Hi, As an upcoming community forum, we're hoping to be able to actively involve our members in the activities and functionality we wish to provide our users with. If you have a wish to put to use some of the many talents available in our community, your help would be greatly appreciated. For instance, you could help us out if you are good at: - Writing technical articles. - Writing tutorials. - Graphical stuff. - Writing news articles. - Offering suggestions for how we can serve you better. - Promoting our site in any possible way. Considering promotion, if you have a weblog, feel free to drop a link to us on there. Are you on Twitter, facebook, myspace, linkedin, or any of the other major networking sites, linking to us will ensure search engines pick us up better, and people in your network might find the site as well. And by all means, tell your soc mates/swunting buddies/grandmother/prime minister/pet monkey about the site, too! One thing we definitly could use is someone who possesses a better graphics card than we have. We have some tutorials that could use some updating, and including updated graphics for those would be a great way to enhance the experience for people new to the universe. Should you want to contribute in any way, please do not hesitate to drop us a note, either publically or through PMs. We're afraid that for the time being, we cannot offer any monetary compensation (we're still investing in getting the site fully functional by purchasing extra addons etc, and we're up for upgrading the license for the forum software soon), but we have every intention of giving credit where credit is due, and one way we think we can offer a return service is by handing out subscriptions when that will be added in the future (no ETA. at this moment, we do not feel there's enough content to warrant this system yet).
I might be able to help you guys with screenshots for the tutorials. Got a Nvidia 295 GTX, so I think that would qualify as a better graphics card :) Just let me know whet you need.
I'm also ready to help if you need. Ask if you need infos about Hangar (when it's back) and Land area. I'll do my best to help.
You are the Vbulletin guru ... I'm sure we find something Awesome, Shadowsong - you will then love my next contest too :)) But yes, making screenshots from different new citys or new looking mobs would be a great thing to do and ad in the right section (f.x. under mobs or whatever will be available in the future *wink wink* ...) That too would be really helpfull - and as said to Shadowsong, MAYBE something will soon be available to put all the info in ... :) Thanks to everybody for the constructive offers to help out! We are very greatful that you are all helping and working on this!
Links to forum added at: http://www.modified.dk/ http://www.kn00b.com/ http://www.kn00b.com/?pg=links Replaced another forum link with this fine forum
Thanks for everybody's help thusfar. One more way you could help us is by pointing out what you think this forum still needs to make you come here more frequently, or what we could implement that would convince your socmates who haven't signed up here yet to start dropping by more often. At this moment, I think the biggest thing we need is either more members, or more posts. Both of those will automatically ensure the other, and will pull people to here faster, and more frequent. For a forum that has been around less than a month, things are already going quite well, and that's something we all can be proud of :) Once again, thanks for your support, and we hope we can stick around and help your EU life to become a bit easier for quite some time to come.
Bernz think that to bring and keep peoples here, you need to be "THE" forum. Put together the whole futur Entropia universe by calling it EntropiaPlanets is a very good idea and a good start. I know some peoples create threads on one forums and copy it on 2-3-4 different forums but I dont. And because I registered at first on the other popular forum, I tend to glue there. The number of members and posts also have weight but like I said, if it's mostly copy from other forums it's less interesting to read (for me at least). To bring new and keep actual firsts members, maybe give some kind of first colonist memberships. To get rid of those who would register only to get these free membership bonus, you could take back the bonus features if, let's say, the members did not loged in or posted since 3 months or something. Me the first (I guess I'm not alone :D) would be happy and thankful if you give me for free or for cheap, a personal forum (kind of sponsored forum). Sorry if it look like I beg for it but I dont. It's only an idea. It's against my religion to pay $/month subscription but as a first colonist I would gladly pay (with Peds preferably) for lifetime membership. EntropiaPlanets is still young but I think it has the potential to become "THE" Entropia Forum and MindArk|FPC and all other partners will soon know about it. .
Interesting thoughts, Bernz. Thanks for that :) The thought of handing out some early bird badges occurred to us, but we figure we'd wait a bit and see until we figure out exactly how we would set up subscription-based memberships (and particularly, what to offer in return for them. Any ideas? We plan on keeping the Arcade free, but perhaps make the auction system available only to subscribed members, and perhaps some of the other tools we are thinking about adding). I'm also not entirely sure about the suggestion of handing out sub forums to landowners. Where would we draw the line? Should we focus on just landowners or offer shop owners their own forums as well? I'd prefer not having a seperate sub forum per estate owner, as the forum would soon end up being swamped with them. I have no problem setting up specific threads for land owners or shop owners, but maybe we should wait with that until the new version of the forum software comes out, which will include Blogs (blogs currently are available as a seperate paid-for addon, but will be included in the suite we will upgrade our forum license to. Considering the price, it'd be daft to spent money on the blog software now, when it becomes "free" later). The blogs could be a good way for entrepeneurs to promote their businesses. Maybe we can set up free blogs for everyone, and specific business blogs for estate owners. It will largely depend on how exactly the software is setup, I guess. The idea of a lifetime membership sounds good, though. Eventually, we're hoping to reach some form of system where the monthly costs of the server are compensated for, and then we just pay for licenses or additional useful software every now and then. Feel free to chip in with your own thoughts.
I know nothing about the cost of such a forum and the upgrades and everything around. It's probably more expensive than I think. Ofc, If you are going to unlock some kind of features for free it must be free for you the admins at first. I understand what you say about "where to draw the line for subforums". I did not think hard about it to be honest. When I think about it, special subforums should be reserved for Planet owners. You should use these giants Peds maker to finance the forum. Deep inside of me I feel that they dont really need it to attract even more attention because whatever we do, they will suck visitors from Calypso Lands where I belong but it will not break their bank if you use them a little bit. Probably a single subforum for others "normal" Land owners would be oK. It could have 50-60 threads inside named OLA-1, OLA-2, ect, ect... but keep closed until the owners ask for it to be open. The change of owner would drop the sold OLA thread into archives and another one would be create for new owner. Free arcade and/or any other freebies for us mortals that cost nothing to you would be perfect. Nothing more. Sorry if my first wish was above the reasonable. I have weird idea sometimes when I too much early morning. Btw, we need Priest and Priestess smilies. .
One thing I would be interested to see here is full transperancy. Maybe make a locked sticky thread to show monthly usage figures, membership counts, $ costs, what was done during the month in the way of changes additions to the forum etc. A kind of History of the Forum type thing. I'm always interested in statistics.
That can be arranged. Costs might be a bit tricky (we're running a VPS which can and does host more than one site, so there it'd be tricky assigning pieces of the monthly cost to a particular site, though licensing etc should be doable), but we can prolly figure something out. Stats regarding usage, membership registration, retention, number of threads/posts, etc should be easy enough. I can try and do something around the end of each month, and then detail a lot of such things. Maybe even automatically.
What would pull people here is amusement and Info. If you got the best guides, The nicest front page news the rest will follow. As that is where EF is lacking in at the moment. Futhermore you should really get the auction feature to be promoted. Id be more then willing to help out try and organise some nice front page stuff, but im terrible at adding pictures to the whole Might be a good idea to get a large competition running which is only accesible on EP? Talk to NeverDie about some sponsorship in return for his sub forum? Maybe, a prize for who globals the letters entropiaplanets first? Its possible i checked it, even with a diff mob on the same letters :)
Hey :) Thank you for a very good post. 1) Info Yes, we need more info - which is also why we ask you for help to fill in the wiki. The months has only x days with x hours and we have full times jobs(+kids :D). We spend all our week time (WITH JOY ) working and improving the forum, but I'm afraid, it will take us years to fill in all information by ourselves ;-) We do have some awesome helpers around - but the more the merrier ;) 2) Front page stories We are working behing scenes on more exclusive front page stories and interviews. Something about new planets, game and individual players - but some of it in a little different and lighter form that you might have been used too :) 3) Usabilities At the moment we are working on a new project for this forum, which hopefully will be very usefull for a lot of people! It is something new not seen on any Entropia related forums before. It takes time for us to implement it to make it if not perfect, then at least the best we can come up with - and we hope you will like this tool. We also hope that this will be one of the things, people will join to be able to use :) 4) New members Best way to make sure that we get more members is for you all to spread the words and get people to join. We had some concerns about what kind of forum this will be. And we can't tell you enough that this is a forum for everyone and that we will manage the forum to make sure people feel welcome! 5) Events Good idea with more events. But it needs (as you mention) some funds or some kind of prizes of course - and we had some expenses already of different kinds - which is why we will have to wait except of course, as you also hinted, some wish to donate some prizes ;)
What kind of pages are you looking fo ron the Wiki? Pages with mainly links to stuff that is already written. Or you want to start writing it all again? If so I'm happy to start work on some general pages. Don't expect to much however. I'm not a best selling author. Any areas in the wiki you would like to build up first?
If you look at the wiki - you can see we made a navigation menu already :) What would be awesome is for the mobs under Calypso to be done. Mobs, ores and enmatters to be exact. I figured to make the main site with a table (try look into some of the other sites like 'links') and then each mob should link over on a new site called the mob name. What is important though is, that the mob info is updated, which might be a challenge - or at least that the pictures there are new. But if they are old now, we CAN place them with new pictures as they get in :) If just the main sites with the link to each mob, ore/enmatters are there, it's easier to work on the rest :) Would be awesome if you will help us out with that !!! (lol not it all but just a little :D )
You may get some help in the above 2... Reasonable prices.... I accept peds as well...;) IL Messengero (New signature soon)
Thanks for posting the info on the site statistics VF. Does it help the 'income' if we actually click on the google ads? I'm not averse to clicking some of the stuff, some interesting astronomy stuff pops up since you have 'planets' in the url.