Website, Forum and more ...

Hello dear Methuselah's !

Michel and I have been discussing a lot, during the past few weeks, about what we could change or keep for our forum.
The main idea was to bring back some of our old content from the former versions of our forum VTES in Belgium (even what we had before being on www.vtes.be).

First, a quick reminder, Michel is well-versed in informatics and technology, from his job, his studies and hobbies.
And myself, being a webmaster on my side-job and also using some new technologies for my hobbies.
I think we both have a good combined view about what we would need and what we could improve here.

But of course, asking the community is always a good idea.

So, would any of you have ideas about what he or she would like to see on this forum/website ?

Here is a random list of ideas Michel and I had :
- adding a calendar feature where we could plan events and games
- adding a 'website' button in the top menu, so visitors could switch to the website part of www.vtes.be (the forum would stay the first thing you see when reaching our site)
- on the website : rules, articles, archetypes, stategies, news ...
- photo gallery for events
- what else ? (a nespresso machine ? lol)

As to programs and technology we would use, we decided to stick to Joomla for the website and Kunena for the forum, both being still actively developed and 100% free. Besides, a lot of addons/features can be added to them to fit our needs.

An alternative forum would be Xenforo, as I proposed a few years ago. It is imho more convenient and powerful, but there is always the issue of migrating our data to the new forum and also Xenforo wouldn't be integrated in the website (joomla).
In case you want to check what Xenforo looks like and all its possibilities, you can check their website here : xenforo.com/
Also, I had created a demo-xenforo for us here when talking about it with Michel : www.vtes.be/xenforo (but this one has no templates and barely no content ... it was just to check if it was working good ^^).

Another idea I had in mind and talked to Michel is about using Discord.
Table talk is really important in our VTES games. Of course, there is no issues when we meet "in real life", or otherwise said "in the flesh" (for our fellow Tzscimisce's...).
But some of us took the habit to play on LackeyCCG, where I think there is no "vocal chat" features.
A Discord channel could then be combined to LackeyCCG to organize friendly games between our fellow Belgian players. ^^
It's 100% free and I have actually already setup a channel here : discord.gg/jBPRbyV
(the Discord link here is permanent, but I may change it if spammers find it as we are on an open discussion ^^).
Also, Discord could also simply be use to chat (text or vocal) for organizing our weekly games, deck building sessions or tournaments, or just spending some free time chatting about anything.

And lastly, as Michel and I were thinking about bringing back our old website to live, I found some old backups and put them back online. If you want to visit them and check if there are things that could be useful and would be worth bringing back to our new website, that would be great
- old.vtes.be/
- old.vtes.be/v1015/

Any other ideas are welcome and we will do our best to maintain and expand our website/forum and offer easy and useful content to new players that would like to start (again) the game.

Thx !

-Luke-

Just one little precision on the old vtes articles.
In my mind those old articles could be integrated in web part to come on the current forum site with the current template.
Of course some articles will need to be updated and maybe some will not be taken back. Luke and me will do that job.

Among this everybody in the community could also send an article and we will publish it.
Those will be informative articles, presenting or explaining useful information for new and old players.
Debates about subjects will be done in the forum.
So you could explain the strategy of an original deck of yours in an article, but discussing or debating on how to ameliorate it or playing it should stay on the forum.
Also if a question on the forum needs an extensive answer, this answer could also refer to an article on the website.
And the website also permits to translate those articles in French or Dutch to allow new players (and sometime older ones) to better understand.
I certainly could translate articles in English or Dutch to French. so you could send an article written in your own language.

On the website we could also put other extensions such as :
- photo or video gallery
- video tutorials
- connection to other (social) medias
- RSS flux
- etc
Tell us what you want.
Personnaly I am not interested in the Nespresso machine, but a teapot will be fine