Is there anything as a community would could do? Source some development work?
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GD.net 2015 Budgeting concerns?
Is there anything as a community would could do? Source some development work?
Would people pay for it though?
There was that one guy (on the old site) that hosted an OGL tutorial site on GD.net. Maybe, GD.net could host other sites and we can pay a small fee? We can be GD.net affiliates.. or something.
Or maybe, if you're a Yearly or "Platinum" member (yes, i made that up), you can get reviews on any assets or games you make?
I think people would pay for those things if the site offered such services.
Dragonsoulj, on 28 Jun 2015 - 10:48 PM, said:
Is there anything as a community would could do? Source some development work?
Would people pay for it though?
I was more thinking the community helping work on the site to fix problems and get us to where we need to be.
Dragonsoulj, on 28 Jun 2015 - 10:48 PM, said:
Is there anything as a community would could do? Source some development work?
Would people pay for it though?
I was more thinking the community helping work on the site to fix problems and get us to where we need to be.
Oh. Well that's a great idea too. But there would have to be a dedicated group for that. Outside the mods and staff. And that's kinda hard to put together.
Has the mods or staff ever put a list together of what they need help with and want they would like or what skill sets one would need to help out?
Has the mods or staff ever put a list together of what they need help with and want they would like or what skill sets one would need to help out?
At one point or another, yes, but that's not the challenge in crowd-sourcing the work. The challenge is how to actually get people who are willing to do this sort of work to do it productively, safely and legally. There's all the management inherit in running a large open-source project (prioritizing tasks, vetting contributions are relevant and correct, finding a reasonable way for contributors to be able to test their contributions in a safe environment, that sort of stuff). Plus the extra complications inherent in the fact that GDNet is a business and needs to appropriately shield itself from liability (we don't want another fongerchat-esque debacle, especially since people have financial information on here now in some capacity) and conform to its licensing agreements (for example, Invision's board isn't, to my knowledge, open-source so GDNet is likely limited in who it can allow to see the source code).
I don't pretend to know all the wrinkles but experience tells me that the bottleneck is not going to be people willing and able to do the work, it's going to be the process.
Every time discussion of financing GameDev.net comes up, I always mention the simple fact that there is no easily findable donation link.
You guys have a donation page - you just don't have it prominently located in the headerbar. It's a secret donation page, apparently. 
You also have your not-ever-linked to GameDev.net CafePress store. CafePress probably gives pretty terrible margins though.
A visible donation link is Step 1. It should go at the top like this:
Donate | Chat | Watched Content | New Content
Following that, GameDev.net has alot of people making games, but most of us are hobbyists, professionals in the industry, or people trying to go indie but who haven't actually done so yet. The number of people who are actively and successfully indie (having already released commercial games independently) can, as far as I know, be counted on your fingers. Selling services to commercial indie developers is probably not the best idea.
People come to GameDev.net to learn, and they often want to know what books to buy. You already have Amazon.com referal links. Have a page set up listing ten or twelve programming books that the GameDev community recommends, with a paragraph describing who that book is well suited for. Link to the Amazon.com page using the GD.net referral link.
Whenever no community ads are running, show an ad like this:
(ofcourse the entire ad is a link, not just the underlined grey text)
You need a moderator or staff member (*cough* Gaiiden *cough*) who once a year updates the page with the book recommendations, but other than that, it's low-implementation cost, low maintenance cost, and probably would actually generate revenue.
The community would be happy to recommend books - just start a thread and we'd give you twenty books easily. Break the books into several categories (programming, art, design, or whatever).
Start it off with Pragmatic Programmer, Design Patterns, and Code Complete 2nd Edition. Then recommend GameDev.net's own Mat Buckland's AI book.
Most of the Astle/Hawkins OpenGL books (1 2 3 4) are seriously out of date now, so don't recommend those (I just donated mine to the local library literally a month ago). If any of the GameDev.net books are still useful, link those - but not if they are out of date! I don't own any of those, so I don't know if they're out of date, but others in the community could probably tell you.
With a properly visible donation link, and vouching for books we know are quality, to a community who is filled with people who are actually looking for books like that, it'd probably go a long way towards helping GameDev.net.
These are things that can be done in a single weekend by a single staff member, are much less speculative, and don't create long-term maintenance problems.
I can tell from experience that these shirts are fun conversation starters :).Why do I not have one of these shirts yet?
If this site ever starts to host, i'd recommend at least 3 levels of service:
The first level would offer a drag-and-drop style of editor, functioning a lot like GeoCities did ( way back in the day ).
The second level would offer a basic [HTML/PHP/JS/SQL] IDE , and hosting services for PHP and SQL .
The third level would offer more languages and plugins, maybe going as far as hosting servers ( ? game servers ? )
Each tier would have a base price, with monthly allotted storage and bandwidth usage. Users have the option to pay for additional chunks of storage and usage.
This site could easily compete with other web hosts IF they target folks who are newish to web-dev AND make sure all hosting features are very simple to use and understand.
I don't think we made any secret of the fact that we really needed that survey we ran earlier in the year to go well. Thankfully the community really rallied to it and it did go well, so between that and some cost cutting the site is fine for now.it seems that their may be a potential long term budget problem with supporting this site?
As I alluded to in the other topic you referenced however, I would really prefer that we were better than "fine for now"; ideally it should never get to a point where we really need one particular thing to go well to keep the site running, and in a perfect world we would have a budget for making improvements to the site -- even if it's just being able to pay to have a single developer dedicating part time hours rather than everything being done in spare time.
I hope the site can reach that point as well, I'm glad their arn't as immediate financial issues and the survey is still covering the site for a good bit.
my first suggestion would be to look at the system something like reddit uses:
Mike actually came up with something like this a while back, so it's good to see others also think it may be a good idea. Hopefully it's something he can get implemented at some point that might help out.
Personally I think our GDNet+ offering has always been a little half-hearted with "most ads" removed, and would probably be a lot more attractive if it gave the option of removing all ads -- probably with an opt-in setting to allow people to voluntarily still see the community-contributed ads we're currently running in the header slot.
As something that's been a really popular request I'd also love to see a black theme on offer as part of GDNet+, but properly themeing Invision -- especially with the sheer number of pages that make up our site -- is as painful as doing most other things to Invision, which as you might be gathering is distinctly non-trivial.
A black theme would probably help with the + offering quite a bit, not that i dislike the white theme anyway. Personally i'm hoping something can be devised that well offer the site the resources it'll need for the long term. And overall it sounds like the first step would be moving away from the invision, it's unfortuante though that the site seems to sit in this twilight zone of good enough to keep going, but not good enough to get the dedicated time it needs to make improvements.
Dragonsoulj, on 28 Jun 2015 - 10:48 PM, said:
Is there anything as a community would could do? Source some development work?
Would people pay for it though?
I was more thinking the community helping work on the site to fix problems and get us to where we need to be.
I like this idea as well, but i suppose i see two issues. first as has been suggested, the software the site sits on isn't free, so it's likely that would be an issue. secondly is actual interest from developers to work on the site.(personally i'm not a web developer, so i wouldn't be able to help much). But i could see the model potentially working by setting up a github of the site's source, then the admin's can choose to merge user patches into the main branch. while user created patches/features could be branched and maybe a test site could be used to test those features out? either way I think for such an avenue to exist, the site would have to find an open source forum software to switch to, which i'm certain is no small task.
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