Things be changing!

As you can see the Portal page for the site is now up and running and when you type thecheckpoint.net into your web browser of choice it is the first thing you are brought to. It's all very basic stuff at the moment so let me know what you want to see added to it, removed, changed, etc. 

You can get to the forums by selecting Forums in the nav bar at the top of the page.

I've also done some moving about of things and tweaking things behind the scenes. Next on my list is to improve the look and feel of the forums themselves and add a few helpful widgets to them as well

With the portal being the landing page of the site now you have to bare in mind that each topic started in the gaming forum is displayed as a news item in the Portal with all replies counted as comments.

Basically this means, if people don't mind (seriously let me know if you want this changing ASAP!) that Gaming is now a news forum. 

So if you want to post something new i.e. a new HD remaster is announced  make a new thread for it instead of adding it to the current HD Remasters thread! 

The idea is that we should see a steady stream of new topics ("news items") for us to talk about and to outside eyes that the site is current with current gaming news as it happens.

Think of it as us all being hobby games journalists 

I like what I'm seeing Cal although loads of new threads for every single thing is a bad idea personally speaking. However, it might be the best way to create chat rather than being lost in other generic threads.

MarkySharky wrote:I like what I'm seeing Cal although loads of new threads for every single thing is a bad idea personally speaking. However, it might be the best way to create chat rather than being lost in other generic threads.

Agree, it could be a fine line between having too many new (and potentially empty) threads or decent new posts getting lost in existing threads. Guess we'll have to see how it plays out.

I suppose this also means I'll have to watch my potty mouth for fear of scaring away potential new members :p.

Changes look good Cal. Let's give it a try with the "news stories" ideas.

Glad peeps are on board! Like people say we will try it out for a bit and see how we go

Just take NeoGAF as a sort of example for how this system works best! (but minus all the anger, bickering, stupidity and pettiness because we are awesome!)

EDIT: You only need to worry about swearing in the first post of a thread, everything else is hidden behind the Read More and Comments buttons.

I'm thinking of seeing if I can set things up so threads in Gaming auto-lock after 30 days so we get a constant stream of new threads that are current with what's going on. So the first posts featured in the Portal aren't wildly out of date.

Are people ok with this?

cal_el wrote:Are people ok with this?

 
I can see the logic behind this but in theory I can't see this working out too well.

This isn't exactly a high traffic site and I could imagine this causing a lot of multiple threads (look at the recent Bloodborne thread/s for example*). Also it may not work so well for threads concerning upcoming highly anticipated titles, like The Witcher 3 for example, you may get times where there's nothing worth commenting on for 30 days in the build up to release but then all of a sudden another announcement may get made, cue a rash of potential new threads when the old one would have sufficed.

*Although in that case, the thread you recently started would have looked better regarding the Portal etc.

EDIT: It may be better if there was a way of getting the Portal to display the most recent posts in a thread rather than the opening post, although it may mean that some of the more potty-mouthed members on the site would need to curtail their language a little :p

PorcusHawk wrote:

cal_el wrote:Are people ok with this?

 
I can see the logic behind this but in theory I can't see this working out too well.

This isn't exactly a high traffic site and I could imagine this causing a lot of multiple threads (look at the recent Bloodborne thread/s for example*). Also it may not work so well for threads concerning upcoming highly anticipated titles, like The Witcher 3 for example, you may get times where there's nothing worth commenting on for 30 days in the build up to release but then all of a sudden another announcement may get made, cue a rash of potential new threads when the old one would have sufficed.

*Although in that case, the thread you recently started would have looked better regarding the Portal etc.

EDIT: It may be better if there was a way of getting the Portal to display the most recent posts in a thread rather than the opening post, although it may mean that some of the more potty-mouthed members on the site would need to curtail their language a little :p

The Bloodborne thread chaos was my fault, I tried splitting and merging threads with very mixed results 

As for your Witcher 3 example the idea would be that in the first topic we would be talking about the current state of the game, previews, news, whatever. Then say something popped up 30 days later you would make a new topic about the new piece of news rather than resurrecting the old thread. 

It would mean that on the whole threads would be shorts number of pages/posts wise but they would always be on topic and current with what is going on in the games industry. 

It's all still up in the air a bit at the moment and I'm sure we will all settle into a groove with it eventually.

cal_el wrote:It would mean that on the whole threads would be shorts number of pages/posts wise but they would always be on topic and current with what is going on in the games industry. 

It's all still up in the air a bit at the moment and I'm sure we will all settle into a groove with it eventually.

I'm certainly not against the idea and it could work out well so by all means, let's see how it works out.

On a related note, I did edit my opening post in the Bloodborne thread to include an image and edit out some (extremely rare ) colourful language that may have ended up in there.

So it looks like I can't implement auto locking of threads after a certain amount of days without a lot of faffing. But what I will do instead is use my godly Admin powers to split threads at my discretion if I feel it is a new "News Piece" style post.

Marky can also do this if he wants with his slightly less powerful Mod abilities

In other news I have been modifying things in the background to make the site more search engine friendly. So hopefully that will pay off with a few new members as time goes on!