THE NEW ZELARON PORTAL! (No, it's not launched yet, but we need YOUR ideas! Now!)

Shoutbox would take activity away from the forums instead of adding it.

As for smilies, we have 65, not 20. If you need some obscure smilie, you can post it as a picture. I see no reason to add 200 smilies.

WW, you see no reason to do anything as long as the forums are functional.

We need front page articles. And we need me and grav to write them.

Why hasn't anyone mentioned reviews yet? (Aside from my hypothetical book club.) Game reviews, movie reviews, book reviews. Definitely with unique elements that separate us from other, more established review sites. 20-word reviews? Image-only reviews?

If this works out, we could attract a lot of attention. If it goes exceptionally well, publishers may in turn contact us and give us pre-release games, possibly invite Zelaron reviewers to screenings and such. Either way, we don't have anything to lose. The forum will still be around.

As for front page articles and news; they will definitely be there.

Customizable stock ticker that enables you to pick which ones you want to monitor on top of the market as a whole. Sports ticker with updated scores on all or any games you choose.

Weird, you posted that while I wrote my list of ideas with the stock monitoring element. Stock and sport tickers/marquees do sound better than separate pages. The fewer clicks required, the better.

Anyway, I know you have more ideas! What are they?

For the reviews, we have them already, and there's only like two members that can actually sit down and write good material..

Well, no. I think the case is that there's only two members who will take the time to sit down and write good material.

If all of us put aside time to do it, then we'd have 30 or so members sitting down and writing good material.

It'd be like homework!

Well, no. I think the case is that there's only two members who will take the time to sit down and write good material. If all of us put aside time to do it, then we'd have 30 or so members sitting down and writing good material.

I know personally I could write decent reviews for material I know relatively well. I guess you're right, most of us just don't want to take the time to sit down and actually write stuff up.

I'll write reviews. I can't promise the topics will be current or consistent, but I watch enough movies and read books often enough to provide something at least. Not sure how this would help a revamped portal, but I'll see if I can get to work on something soon. (Halfway through Ender's Shadow right now).

I remember when we had a Review forum. I contributed a bit to that.

I like the game reveiws idea! The ability to look at what people think of games without bothering to search for it would be nice. Maybe also some by zelaron members. That could be the reward for 3 rep bars!

Having Zelaron members do the reviews is the idea...

Bump! WetWired has worked quite a bit on the portal project, which I haven't had time to be involved in for a long while now.

Anyway, here is a list of the suggested features, arranged by myself based on how important I regard them as:


Very important:

• Pre-selected Google search field (Replaces the need for using Google as your start page)
• Reviews by members (Games, movies, books)

Useful:

• Customizable module layout of portal index
• Customizable calendar with personal notes
• Easily reachable arcade games
• Software downloads
• Shipment tracking
• Gmail login
• User-definable RSS feeds
• Torrents
• Local weather and news reports

Unnecessary but possibly interesting:

• Customizable member profile pages (e.g. username.zelaron.com)
• Wallpapers
• Customizable stock ticker
• Sports ticker
• Dictionary
• Babelfish translation
• Links to funny videos (Or videos in general? Some kind of YouTube integration?)
• Links (To general, useful sites)

Available:

• Perfect integration with forum database
• Portal styles match forum styles
• Recent threads
• Weekly poll
• Wikipedia search
• Private messages
• Birthdays
• Buddy list
• Activity bars
• Shoutbox
• Users online
• Community statistics (Member, thread and post amount; newest member)

Post more ideas!

We need front page articles. And we need me and grav to write them.

I really agree with this one. Except we need to ALL be able to write articles. (Not really like a post. Find some way to distinguish it) but, we should be able to review books, movies, games, events and such.

EDIT: LOL, didn't read all the way through before posting my thoughts. Still a GREAT idea though.

Okay, the portal is almost done. All we need to do now is to decide on what content should be put on it. So far, the main ideas are:

• Reviews (games, books, movies) written by Zelaron members.
• Interesting news (mostly pertaining to gaming and technology).
• RPGMaker resources.
• Game hacking resources.

We could, of course, turn Zelaron into a RPGMaker or game development community, largely because it is better to break into markets with low supply and high demand, but it depends on what we're capable of, and interested in providing.

So, three questions for those of you who read this.

• 1: Why do you come to Zelaron?
• 2: What do you perceive Zelaron as? (A gaming forum? A place to hang out with online friends?)
• 3: What "unique" needs should we cover, to make others come here?

So, four questions for those of you who read this. 1: Why do you come to Zelaron? 2: What do you perceive Zelaron as? (A gaming forum? A place to hang out with online friends?) 3: What "unique" needs should we cover, to make others come here?

1. I come to Zelaron for the community, and occasionally to talk about Gaming.

2. I percieve Zelaron as a place to hang out with a touch of Gaming discussion.

3. We should focus on RPGMaker, Gaming, Art (literature, modeling, what have you,) and current events (such as science, debate, and all that jazz,) in my opinion. Whatever it is we do, I think we need to focus more on these things rather than the "community" aspect.

4. Where's the fourth question?

1.) I come for the community, to discuss current events (science mostly), and to share my knowledge on what games I play.

2.) Mostly, I perceive Zelaron as an online chatboard. There really isn't a whole lot of gaming discussion these days.

3.) I mainly think that more discussion on the gaming aspects would draw more members in, as the aspect of "community" doesn't do much to draw in new people. Whatever we discuss should be something that a lot of our people are interested in, and hopefully a popular subject (I doubt we're going to find something bigger than D2 was in its heyday unless Diablo 3 is announced).

1: Why do you come to Zelaron? 2: What do you perceive Zelaron as? (A gaming forum? A place to hang out with online friends?) 3: What "unique" needs should we cover, to make others come here?

1. It's addictive, and I find some of the vindictive assholes on here similar to myself.
2. A hang out for people. Most of my conversation does not have to do with games, but there's a lot of it that goes on.
3. Pull a slashdot and relay the news that nerds like.

3. We should focus on RPGMaker, Gaming, Art (literature, modeling, what have you,) and current events (such as science, debate, and all that jazz,) in my opinion. Whatever it is we do, I think we need to focus more on these things rather than the "community" aspect.

I disagree about the extra emphasis on art unless there's an interesting twist to it. I definitely agree with your idea about focusing on RPGMaker and other areas of gaming. Of course, "gaming" is too vast per se, so narrowing down our share of the gaming market to something which is in great demand without a great supply of need-covering websites is a good way to go.

What about cheating and game hacking? Not many web sites cover that, but everyone wants to cheat. We even used to be a fairly famous Diablo 2 hacking community. A few more up-to-date map hacks posted as attachments so visitors have to sign up to download them, some guides on memory editing... Of course, illegal things such as cracking copyrighted games or selling CD keys would be disallowed, but a little ToS bending has never hurt anyone, has it?

Focusing on things other than the abstract "community" aspect of Zelaron is definitely a must in our pursuits for expansion.

3.) I mainly think that more discussion on the gaming aspects would draw more members in, as the aspect of "community" doesn't do much to draw in new people. Whatever we discuss should be something that a lot of our people are interested in, and hopefully a popular subject (I doubt we're going to find something bigger than D2 was in its heyday unless Diablo 3 is announced).

RPGMaker and Diablo 2... Hmm. Game development and hacking? Throw in some Slashdot-esque technology, gaming and world news as Willkillforfood mentioned, and I think we're good to go.

As for my earlier skepticism about linking Zelaron with art, what about writing game, movie and book reviews which follow a particular theme or school of thought, e.g. Cranky Steve-esque cynicism and negativity? Raziel (whom I have a 50% chance of resurrecting) would definitely pull that off extraordinarily well. Or, what about limiting the reviews to cyberpunk, steampunk and/or generic sci-fi?

1: Why do you come to Zelaron? 2: What do you perceive Zelaron as? (A gaming forum? A place to hang out with online friends?) 3: What "unique" needs should we cover, to make others come here?

1. I come to Zelaron because it feeds my gaming news and tech addiction better that most other sources.

2. Zelaron is most definitely a gaming forum. I found it years ago when looking for RPGMaker tutorials. It was mainly because of this site that I got as good as I did.

3. I really think we need to host resources and review RPGMaker games.

While others may favor the community more, I've always seen this as a game making site.