Group,
Earlier this week I had posted on my blog about looking for help in testing out a new social community that I was investigating.
http://www.rotheblog.com/arcade/arcade-community-forum-testers-request/I had a couple of people I contact directly, and we took a day to go through Ning and the functionality it offered. I had heard so many amazing things about it and I wanted to see for myself.
What is Ning? It is a free service meant for individuals to create their own social communities. By my definition, a social community is much more than a forum. Facebook is a social community as well as MySpace, and all of these have some similar ideas.
Ning adds so much potential value to sharing information and discussion between arcade game collectors. Here are some of the things you as members can do, and what we can do with the site in general.
Easily customize the design (if you know HTML CSS) to look not plain like Facebook. I could design this to look however I want, and not just be a simple solid color forum in the banner.
You can have your own personal page where you have simple blogging tools.
The search feature works very well for finding information! What a novel idea. I think this site absolutely sucks for that, and that is part of why we see so many repeated questions.
Share feature - Easy one click on pieces of content to send emails to friends to share that content, or click on 'friends' to share directly with them
Chat section
Customize your own profile page - If you know HTML / CSS, you profile page can be anything you want visually. Already your page will have your collection, videos you've posted, photos, list all of your posts, much more robust.
Flickr Integration - You can auto pull in any photos you have from a Flickr account into Ning to share with the group.
Photos, Videos and the Forum - You can easily add photos that are resized for you, don't need to be hosted somewhere else. One click and you're done. You can either upload videos that you have that will be converted to .swf similar to YouTube and be hosted on Ning, or you can add a YouTube video link and that video will be embedded in the site.
The forum is easy to work with, to edit a post you click on the text and with Ajax working in the background, the text is immediately editable, no page reload. One click, edit, done.
Tagging of forum posts. Not only do we have forum categories, you can tag posts if you like to enhance searching one level further.
RSS Everything - RSS on the forum, just about anywhere else as well so you can follow anything you want in your favorite reader. Another huge failing of this forum.
Change profile name - You email address, password, whatever. Don't like your name six months from now, you can change it without requesting a change from the admin. It's your profile, do with it what you want.
So, this is what we know so far. Some of these features exist in forums, some used, some not. You might be saying that a lot of these things we can already do in 'some' fashion here. But the integration isn't nearly as tight and later when you search for this content, the tighter integration will allow you to find more related information to your search.
Here are the things I know it doesn't support so far;
Subcategories in forums
So, we have a repair category, we can't put a subcategory called monitors. We could have a level 1 forum called repair - monitors, but not a sub. I am not sure if this will be added, I assume not, assuming that tagging is supposed to take the place of this a little bit.
Signatures
There are no signatures. Since you have your profile page that is searchable by all members, you have to customize what machines you have, want looking for there.
Post count
I am not confident that there is a displayed post count for your profile. Kind of like here on Klov, we have post counts that determine certain ratings, like Old Hand, etc. Ning doesn't do that.
Other Limitations
Free storage. We have storage for some 5,000 photos. But after a certain point, that storage is extra, like $9.95 per month. So, in theory there is that limitation as well. It will be a problem eventually if this takes off. But we can purchase the site and add our own advertising to set this off if things ever got to that point. The biggest concern would be if people would upload a ton of custom videos, instead of just linking to them from YouTube. This would eat up space faster. My recommendation to people would to be just continue using YouTube, it's probably better overall for general searching and recognition for videos anyway.
Last notes
I am striving for full transparency of what I do and don't know. I went in evaluating Ning as a solution for our members here to replace exactly what we have, and add value for your experience as well. I think this forum sucks, but we deal with it because the alternatives are few. I think that this Ning community does just that. 99% of the features we have here, you can do there, and much better.
However. The consideration I have also always made was, do we need one more forum? One more place to check? Do we need to disperse content that much further.
No. We don't. And this community would do that. That is the truth, one more place to check. Some of you might make a switch, some of you will try it out and do both, some of you don't care and wont' even look. I would like to have one great aggregated site that incorporated sites like VAPS and Klov, with the database listings and collection listings tied into the social community.
That is a possibility if we buy the code for the site and a programmer writes it from scratch. It is likely....no. I can't do it, I don't have the skills, and if I manage the site I will need to work with someone else on a for free basis more than likely to get something like that done, and no one has the time for that.
So...why offer this if we know it is one more area to disperse content? Well....
I had started a Facebook page six months ago for members here. I had announced it, and the general feedback was that people weren't into social communities, and had little interest. That's fine.
But then just a week or so ago someone else started another Facebook community and Bam! they had like 100 + users.
So, my thought it I will leave this up to you. If this creates value for you and you want to use this community, Awesome! I can't guarantee anything for the future.
But I can say this. For those of you who read my blog, my resolve is hard and fast. I post very frequently, and have done so for over a year, sometimes as much as once per day, if not 4-5 times per week. I have the focus to make this work if people want.
If we get regular traffic, and 75 regular members over at this new community, I will take some of my time to make a custom design for it and have it be the best visual forum website out there for arcade game collectors.
Zorg is claiming that he is developing an all inclusive website that incorporates forums, databases, listings and even incorporates the functions that localarcade has for storing artwork. But he is talking about approval for artwork at the very least, if not for photos of games kind of like Klov. I respect the need for moderation, but with a proper social community the rating systems in place should be enough to alert the community to what is good and what is bad. I fear that any process where approval is needed to post content by a small team of people will eventually become just like Klov, outdated. Plus my thought is, why reinvent the wheel. Ning was developed from the aspect of the GUI first. All of these tools already exist, why not just use them since they're so simple?
I am hoping maybe we can incorporate our projects together, maybe what he has developed so far can be included into Ning, his database of games, collector listings and artwork storage. But time will tell.
So, sorry for the super long post. If you are still reading and want to try things out, here is the link to signup.
http://classicarcades.ning.com/
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Topic: New Arcade Game Collectors Community - Built off Ning (Read 2086 times)
