I think that the rollover menus are nice, but that we need a lot less options.  Honestly, a new user might have a slower learning curve because there are so many options.

Ah, the navigation is much better now. I'll see how to content area turns out but of the preview images I've seen so far, I'm not really a fan of any. Does that sidebar have to be there? Is it just gonna have the user's information on it or will there be other links. One thing for sure though is that the sidebar you planned should not show on the forums, etc. You could just leave it as it is right now with the user info and login box in the top left. It's good the page titles are alignment to the left... my computers teacher said centering titles is for kids.

If the layout is gonna be 950 pixels wide though then a sidebar might be a good idea on some pages or else a title aligned to the left may look weird. There just doesn't seem like a sidebar could really display much unless the chat box and stuff is moved there or you cram the sidebar with the user's stats. I'm perfectly fine with no dropdown menus. The games really don't need to be listed there and they can be presented is a much better way on their own page with a screenshot of the game with the title and description and stuff. I don't see a "Games" link on the navigation though so I'm not exactly sure what you're planning for that. For forums and community, the censors, badges and bug reports links simply don't need to be linked to, BBCode help is a horrible guide and it's already linked to when you post a reply, the statistics page could be linked to from either the homepage or the forums with a "more stats" link, the recent karma ratings page will hopefully no longer exist (get a "Like" system instead), and I dunno how the member list can be linked to. You could try having breadcrumbs on profiles (I don't know if this is an official term but Drupal uses it) so it would show on the page something like Member List > Livio but I dunno.

Oh yeah that's a pretty complex search feature you're talking about. I dunno all about how it works but it seems to strip posts down to only letters and numbers and remove links and bbcode and stuff and then all words over 2-3 characters are stored in db with the corresponding ID. Words separated by a dash are joined and underscores are changed to spaces. Drupal also stores a "score" as a float so it can order the results by what it believes is the most relevant content but I really have no idea how it calculates that score. When content is updated, or a new comment is added or the content is deleted then the index is set to be updated. I guess you could do this immediately as the content is updated but it may be slow when the search index table gets really large.  Drupal has a cron job which updates the search index of updated content every few hours. I dunno how much of this you could copy from Drupal though. I looked at the code and it's pretty crazy and it references all these functions and stuff.

Could you email me the code, or something? I would like to take a look at it.

EDIT: Or PM

You could just download the latest version of Drupal... but here's the search module:

http://rotatingdisc.net/search.zip

You probably won't understand any/much of that code though because Drupal has its own coding practices. Everything is in these functions called "hooks" which are called by the core at certain times to make everything work.

Good Christ that is so confusing to me...

Regarding the lack of weekly updates on page one, I can be a "General Community Manager" person, and post weekly updates and such.

Yeah I didn't really expect you to make much sense of that. I've been working with Drupal for 10 months and I don't really know what it's doing at all in some parts.

I found the function search_index() which I believe is what updates the search index.

http://api.drupal.org/api/drupal/modules!search!search.module/function/search_index/7

It looks like part of the "score" is based on words in certain HTML tags like <b> or <h1> which makes sense because the user puts those words in those tags either as titles or to get the point across is writing. I dunno.. it looks pretty complicated but Google's algorithm would be 100,000 times more than this so it's possible.

I haven't been able to work on this much because the deadline for the game I'm working on for the IGF is on Halloween, and this whole month has been crunch time for us. I'll probably get back to working on this regularly again during November.

I guess I'm just not a fan of making it look like glass. I just don't like the "feel" of it, and I don't feel like it would fit the Interguild's character very well.

It's just that once you start trimming down the options, you start finding that many of the menus would end up with zero, and others with only a few, so I feel like everything would feel much more coherent if we just didn't have menus to begin with. Although, I imagine that it might make sense to have a menu under the Other tab, so maybe we can try that out if we ever need to.

Yeah, I'm still not entirely satisfied with those either. I'll do some more experimenting when I get the chance.

Yeah, the main purpose of the sidebar is to keep the content from being 100% wide. It can be a real pain to read posts (especially articles and news posts) when you have to move your eyes so far back and forth across the screen.

Right now I'm just planning on using that space for displaying log in information and maybe a vertical ad. Then any space left over will probably just be empty space. I might experiment with using the sidebar for a list of recent topics, but then the "community bar" with online members and chatbox might not work out very well.

The way that I want to present the new site is to focus more on the community and the discussions. There really is no reason to link to a collection of Games, other than maybe to attract new members, but then a lot of people think that we own those games or they think we're a flash game site, and they become more interested in trying our games than in seeing what we're about. Plus, no one ever really uses the Games tab as a way of navigating the site, anyway.

Another idea behind this project is that it's going to be a complete rebuild. No broken, horribly made pages are going to get ported over. Everything's going to be built again with the new design in mind, and the coding will be different in order to take more account for security and maintainability.

Yeah that's going to be a lot of work.... I'm just going to aim for something decent and usable first, and then I'll start worrying about optimizing it later, if there's a need for it.

This sounds familiar.

I actually think putting the chat and recent posts there would be a good idea. Then the user information can go either somewhere else, or beneath it. That way, the chat is easily accessible, and can be made a bit bigger. Maybe put the avatar somewhere near the top so you can easily see who you're logged in as, but besides that, the user information doesn't need to be majorly prevalent.

I could be online constantly if you made an Interguild app...

Just being online constantly isn't enough. Look at Darvince.

I could be online constanly too, if...
Oh wait, I already am.

Active =/= being on.

I really don't understand why you're on so much if I rarely see you post.

I guess I just don't really see that much stuff that I could add to if I posted in it.

All the same, I often access the Interguild through mobile devices, so I have to use safari- it's not the fastest browser... An app would be convenient. Maybe a little too much of a hassle to make, though.

Progress Report!

First, I think I found a good design for the layout of the content: http://revamp.interguild.org/preview17.png
It's just a rough sketch of what it might look like, but it's basically what we have now, but with bigger text and the user/login information on the sidebar. While this still needs a lot of polish, especially in terms of spacing and sizing, I already find this to be a lot more comfortable than what we have currently.

I actually experimented a lot with finding different ways to present some of this information. I explored having each item in the online list be inline, as opposed to taking up an entire line for each name. I even looked into different ways of showing posts in the chatbox, and the idea of putting the recent posts on the sidebar, which would look really cool, in my opinion. But these three elements just feel best when they're all together in one spot, because they're the only pieces of information on the page that will update dynamically (and they'll probably share a single refresh button as well). Plus, if you move one away, it's really hard finding something to fill up the empty space, so this is probably the idea configuration.

Also, having one sidebar as opposed to two (one for login info, another for something else or an ad) makes the page fee less cluttered and more organized, and it makes it easier to figure out where the main content of the page is without having to find an alternative color for the community bar and sidebar (finding a good alternative color in this color scheme is pretty hard). I tried adding borders and other such tricks to increase the contrast between the bars and the page, but those only served to make everything feel more cluttered and cramped like the current layout.

I wanted to start programming some of this in, but I didn't have anything in my dev server's database to test it with. The smart thing to do would have been to just give the code some fake database entries to work with, but for some reason I decided to start designing database for the new member system instead. The new system relies on user ID numbers, rather than strictly on usernames, which will not only save space but will also make username changes less risky. The new site is also using a more secure method for connecting to the database, and a much more secure system for managing login sessions.

It took me a while to design the login form. Some of the themes of the new website design are breathing room and modernness, but forms are notorious for always being ugly and messy. I could just get rid of the checkbox options, but I think those options are probably more important to the users of this site than visual prettyness. One trade-off that I did make, however, was the choice to use placeholders in order to label the username and password fields. Placeholders are an HTML5 feature that are not yet supported in Internet Explorer, so I'm hoping that (a) we either don't have IE users, or (b) they're smart enough to deduce their respective purposes considering the context, the fact that the password field obfuscates the text that you type in it, and the fact that if you roll over these fields, they tell you what they are. However, recoloring the placeholder text is not something that all browsers support yet (and if they do support it, there's no standard way of doing so yet), so if you're using Opera browser, then the color of the placeholder text will be painfully illegible.

Right now the rest of the sidebar will be taken up by an ad, which I must admit looks ridiculously huge when compared to the emptyness of the main content area. I think I'll look for a way to turn off that ad depending on which page you're on, so that it doesn't obnoxiously stretch the page all the time.

Another thing that I started experimenting with was to add some code so that the site can react to different browser sizes. The idea is to have different parts of the page move around or resize or disappear completely depending on whether you're on desktop dimensions, tablet dimensions, or mobile phone dimensions. I haven't done much on it yet, but right now if you go to: http://revamp.interguild.org/ try resizing your window's width and you'll see some colors change. I still haven't figured out which dimensions I'm going to design for yet, but I don't intend to put any code that will prevent mobile users from zooming in/out, b/c that's just annoying.

I was happy to see the promotion of L28 in the preview. I was even happier to see that it was there twice. MOAR PROMOTIONNN.

Why was it there twice?

These are mock-up images of a new design made in Photoshop. When I was copying text over in order to see what it'd look like, I accidentally copied that one twice.

Progress on the revamp has slowed down dramatically as my time has been taken over by university. I was really looking forward to working on it during the break, but all of that time got taken up by an independent study project that I had to register for in the last minute so that I can have enough credits this year. I didn't even get to finish editing all of those video recordings yet.

But I've been thinking a lot about the actual design of the community and how to build activity up again and there are few big problems that I just can't find a good solution to:

Problem 1: The Inactive Admin

Interguild activity is super dependent on my own activity, and I'm not just talking about me logging in and writing posts, but about updating the site, programming new features, keeping the minecraft server running, organizing events, advertising, etc. I would really like to do whatever I can to help the Interguild get active again, but there's so much work that needs to get done in order to do that, and since I know that I don't have the time to do it, it's just demotivating. It's pretty much impossible for me to be as active as I want to be, unless I stop going to school and turn the Interguild into my job (which is not happening). It'd probably help if I'd just drop a lot of my other commitments, such as my other game projects and my club, but pragmatically speaking, the trade-off doesn't always seem worth it because I'm getting more out of working on these projects than the Interguild, especially when it comes to learning new skills and gaining experience for my eventual career.

I think I would be much more motivated if I wasn't the only admin. I know that's kinda why we have the staff, but what would really be helpful would be if there was at least one other person willing to invest as much time into the Interguild as I have. Not only would maintaining the Interguild be much less daunting (and therefore more manageable), but I also find that watching other people work on a project that I'm involved in is a great motivator to get to work myself, mainly because I'd start to feel like I'm letting the team down otherwise.

The only problem is that finding a co-admin is really hard. I can't pay them, which means that they'd have to be really dedicated to the Interguild to begin with, and I don't think there's anyone else on the Interguild with the skills, time, and energy to do such a thing.

Problem 2: Content

Another big issue with the Interguild is that it lacks focus. This hurts us in two ways: (1) as a product, the Interguild is really confusing and hard to advertise to new members, and (2) we don't have one core thing that we can use to build activity around.

At our core, we've always been a HATPC community, but now many of the veteran members (veterans = literally almost everyone at this point) have grown very tired of HATPC. The clearest sign of this was the underwhelming amount of activity that came after the Fiddler breakthrough. Making and playing caves just isn't that interesting anymore. We've hit the ceiling with what we can do, the fact that Fiddler raised it further by a little bit just didn't make much of a difference (and the same thing might happen with Aeon).

Since then, it's been really hard to build activity on the site, because we just haven't found something to replace HATPC yet. Minecraft still isn't good enough, though, because for some reason, there's little to no discussion between Minecraft players on the forums. With HATPC, you made levels for other people to play, but in Minecraft, you're pretty much building for yourself, and you don't have much incentive to get feedback. Because of this, the server tour videos are usually the only time when Minecraft players actually get to know the server.

Right now the only thing keeping the Interguild alive is member loyalty and the friendships that we've all formed here, and while that's super awesome, it's not good enough in the long term. We need to find something specific that we can base our community around again. We've talked about making a general games site, but that's way too broad of an idea to actually be able to build any activity around.

As for the "multi-game level database" idea, we can see right now that it's just not working, because most games come with built-in community features nowadays which make our database obsolete. Plus, if you really wanted to find someone who'd appreciate your levels, you'd probably take them to a specialized community for that game, because you really have nothing to gain by posting them on the Interguild. The only way I see this "multi-game user-levels" idea working was if the Interguild became completely dedicated to level design (as in game design), and so members would be coming for high-quality insights and discussions about design, all the while striving to create high-quality levels in several different games, much like how the OC Remix community strives to create high-quality music in several different genres and games. The only problem is that that kind of community just isn't the Interguild. Those types of communities tend to be filled with older people who are probably pursuing careers in those fields, whereas the Interguild is really mostly a community of a bunch of kids who liked HATPC and minecraft.

This problem of finding a core topic to focus the Interguild around has been with us for years now and it's been the main reason why we've had so much trouble finding new members (and finding new admins is even more difficult). I don't think we can find a solution to this problem that will make everyone happy (just like how minecraft taking over didn't make everyone happy), but we can't be serious about truly fixing Interguild activity without fixing this problem. I've been thinking about this problem for months now and I still haven't found a good solution, so I want to ask for ideas, even if I feel like we've brought this issue up about half a dozen times already.

I think the answer is pretty simple... we must clone you.

But really, trying to find new members is somewhat out of the question. I'd like to help in any way that I can, but I'm not good at coding, and learning it would take too much time. I'm not sure if jell or jebby know coding, but if I were to try to do jobs as a staff, maybe someone else could be co-admin rather than staff.

Finding new members like me (because I joined Interguild without knowing anyone here) might be hard. I always invest my time here (which is not very productive) and I would like to be a co-admin but the problem is I'm too young but most of all, I don't know all about coding.

The Multi-game database idea is not working because some games have there own forums. I tried to asked my friends f they would like to join but they are not interested and some computers don't recognize this website. I'm sure Xyteran knows 'bout coding though.

@livio
I do exist, you know.

I have experience with html, css, and coding in general and I'm looking to develop a portfolio, which would be my motivation. Plus there's the fact that i see you every week, so you can verbally punch me in the face if needed.
I don't know php yet. I'm learning c++ right now and after that I'll get to work on php.

How to organize the community is a harder question.  Maybe a larger focus on competitions would help?

Competitions died because nobody made levels, we hosted tournaments and nobody made levels for them. The lack of levels isn't because we stopped hosting competitions, in my opinion.

With that said, I think that a community purpose is more important right now than an active administrator. It's harder to solve for sure, since even if we make this a transition into a Minecraft community (which is what we're resembling the most as of now), would alienate a lot of our current members (Quirvy, Yaya and Soccerboy are the three ones that talk the most about their lack of Minecraft, and there's a big silent mass on top I think). However, I think that we can't really go any further without doing so - so as much as it sucks, I think we must be willing to cut our losses if we want to move on, and accept that not all our current members will be able to appreciate what the New New Interguild will be.