Where Things Are Going

[Bolty]

I'm going to make a mistake and go on record here with my current plans for this website, so you can be aware of them and get on my case if I fall behind. So here goes:

As we all know, Diablo II is far along on the winding-down of popularity scale which occurs for all games; as they get older, all but the most die-hards move on to newer games. You can see evidence of the die-hards in our current Diablo 1 forum, with guys such as Lemming holding down the fort and helping those still (amazingly!) new to the game learn its ins and outs.

For our community to keep kicking, we need to adopt a new game. There's no easy choice this time like there was with Diablo II, the direct sequel to the game this site was started for. Currently, Guild Wars is looking like the frontrunner as the game Lurkers are most excited about, but there's been little chance to get a deep hands-on look at it to be sure that there's enough there worth getting our hands dirty with. World of Warcraft, Blizzard's latest offering, seems an obvious choice for our next game on the surface; however, it's an MMORPG, quite a different beast than the Diablo-style games we love.

Personally, I'm having a blast with WoW during its long beta test. It's insanely fun and addictive as any MMORPG. Hopefully many of you have chosen to get into the Open Beta so you can get a good look at it and make up your own minds. Perhaps there's enough room in both Guild Wars and WoW for our site to cover both games, but I've found that sites that try to cover too much at once get too spread out.

Another issue facing us is the fact that over the years, many of the regulars here have really gotten to know each other. While this site is first and foremost a strategy site, we are inevitably becoming more guild-ish in nature (despite my strong resistance to this becoming a guild site). I'm not so sure that this is a bad idea anymore, but as I've stated many times, I don't want to run a guild. This ties into discussion below, so bear with me.

Currently my plans for this site involve getting this dang forum properly skinned, and moving the main site over to a content management system. I'm sorry it's taking so long to skin this forum and you've had to deal with the agonizing BLUENESS of it all lately. I basically suck at skinning and site layout designing. It can take me months to come up with a new look. Fortunately, I'm not coming up with a new look here, but applying the styles of the old look to the new interface is still a slow process for me. Thanks for your patience.

My timeline is as follows: by December 31, (yes, THIS year) I want to have the entire main site switched over to Mambo Open Source ( http://www.mamboserver.com ), a content management system that seems to fit what this site needs like a glove. It's a very good CMS that's had years of strong open source development support and constant updates. To implement this, I'll need to install, setup, and skin (argh) the software with a decent, spiffy look. The site will move to just one look and one "section," instead of its current setup with a section for each game. Then I have to complete the time-consuming (but easier than skinning) process of taking all the articles, news, and data of the site and placing it into the Mambo database.

At that point, I will be dusting my hands off and finally considering myself "free" of the content of this site. Content people for the site will be able to add news and articles much more easily than before without requiring any technical HTML knowledge *at all*. Other great features will include the ability for those submitting strategy articles to have direct access to their article - i.e. the Lurker Lounge would become their hosting base for their guide, which they could log in and edit at any time to keep it up to date without having to submit it to an admin who then could take weeks to update it (which happened in the past, unfortunately). I will fully relegate myself to a technical role - applying upgrades, monitoring the server, maintenance, finances, etc: the "extra crap" that webmasters have to put up with alongside the fun of running the site. For me, it's actually a little fun, but for most people, it's a huge barrier to them running their own site. I'll free that up. At this point, we will likely be moving to a new game and I will be accepting applications for people to "run" a game on this site by being the content admin. We may have more than one admin for a game if it works out better that way. The admins would run the show for their game, deciding on all content, administering the game's forums here, etc, just as Lemming and Refrigerator do now for Diablo and Diablo II, respectively.

It'll be an exciting time for the site and for me personally. I know that quite a few of the posters here would make great site admins if they wanted to be. Some have already inquired into it, and I had told them to hold off until getting this new system installed. That was almost a year ago! (ack) But another thing I'm considering opening up is the possibility of a guild for these games, with guild admins controlling a WoW or Guild Wars guild through this site. Obviously the emphasis on the guild would be the inclusion of people who enjoy the strategy aspect of these games more than the "W3 H4VE 400 MEMB3RZ W3 R0XXX0R!" guild people you see on these games, but the guild leaders would have full control over the direction of their guilds. We've had a loose Lurker Lounge guild during the beta, divided between two servers. It's been pretty fun so far, if small.

One of the challenges I've already completed so far was moving this site to a new host on a Linux operating system that I've had no experience with before (that was fun). However, some of the challenges I'm still facing to get this all done by December 31:

1) Skinning this forum software
2) Installing and configuring Mambo 4.5.1a
3) Skinning Mambo
4) Moving all current content over to the Mambo system
5) Developing a new logo

Yes, a new logo. This site has NO logo, when you think of it. A few months back I has asked around for a logo and a number of Lurkers came up with some great submissions (thanks, Deebye). But what is needed is something more than just text or letters - something with an image (that's not copyrighted) that can be incorporated with the Lurker Lounge text in some way. What would be cool would be:

a) A logo similar to the top of the LL pages now, with the text - but some cool image either behind the text or incorporated into the text
B) A button - something smaller with height and width being equal, with perhaps just "LL" in it
c) All with a "gothic" look that fits the theme of a gaming website
d) The willingness of its creator to donate the work free of charge to the Lounge

Finally, keep in mind that installing and moving over the data of the site to the Mambo CMS is more important to me than skinning its appearance, because it will enable me to move this site forward to its next era faster. I'd hate to wait so long getting this done that WoW and Guild Wars are both released and we have no support in place for them. Do note that I'm geared up and running to move the LL to its next major age: our third game, a new "paradigm" if you will, where I will no longer be running this show when it comes to the individual games. All of this needs to be in place by January 1, 2005.

If some of you are thinking, "what can I do to help," there are a couple of things that I could use help on:

1) being patient with me
2) considering being a content (site) admin for an upcoming game
3) working on developing a possible template (skin) for the main site in the Mambo Content Management System - see http://www.mamboserver.com and http://www.mamboportal.com for lots of info, guides, and articles on how to create templates for this software - imagine how neat it would be to develop the look of this website and know that it's YOUR design! (p.s. people actually make decent side/hobby money developing templates for Mambo and selling them, since this software's pretty popular, so this would be good practice)
4) start writing strategy guides for WoW or Guild Wars when you feel you can. This site is ultimately judged by the quality of its strategy news and articles. The LL will be able to host your guide and give you access to edit it as you please to keep it always-updated. Imagine being known throughout the WoW community as THE expert of some facet of the game - all it takes is the willingness to create the definitive guide to something and get it all down in text for that to happen, even if you're not the most knowledgeable out there (*cough*, Bolty's High Level Warrior Guide) about the subject matter! In other words, "(s)he who writes it gets the credit, muhahaha." Because then, other experts will give you advice to tweak your guide and make it even better. Oh no, my secret's out! :)
5) getting on my case if things fall behind. Note that this conflicts with point #1. Crap.

Overall, what I'm asking for is community involvement - any help that is offered, I'll take. In the past, I've shunned help, mostly because I'm a "do-it-my-own-way-dammit" personality ("no, REALLY?" some of you are thinking), but that needs to change if we're going to progress into a new game.

Thanks for reading. Feel free to reply with public comments, or email/PM if you need to get in touch with me in private.

-Bolty