Zelaron portal
 

Well, some people have asked me about the zelaron.com portal and why it hasn't been up since the launch of vB3. Simply enough, it was taken down because it served no purpose at the moment. The game review sections and download areas did hardly have any hits at all, and the portal just seemed like a robust, nice-looking site with no interesting features at all. There was a cafepress store with "amusing items" no-one purchased and things like that.

Despite these reasons, what do you all think about the portal? Should it be brought back, possibly changed to be a lot more interesting, and if so, do you have any good ideas for the portal to implent? Personally, I think the reviews posted on Zelaron could possibly be put on the portal automatically, but I'm not quite sure yet.

I was thinking that exactly, and yes, I think it should be brought back.

Bring it back....

For choose who never seen it, here it is....
Old Portal: http://web.archive.org/web/200209201...files/news.php

Old Zelaron: http://web.archive.org/web/200210251...rums/index.php

I like the being able to see New Post on the front page then click to read them. It keeps them in order from when they were made, not from last post like it is in the forum

I don't think being able to read news in order justifies bringing the portal back, especially if they are hardly ever posted.

No, because it sucked ass and no one cared about it

Maybe if they spent half the time on the portal then they do adding hacks, it might be something rather interesting.

I never really used it because I was too busy trying to get as many posts as possible because I didn't have an internet connnection of my own at the time.

Okay, so here's what we have so far:

• A majority wants the portal back.
• Reviews posted on the board should also show up on the portal.
• News get displayed in the order they originally get posted, not by the latest reply.

That's not enough ideas by any means. If we ever want to compete with the big boys (gamespy, mgon, gamespot), this will not be enough by any means. And don't think "but they're huge, there's no way anyone could EVER compete with them."

Anyway, I'll start off by brainstorming about some various ideas. Go ahead and leave some input and post new ideas so we'll have a decent basis for the portal.

• A download section with the latest game demos, patches, trainers and such relevant things. We've had this before, but it did not get much input due to a lack of portal visitors.
• Up-to-date news with news posters capable of posting often, not a group of 10+ news posters who post ONCE every week altogether. The news posters have gotten more lazy lately and will need some new, fresh recruits.
• A game screenshot easier to update than before. Multiple people could be assigned to take care of this one, possibly to have a screenshot of the day.
• Interviews with industry professionals? Except for a few industry professionals who come to Zelaron every now and then (such as CAClark), we likely have to boost our ratings a bit more in order to find interesting game developers who would take the time to give us a scoop.
• The Zelaron email stays. If we get the resources, we could upgrade it to HiveMail to disable advertising and allow members to use POP3 if they so wish. A lot of people do prefer having Outlook running instead of having to check their web mail.
• Full forum integration. The portal should display things such as the current forum members online, possibly even notify users if they have a new PM, and of course, quickly let users check for new posts directly from the portal via a single mouse click.

In addition, Zajako has promised us the pay version of his splendid RPG game, which allows pretty much full customization in all sorts of ways. The main elements behind it is still to fight monsters, find items, gold and such things while you level up your character. You can duel other players, navigate throughout the world and possibly find some nigh-impossible monsters to attack. It has been greatly improved, and for those of you who liked the beta (even though it lacked random battle damage) will absolutely love the new version.

the download section will be cool as long as there are good things to download.Another thing you could do is have some kind of awards ceremony where people can vote for people here at zelaron for different titles.At the forum that I got unfairly booted from called Final Fantasy Discovery I was almost elected as the most spammish.

i would say that diablo 2 is probably one of the most active forums that we have so i think that adding diablo 2 files would be a must for the portal and as far as interviewing people some people to consider could be the guy from mousepad the guy from d2jsp as well as gayak , evilcheese, and other diablo hackers/programmers.


thats just my 2 cents.

I think that would be cool even though I only played the first Diablo game when I had it.I made it to hell and then got stuck.I tried about 50 times to make it through hell but I kept dying so I never beat it.

Here are my thoughts, once again....

First, In order to get people to post news, you would have to give them something to keep them motivated. Extra forum privileges, and not just the ability to post in the announce forums ect..., something to make them feel more part of the team. That’s just an example.

Maybe a weekly news letter, showing new thread titles, news articles, members, updated downloads, ect... I know you’re very professional with the structure of your sentences. And I know you can make some pretty interesting news letters.

Interviews would be really good, but I don't think many members would take that serious, they could just embaressed the site completely. Unless an admin does it. I dunno....

Screenshots are good, as long as there updated on a weekly basis or something, and not every 4 months... Also downloads would be perfect, demos, patches ect.. I like that idea.

Lastly, the RPG, not sure if that would be a good move. Might do what it did last time and take off great, then become less active. Unless you integrated it with the post bit. That would keep alot of members playing/posting, participating.

Hope this helps.

If there was an RPG I would defenitely go to it.

If you where here when the first one was here, then you would understand what i'm talking about.

Well, the RPG gives you gold when posting. New threads are worth a lot more than replies, but both things work.

I was refering to meters on the postbit, showing how much gold you have, mana points, hp points, each post it goes up untill the next level, ect... like most sites have it, but making it client side only.... ;)

No, you wouldn't. Goto http:\\tfogame.com, register for the forums, then use the "one fate" link in the nav. Admittedly it's better than what we had before, but it still has major issues. For one, there is still no randomization to battle damage besides the occational half damage

You could also try to incorporate the zelaron email into the main page... That might get people using it. 3DBuzz had a similair situation where their site is completely dedicated to the forums and not so much the portal... May be you could take a look?

There was always a email login on the main page.

I mean having the main page actually show your mail, or a list of your new mail

We have HiveMail at computerproblems.org, but im waiting for the gold release of that, snice it's still in beta. The new version is wicked. You should check that out.

Come on people, keep hitting the thread with new ideas. We can do better than this. We already have the community part (the forum), and it can be an extremely fundamental element to the portal. E.g., every new "file" posted in the download section could actually be managed directly from the board in a specific forum section, where only a specific user group can post new files, and anyone can reply to the thread, hence adding commends for the download. It would work a lot like the news posting, where a news poster submits a new thread to the Announcements' forum, and it shows up as a news tidbit on the portal.