You live by Livio?

They go to the same university.

While I can't contribute too much to neither the discussion of what the interguild should become, nor the admin thing (although sniper actually does look like a pretty good candidate. He's probably not as embedded in the community as Livio would like, but he seems to be more active than Livio, and is probably the most qualified person at the coding stuffs), I still think that the problems your having with minecraft activity are because of lack of organization. HatPC was a game that you made your own level on your own, put it up for the others to see, and then the others would spend time playing and critiquing it. If you apply that same ideology to minecraft, you make a building on your own, other people occasionally see it, and maybe they comment on it, and if they do then they're pretty much done with it. For minecraft to work, you can't do things individually otherwise it's just doesn't build community interest (unless maybe what you build is really interesting, like sniper's dog statue). Making buildings by yourself doesn't really bring together the community like it did with HatPC, as such you guys should instead be looking to form community projects, either by having pretty big goals that you're working towards on the survival server (like building a giant fenced in farm or something?) or developing land on the creative server (this can be creating entire cities, or working on large projects together).

For HatPC you would organize competitions and that would boost community activity. We tried to do the competitions-to-boost-activity with Minecraft, but it rarely ever worked, and I think that's because the equivalent to that in Minecraft is more likely just community events in general. Perhaps instead of making another competition in minecraft, you should next time try to organize events where a group of people come onto at the same time to work on something. I don't know how well it would actually work, but it can't possibly be as ineffective as that Ancient Egypt competition.

Case in point: In previously mentioned competition, there was only one entry, but 6 people worked on it.

Thomas knows java I think... There are so many times, and I can't remember which ones are which. He's fairly active.

The problem with minecraft, for me, is that all the activity is on the server, not here. If people were to talk here, I could join in, since i'm sure not ALL of the chat is centered around minecraft. From what I see, all that ever happens is:

a) occasional building posted
b) server errors

So it doesn't look all that appealing to me.

I would really like to be able to do something about the Interguild's marketability. I feel like if we just explicitly become a Minecraft community, then would we still advertise ourselves as a "multi-game level database"? I definitely don't think it's a good idea to lose the database though, because we get quite a lot of traffic to the site because of it, and it'd just be lame if we either lost all that content or just tucked it away into an obscure section of the site. I wish there was a more elegant solution to this, but if there was, then I guess we would have found it by now.

Although, I really like Quirvy's idea of starting some really ambitious collaborative minecraft projects. As for not having people post enough about minecraft on the Interguild, I wonder if we can somehow stream in minecraft chat messages to the site. We've already got them streaming into the server map. It'd also be cool if we could somehow display the number of people who are currently signed into the Mumble server. Tyler, if you're interested in becoming a co-admin, maybe you could help figure out how to get such features working.

Minecraft is somethijg I persinally do for fun, I don't post levels, although I may soon. HATPC is definitely the game that the Interguild is centered upon, so it's understandable why there are thousands of HATPC levels on these forums, and why HATPC just isn't as fun as it used to be. We've mostly exploited all the glitches and used most of the techniques in the game. I've said this before; we need some new interesting and popular or addicting games that everyone (nearly everyone) will enjoy or at least participate in. I'm not just talking about one game, not two, we probably need quite a few. Something other than a puzzle game. Maybe something where you can make puzzles, but is not centered around puzzles. HATPC is mostly about skill, less than the puzzle aspect, in my opinion, so something with the same general type of gaming concept. Minecraft isn't really a game that involves skill and strategy when it comes to reviewing or observing levels. You sort of build something, then post it, then... It's just there. It probably gets a bit of attention for a week or so, then sort of fades away, like you can't really find anything interesting about an old Minecraft level, unless its really good. You can visit a Minecraft level on the InterServer 4, but you can't do anything with it, just look at it.

I've recently been trying to think of playable Minecraft levels, like where you're stuck in an odd situation and have to find a way out of it, but generally those ideas take an extremely long time to make very interesting, reliable, and glitch-free. Mojang is always implementing new features into the game, and removing and/or changing others, which can mess up circuitry, or game mechanics. So, those ideas often work when created but fail when a new game update is released. Some ideas that were brilliant, back in the day, are now useless or obsolete. For example, my solar-sensing machine that uses burning zombies, villagers, and pressure pads: I made it on singleplayer and was going to make it on the InterServer, but now Mojang is implementing solar panels to detect light strengths and signals. So, that idea is kind of useless. Minecraft isn't really a good game to try to get activity from on the Interguild, because things like that happen often, and you can't exactly, "play" other people's Minecraft levels.

Yesterday I was looking for a nice game with a level editor that we could add to the Interguild. Finding a GOOD game with a GOOD level editor is more difficult than it seems. It's also harder to find one that would suit the Interguild's twenty or so slightly inactive members well. A sandbox game like Minecraft is out of the question, because, like I said earlier, it's not great for levels. Every game has its drawbacks, especially Minecraft when it comes to levels. But overall, we need several more games to entertain the Interguild community, and unless we ACTUALLY look for and suggest them, nothing's gonna happen.

Ok, I've posted questions to some other forums I visit (because a few google searches didn't turn much up). I'll look into minecraft modding. If push really comes to shove, we can log the server chat in a file and write our own program to push new chat to the website's server, maybe with ftp.

I just had an idea: why doesn't Livio make the "Recent Posts and Comments" box bigger? I think it would be easier for new members to find their way into a currently popular topic.

Mainly because I didn't want to put so much stuff on the top of the page that you had to scroll down too far just to see the content.

That makes sense. Scrolling down too much would be annoying, but it would be nice if the box was slightly larger, not to interfere much, if at all, with the content underneath it.

Livio... I coded a plugin, and you have yet to install it... If you want more features, just tell me

Oh, and by proxy, I'm able to code mods, if the need arises

Do explain, is this sudden or has it been going a while?

Okay so, as a semi-new member of the interguild, I think there should be a very small box just above the recently commented topics, for basic things of all trade, like a tutorial wall for basically all things, then if you have a question just comment it, and rather than a random person answering wrong, and it shall be answered as an op using the interbot. Again, I think the feature would be great for new members and would be more friendly/easy to use for new members who just need a little guidance. Hope this helps.

I actually created a topic for interserver event ideas if you think it works well for your idea on larger focus on competitions

No one got back to me on it, and no one installed it, even though I asked multiple times

...And who would want to enter a competition if they know the results won't come out for three months? And that's part of the bigger problem here: nothing ever gets done. Weekly updates are never written, featured content is never updated, and games apparently take months to be added to the games list (the games list sucks, anyway though).

And then it's pretty lame how games like mario paint get added but then no content is ever added for them. But that's something else...

If I had to describe this site right now, I'd say it's a minecraft community. If I remember correctly, the minecraft forum is actually hidden from visitors though so they probably don't even realize. But right now, this site is "a multi-game level database." Does that need to change?? When you put all these games together, there's always going to be one or two that come out on top and then some at the bottom like Spore. The problem here is that there's a HUGE gap in activity between the top two games and all other games. Some soft of event (like a competition or someone could write an interesting blog post) could encourage more activity for those games and make the level DB appear more diverse. But that would require the staff to actually do something so that isn't gonna happen.

The games definitely need to be treated more equally though. Right now, the favicon for this site is something from HatPC, and the HatPC cavelist is linked to from every page on the site.

And soccerboy, I have been learning java but I'm better with php and MySQL because of 3+ years of experience with those. I also like the latter more because the rules and stuff are more chill. I don't know if you were suggested I should become Livio's co-admin though.

Maybe not have the label as co-admin but just have the power to fix things when livio is gone? If you had complete access to everything over the site, I'd trust you to not go through it and screw everything up.

I haven't been very active lately, but I feel like I should contribute something to this discussion. I’m going to expand on the “channel” idea I mentioned earlier because I think the Youtube comparison gave the wrong impression.

For starters, I doubt we will ever be as passionately devoted to a game as we were to Hannah and the Pirate Caves. Like Yaya said, every great game has had its innards scraped out by at least one hardcore community, and we were HatPC’s. Minecraft is cool, but I think basing the whole site around it would be a mistake in the long run. We'll just run into the same problem we're in now, and a lot sooner I reckon.

The idea that members will come for the service and stay for the community worked as well as it could have with the HatPC resources, but even if we put a serious effort into advertising, the level database isn’t something that people are clamoring for. The site's current model is obviously a dead-end. We create competitions to generate interest in games nobody cares about, when really there's a reason nobody cares about them. It's an inherent problem in basing the site on a game, or handful of games: truly good games are rare, and when we lose interest in the ones we have then chances are we won't have anything to turn to.

And if we took the site in the "general gaming" direction, I doubt we’d see any growth at all. It's just too saturated a niche.

So, what if we could make the lack of direction the purpose of the site? One of the things I like most about the Interguild is the sense of free creativity. There’s always been a focus on level design, but you can also post comics, art, music, choose-your-own adventure stories, blogs, programs, that funky puzzle Xyteran made – and no matter what you create, the community will be receptive to it. From the “community as a service” point of view, I think that’s our site’s best quality. There are no limitations: you can create whatever you want, with whichever tools you want, and if it’s good and interesting then you’ll find an audience.

For that reason, I suggest we lose the gaming focus. It would exist anyway, because that’s what we’re all interested in, but it doesn’t need to be the basis of the site. The Interguild could come to mean an international guild of creators: artists, programmers, writers, game designers. A place to collaborate, give and receive feedback, and find a place in the community doing whatever you like to do. We’d be able to carry on doing everything we already do, but the site would have much more marketability, versatility, and potential for growth. We could make site-wide collaborations a regular thing, projects that encourage us all to contribute our skills and work together to create something cool (like Aeon, but less ambitious).

To add more to the service side of things, it seems one of the best ways to keep members active and engaged in a site is by giving them their own corner of the site to play with (think Facebook, tumblr, those old Petpet pages, etc). Something more dynamic than a normal user profile. Each member could have a neat little wall/portfolio/channel of their creations. You could choose what you’d like to feature at the top, how you’d like to organize it, the colour scheme and layout. It would be deeply integrated into the site and flow through the front page. With enough polish, it could even be something you could direct a potential employer to.

So I guess what I'm suggesting is that the Interguild become a creativity hub, one that focuses on freedom, collaboration, and experimentation. We'd still be a gaming community in many ways, but that wouldn't be our purpose (though in a way we would be much more open to gaming than we are now; we'd abandon the idea of "supported" games and open our doors to everything).

But no matter what we choose to do, we've always been a pretty ambitious lot, and frankly I think we can do better than becoming another Minecraft site.

Seems like a good idea to me.

I've personally been pretty busy lately. I intended to have this half year be relaxed so I could take up some broadening stuff, such as being a TA, but in the end that extra stuff has kept me far more busy than I otherwise would have been. I have also lost interest in making levels for games some years ago. I grew tired of HatPC and compared to that almost every other game seems too limited.



All these problems are caused by three things: inactivity, time and just plain boredness.
The site is pretty inactive. We could do Weekly Updates, but then every Update would be about what happened in the One Post topic that week. There also very little new content, so either every single thing that gets posted will become Featured Content, or we simply don't bother with that anymore.
I think every active mod is in college now. This takes up not only time, but also a lot of your energy. You won't have that much energy left to work on the site when you've just finished a 12 hour assignment for Partial Differential Equations.
And finally, I think most mods are pretty tired of the games. I know I am. I notice this especially during the IO. I forced myself to get it judged in a reasonable timeframe, but after the first few rounds I simply hated every single level. I've been playing HatPC for about 10 years. I just don't enjoy playing it anymore. And the other games are generally worse. Every Red Remover level is either an agility test or just randomly selecting blocks until it suddenly works out and Minecraft is just legos with worse graphics. The only games I still enjoy somewhat are N and Amberial Axis, but it is too easy to make a level for those that is just plain annoying.

I feel like this will become an Ice-Caves Interguild hubrid type website if we do this.

I'm always hesitant to install more plugins than we need because Minecraft updates so frequently that it's just more plugins that could break with the next update. That's why we decided to go with Essentials' built-in crate-protection stuff rather than installing the one that we had before (although, that may or may not have been a good idea).

By the way, Jorster, can you post the source code of your plugin anywhere? Also, I used the op command a lot outside of the console, mainly for when I want to quickly deop myself while I'm testing permissions. But it'd be nice if when I did use the OP command in the console if it posted a message to the console so that I can get some feedback and see whether the command was successful or not.

I really like Sefro's post. I didn't much like the idea of becoming a dedicated minecraft community, and what he's getting at seems to be a lot closer to what the Interguild actually is at its core. It'd be cool if we could be much more open and accepting of different kinds of content and if our systems weren't so biased towards the few games that we've surrounded ourselves with. Although, I'm still not sure how exactly we'd present ourselves as. I mean, how would you describe the Interguild in a short sentence? Or better yet, what would our new tagline be?
The Interguild - A Gaming Community?
The Interguild - An awesome community?
[no tagline at all?]

I personally think the Interguild should never ever leave HATPC, even if it just gets overrated. In my opinion, there's no sense in making this site another Minecraft community. What happens in 2015 or 2020? I don't know, and I guess you don't know too, but I'm sure Minecraft is going to be treated like HATPC at the moment somewhere in the future. (almost) Everyone here has played HATPC from the earliest years of existing the game, and definitely nothing is going to be as related with Interguild as HATPC. Minecraft has "helped" the site in some kind, but since we all know it is not "going to be as related with Interguild as HATPC", there's even a bigger chance it gets even more overrated than HATPC in the not-too-far future.

I agree about the Minecraft being here and it's a pretty good idea. Without it I wouldn't even want to see what would happen to the site. I'm also always having fun when I'm playing Minecraft, but I definitely don't see in it any potential to "waste" Interguild for, and trash everything else nowhere. And this is why I'm now always feeling well about the Interguild when I see something like Buboy and Soccerboy's HATPC collab; even a new HATPC level is always nice to see! I've played HATPC when I was a kid (even more immature than when I was before my inactivity...), I don't even remember when, but I guess it was 2006. I played it on a Polish site so I didn't know anything about the cavemaker, I couldn't even play user levels from what I remember. I was leaving it several times because of not being able to beat all levels but always came back after a month or so. Then that game-site got revamped and there was no HATPC anymore there, and I remember sitting in the evening and designing HATPC levels on the paper with the knowledge "there's no way to make levels for this game, I can only design them on paper" very well, even though it was 7 years ago. I was very happy when I found it back in 2008 and when I joined Interguild to have fun with it, but after leaving Interguild in 2010 and coming back after two years, you can't just feel what I've seen. Leave a very well working community with lots of memories and come back to a... well... no words. I'd think more carefully about competely changing the Interguild with the effect of having HATPC trashed away from it.

About the Interguild itself... I think the search engine could be more effective.

For example, but for now it searches only by the words used in the name of the topic, at least at me. In the Isa's Fiddler tutorial video he was searching for CSD's Realm of Dying Brain if I remember well, and there were no results. When one letter is different, the search engine could be a bit more flexible and search for some topics with similar words, that were used to search, instead of showing no results. It could also search through the actual contents of the topics, it would help a lot. These are my thoughts for now.