under.

And I can see that this is potentially a problem. From our perspective, if activity continues to remain low, there's less incentive to keep coming back, so members will start going elsewhere, and this place will stagnate.

From the visitor's perspective, would somebody want to spend time writing an article for a wiki that is the relic of a dying forum? A wiki that has itself been risen from the dead? If the thought crosses their mind that probably nobody is going to read it, then they're not going to write it.

So, I think we might do well to give this whole site a facelift this winter, with a snazzy front page that looks friendly and welcoming. It can provide the links to the wiki resources and forum resources, provide development related news, a few free games and free dev tools to download, a community section where people can write their own mini-sites or blogs for their own projects, and stuff like that.

So rather than just plain ordinary wiki + plain ordinary forum, I think we should provide a friendly face like a scene-hub, reminiscent of some of the game fan sites.

Your idea of making the whole site a more friendly and welcoming is great. I'm very new here, so I did not participate in the past, when the forum was more active, but I never entered the game wiki there is on gamedev because I never seen it up.

I'm moderator of one specific tracker/forum with 9000+ users, we provide a lot of mini-games, mini-blogs and even e-mails to make people feel confortable and then create a tie.

A website will receive more visits if it has new and good content, and I can bet gpwiki has it (-:

adding to my previous post...

The most important thing is to think who exactly our visitors are, and to provide them with what they are looking for, because our survival is co-dependent on providing what our visitors want.

For gpwiki, the visitors we're supposed to be providing for are people who are interested in programming, who want to learn and/or chat about programming related things with like minded people.

So we're providing two things:
- a community that they can enjoy belonging to.
- easily accessible information.


On the first of those things:

When I arrived here, I was looking for a community of people who (like me) do a little programming as a hobby. I thought it would be nice to have people to program alongside, to learn from, to share thoughts and ideas with, to share our programs with, etc. To have a 'home' for this little hobby, which is predominantly game-oriented programming, although not exclusively.

More generally, if we want to create a thriving community, and a place to hang, we must provide furniture. So the forum is an essential element. Also important is making the site prettier with a proper front page -- something which defines the scene that this site is supposed to be holding. The aesthetics of the whole site is important to hold a community together. This isn't a programming 'clinic', so perhaps it could benefit from a lick of paint; something more than this minimalist "developer's finish" (*) we have at the moment.

Secondly, the wiki:

One thing I dislike about wikis is their layout. I find them fragmented, like a collection of loose papers with too much hyperlinking and not enough structure and flow.

I prefer information to be layed out with a contents page, and sections, and be categorized that way. Like, "physics section" and "directX corner" and whatever. A page of titles with indented lists of articles is IMO better than a page of links, to pages of links.

The gpwiki I find hard to navigate because of that. Sometimes I don't always know what I'm looking for and just want to read and learn something, but it isn't easy to select an article because it isn't this nicely structured and categorised.


(*) that's a real-estate analogy

This is the kind of front page I had in mind:

I have to agree, although that was the idea behind different categories of subjects

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Nice pic Jasmine.

However, I for one like the minimal layout of GPWiki. The lack of huge sig blocks, huge avatars and wild colours kinda goes with the straightforward attitude of the place.

Is your design a portal page, or a re-jig of the actual forums?

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10 PRINT "Bad Monkey ";
20 GOTO 10

It's just a picture Codey.

I don't like huge avatars and sigs either. I don't think the absence of those would detract from the community feel.

There's the black on white vs white on black thing...

I actually do prefer reading black on white, but dark backgrounds make better looks

One nice looking black on white site is www.Atariage.com , which is a similar layout to what we would want.

Making this place a community instead of just a forum sounds interesting. The nice thing about using media wiki is that we could make the front page in it and just lock it down (this is how I do my site).

To date, this thread has been running 1 month and nothing has changed.

I think a lot of the problems here would be easier fixed if one of us was trusted with administrative access.

Because at the moment this is all just talk and nothing is happening. If one of us had a hold of the reins, we could have the wiki up in 5 minutes.

Then we'd be free to experiment with front page designs and chat facilities, and other site/content features.

One of the mods could make this request to Ryan, and see what he thinks.




Additionally: If web server restrictions cause a problem for hosting the sub-sites (possibly due to space needed to upload binaries and graphics), then that added privilege could informally be a subscription service. With members receiving some webspace, with a framework already in place for writing blogs, defining their projects, adding development information, etc. Like £1 per year per member might be sufficient.

Almar has extra godlike powers. I think the number of super users needs to be kept to a minimum.

On the subject of blogs and stuff, I looked up my old Wiki journal

http://www.gpwiki.org/index.php/User:Codehead/Journal

Last update 2006!

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10 PRINT "Bad Monkey ";
20 GOTO 10

The reason the wiki isn't back up isn't because of the labour involved. A few people, earlier in the thread, wanted to wait to see if wiki.gamedev.net would get better, so that's why he didn't rush to make the change. I think there's a general consensus now that we'd like the wiki back. I don't see anybody making objections now.



Yeah, I'm the same way, but I would never sacrifice readability for better looks . Nice mock-up, though.

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Ryan

"What difference does it make to the dead, the orphans, and the homeless, whether the mad destruction is wrought under the name of totalitarianism or the holy name of liberty and democracy?" - Gandhi

I guess it's not a matter of design, it doesn't matter if it's black on white or white on black, it's just how the wiki is maintained. It could be more organized, following a structure, having a flow, whatever.

But I guess it's a good idea to change the layout. There's no need to change everything and make a whole new one. I think it's enough to change this, adding more sophisticated details, I don't know...

Quoted For Truth



Quoted For Truth



Could a community hub be formed under a content management system such as Concrete5 or Drupal?

Perhaps this is too ambitious a goal to be implemented immediately. Still, I would support such a move in any way I could. I think people having homepages would really increase repeat users (see myspace, facebook, deviantart, etc).