As it is still the 31st of may, I want to quickly add to this months theme with some ideas that've been playing through my head. Its videogamesite related so I figure it fits within the premise of the 'assignment' :-)

I think some serious improvements could be made to the Community section of our marvelous and wonderful site, even more so as the community is what makes dtoid to what it is... The most-kick-ass-gaming-website-ever-conceived!

Don't mind all the open applications at the bottom, I'm at work and I'm responsible for several thousand servers so I need a lot of stuff to be open at all times...

[DISCLAIMER] Just want to make clear to everybody that reads this, I totally love dtoid and its community, there's just some things that make our stay here a little less enjoyable and almost everybody suffers from it... I know the crew does a brilliant job of doing what they can to make this a better place, I'm just wondering if more people feel the same way... [/DISCLAIMER]

We'll start with the easy stuff...

The Forum



We've got more then 20.000 members and we're supposed to post all our thoughts into 4 sections? Its sometimes pretty hard to keep track of a specific thread. Plus we ( the people on the forum ) always try to get more people involved in the forum, but in the long run this will only make it harder to keep track of them. ( Luckily we have the email-notification feature, but still...)

I'm not saying that we need 200 subsections like most of the forums out there, but a 'community'-section for the different gamingnights like FNF but also NARPs would be handy, people could start carpooling/travelling threads for different dtoid-events and such.

And I'm sure there's a few more to-the-point sections that could be made without making too many of them... And to be fair, Meet-And-greet is only used once to start a thread and in clogs-support shouldn't be too many :-)

BUGS


sadly there's more where that came from... I've build my own share of websites so I realise what a hard job it must be to avoid all bugs in the dtoid site, but they really detract from the experience, even more if its on a 'critical'-feature... It sux not being able to check my 'friends-blogs' in the way its supposed to work...

anyways moving on...

Communiy Blogs


This is divided into a few subsections ( you know like the forum should be )


1. Forum Posts

This is especially painful as we constantly try to get more people to the forum, yet they apparently rather suffer abuse in the clogs then venture into the forum

However I do believe this is an issue that will be resolved once we have more subsections in the forum. Luckily there's more then enough of us who will make clear what belongs in the forum when we see it


2. Short Posts

I've seen it happen, I've had it happen to me and all of you will probably have experienced it in some way or another. Short posts are annoying for a varriety of reasons, first of all, most of them belong in the forum ( see point 1 of this section ), secondly its a waste of our time to load a clog with a promising title only to find 1/2 lines of text that mean nothing.

But lastly and probably most importantly, there's nothing more infuriating then spending several hours on creating a decent post, only to see it get flushed ot the 'main' page in a matter of minutes by posts of which half of them are shorter then the average comment people drop... It's very demotivating too...



3. Photos

Well the image is kinda self-explanatory I think... the thing is, I know how hard it can be to 'forget' about it... I've made the mistake before too... another problem is that it messes with the dtoid-width as you can see clearly demonstrated in my post about "Call of Nazi Germany the game"

Anyway, this is something that all of us have to co-operate on, so please people be mindfull of the poor sob's that have to be at work, and host your pictures on dtoid so we can all see them all the time :-) ( its the same for avatars, I can't see half of the avatars around here...)

At my job they use WebSense and I hear its one of the most used webblockers around nowadays, so I can imagine more people suffer from the same problem.


4. Scoring System

I think the further implementation of a scoring system could help. But it'll have to be implemented in such a way that abuse is hard or even virtually impossible.

My suggestion is, only let people who leave a comment vote on a clog and publicly show ( like next to their reply ) how much they graded that post, this will automatically create a level of keeping people in check as their votes will be there for all of us to see, I mean if you want to give a post a 1, you better be ready to defend that choice too, the same with ranking it higher...

On the main-clog-page we can then have a possibility to remove all posts below a certain ranking from view ( to prevent new posts from not being see, they should be given an average rating at the moment of posting, after which they'll surely dissapear if they are not good enough ) This way the concerned members of our community will have a way of dealing with unwanted creatures & posts. sure some vendettas are sure to arrise but in the end we would all benefit from a good system to 'automatically' remove utter-fail-blogs from the listing.

ALSO ALSO ALSO, we can have e-cock-waving-contests with our blog-scores!

Conclusion
Dtoid is a marvelous website, and the community rocks, its just that the tools that the community has at its disposal could be just a little tad better, and I think that little bit would be enough to make dtoid an even more rewarding and pleasant experience for everyone involved, so that's ALL OF YOU!


So that's about it, what do you guys think? what would you like to see improved in the dtoid-community-sections?