DaiAku
Well-known member
Hi Everyone,
I anticipated this post so much and was so excited to be finally be able to post here - and wanted to do so this morning. However, all of these great plans were side-tracked by issues we didn't anticipate. Before going into all this good stuff let me start out with a proper introduction.
We make video games and have been working towards launching a crowd sourcing campaign and forums for quite some time. I am completely new at forum administration and it is fun, exciting and terrifying to actually be running this thing. Our company is called Precursor Games and today we announced Shadow of the Eternals. Here is a few videos of what we do:
Our Teaser Video
Our Campaign Video
When I first started looking at forum software, I was almost certain Vb would be what we would use as this seemed to be the status quo. However, we were determined to make intelligent choices so I investigated several forum options.
Inspired by you!
When I checked out Xenforo, I dug into the lawsuit and read the merits of the case and made up my mind pretty quickly that the case did not seem to have much merit. However, I unfortunately have an understanding of the negative effects of a litigation and the possible downsides so I ran it by the team who also understands these things. In the end when my opinion was asked what we should do, I conveyed the following message. “I think this software is the best choice of all the others out there, however, what I find special about Xenforo is the strength and support of the community. The community is supporting the software because they believe in it so much and this support is very strong. The site is literally running by itself right now despite the litigation. The community made me a believer so lets be honey badgers and use Xenforo”. The team agreed and several months ago in 2012, we purchased Xenforo did our first Xenforo install.
The Inspiration Does Not Stop Here
Crowdsourcing is new and not many people really have a solid understanding of it. We certainly do not claim to have this understanding. However, what has become clear is that keeping in touch with the community is key to success and we felt forum software was key to this. I was inspired by the quality and additions the Xenforo Community provided here and felt we should do something similar with our game. So we started working toward have our community have ways to contribute to the development of the game. Not just opinions, or votes, but real content - like the resources here. There were other inspirations of course - creativity is very ephemeral but this community made an impact. The Order of the Unseen was born so contributors can work together with Precursor to “Make games that they want to play”.
Side-Tracked by SPAM
Our campaign started as expected - with an extremely high number of hits. Over 1k users on at once with a ton of site hits. It all held up! This was great but what surprised us was that the email confirmation for forum registration volume was so high it was flagged as SPAM by Amazon (AWS) they stopped sending the email confirmations. This was later fixed and but we were also flagged as by SPAM by hotmail. We ended turning off email confirmation for registration after 6 hours of the server going live.
The Forums
So on to the tradition part of the post. Here are some quick screens of the forum: we decided to go with 3 styles (not common I know) but we wanted each part to look different.
Let me know what you think! Here is a shot of our FAQ with a list of all the add-ons/resources currently employed. Please let me know if we missed anyone and I will try to fix it. It will be crazy the next few weeks but I will pop to check out everyone thoughts.
Thank you for all the help during the last few months to help make this happen - especially Chris Deeming for keeping me sane when I thought I burned the forums to the ground. It has been a great learning experience and it is fun to be part of this community.
The forums are working great so far but I am sure I have done some things incorrectly. If you see anything please let me know!
Hope you like.
(edit: addition) Just realized I forgot to mention. I am Denis can be seen in the 2nd video.
Wish us luck!
I anticipated this post so much and was so excited to be finally be able to post here - and wanted to do so this morning. However, all of these great plans were side-tracked by issues we didn't anticipate. Before going into all this good stuff let me start out with a proper introduction.
We make video games and have been working towards launching a crowd sourcing campaign and forums for quite some time. I am completely new at forum administration and it is fun, exciting and terrifying to actually be running this thing. Our company is called Precursor Games and today we announced Shadow of the Eternals. Here is a few videos of what we do:
Our Teaser Video
Our Campaign Video
When I first started looking at forum software, I was almost certain Vb would be what we would use as this seemed to be the status quo. However, we were determined to make intelligent choices so I investigated several forum options.
Inspired by you!
When I checked out Xenforo, I dug into the lawsuit and read the merits of the case and made up my mind pretty quickly that the case did not seem to have much merit. However, I unfortunately have an understanding of the negative effects of a litigation and the possible downsides so I ran it by the team who also understands these things. In the end when my opinion was asked what we should do, I conveyed the following message. “I think this software is the best choice of all the others out there, however, what I find special about Xenforo is the strength and support of the community. The community is supporting the software because they believe in it so much and this support is very strong. The site is literally running by itself right now despite the litigation. The community made me a believer so lets be honey badgers and use Xenforo”. The team agreed and several months ago in 2012, we purchased Xenforo did our first Xenforo install.
The Inspiration Does Not Stop Here
Crowdsourcing is new and not many people really have a solid understanding of it. We certainly do not claim to have this understanding. However, what has become clear is that keeping in touch with the community is key to success and we felt forum software was key to this. I was inspired by the quality and additions the Xenforo Community provided here and felt we should do something similar with our game. So we started working toward have our community have ways to contribute to the development of the game. Not just opinions, or votes, but real content - like the resources here. There were other inspirations of course - creativity is very ephemeral but this community made an impact. The Order of the Unseen was born so contributors can work together with Precursor to “Make games that they want to play”.
Side-Tracked by SPAM
Our campaign started as expected - with an extremely high number of hits. Over 1k users on at once with a ton of site hits. It all held up! This was great but what surprised us was that the email confirmation for forum registration volume was so high it was flagged as SPAM by Amazon (AWS) they stopped sending the email confirmations. This was later fixed and but we were also flagged as by SPAM by hotmail. We ended turning off email confirmation for registration after 6 hours of the server going live.
The Forums
So on to the tradition part of the post. Here are some quick screens of the forum: we decided to go with 3 styles (not common I know) but we wanted each part to look different.
Let me know what you think! Here is a shot of our FAQ with a list of all the add-ons/resources currently employed. Please let me know if we missed anyone and I will try to fix it. It will be crazy the next few weeks but I will pop to check out everyone thoughts.
Thank you for all the help during the last few months to help make this happen - especially Chris Deeming for keeping me sane when I thought I burned the forums to the ground. It has been a great learning experience and it is fun to be part of this community.
The forums are working great so far but I am sure I have done some things incorrectly. If you see anything please let me know!
Hope you like.
(edit: addition) Just realized I forgot to mention. I am Denis can be seen in the 2nd video.
Wish us luck!
- the bane for us. 
