Hi Guys! I am curently thinking of investingsome money in a vBulliten site that is halo based. I want the site to have an active, and happy community like we do here. So what aspect of halo should I make the siteabout. What would be cool, something you join?
ForgeHub has everything Halo, why would we join somewhere else if we have all our wants and needs here? Save your money, your website won't go anywhere.
Joining a website with the hope of being part of it's success is majorly a trust thing. It's a long-term investment of time, enthusiasm and effort. Nobody would join with real intent unless you showed an even greater amount of enthusiasm and effort. You don't even know what the website will focus on, and having a niche' is everything. I don't think anyone will show real interest until you really stop and think exactly what you want, and know exactly why it will work.
I did what you want to do a year ago. ForgeBattle.com if you want to look at what I did. FYI I hope you have at least $200 - $400 to make it all come together. The software is not user friendly. I hope you know a lot about computers, mods, codes, skins, files, etc. If you don't you will have your hands full. I would say go for it. If you think you can pull it off, then do it. Don't let anyone talk you out of something that you really want to do. I would say that your timing is a bit late. There are about 10 VB sites dedicated to Halo out now. It's tough to get members. I tried to PM a few members on this site a long time ago and got myself a one week ban. Finding members is the hard part. As far as the content of the site, make it cover all aspects of Halo. You can create an unlimited number of forums with your VB software. Have it have maps, games, off topic, forge, pics, videos, etc. By having it cover all aspects of Halo, you will have more of a chance of success. Again, if you are passionate about it, then do it! Reach is coming soon and everything is going to explode again. This would be a good time to get it together now. Good luck!
Indeed you can create an unlimited amount of forums. But the problem I find with most new forums is that they have hundreds of forums made for one specific subject. ex. Code: "Halo Campaign" "Halo Multiplayer" --> "MLG Halo" "Halo Customs" "Halo Forge" -->"Sandbox" You want to start off with a small number of forums. Announcements, Customer Service and Introductions are important forums, and every forum has those, even though it may not be called that. After those, come your Content forums. These will be the forums that people do what I stated above. Start off very generally with your forums. The biggest turn-off to a forum starting out is empty forums.
Recruiting is pretty damn hard. There are too many "Do it all,Play it all" type sites out there. If you really want to start your own site, wait for Reach. There's bound to be something in Reach you can base your site off. Like Forge in Halo 3.
or... get a head start and create a Reach site before it is released, that way when the game is released, you have a site there, and hopefully you could get a good domain name. idk if you have heard but next Saturday, Reach will have a world premier at the Spike VGA. take a look at that and see if there is anything of interest. i would love to join a budding community.
Yeah thats probably what I'll do. Ill wait till saturday and build a site around whatever hype it creates.
Alot of people will probably be doing it first. And a site takes a few days to actually get set up, so If you're 100% sure on this, I'd suggest making sometime in this next week, so you can get everything set up and start drawing in members the second the VGA's are over.
of course, there would be the small problem of picking a domain name fitting to whatever he wants the site to be about... if you could get a somewhat generic name, i would suggest do this, and create the vBulletin topics once the VGA's are over. otherwise, wait. that would be my plan of choice - wait and see whats popular.
If you are unsure what you want to base it on, then you could try joining another forum that's fairly knew, and try helping make that as successful as possible. That way you wont have as much competition, you wont have to spend 200-400 bucks, and there will already be a bunch of people wanting to help you. Not that i have a particular one in mind
I was stacking wood and thinking about this.. heres an idea for a general Halo site. get a domain like haloprojects.org or something like that, and you could create a site that basically hosts multiple community projects. there are so many little projects that people have who don't really have a place to go for them. Example: In a discussion on the Optimatch Forums on Bnet, a few community members and I decided we wanted to all get together and forge a group of maps that were basically remixes of all of the Pre-DLC maps. We hoped to bring a fresh set of new weaponsets to Matchmaking by submitting these maps once they had been balanced/playtested. Unfortunately, nothing has really come of it so far because we have had no way whatsoever to colaborate. A website like this could have a forum where Entrepreneurs could write up a post detailing a project they would like to start, and if accepted, a forum would be created specifically for that project, and the project head would become a moderator of that forum only. you would get quite the large and diverse Halo Population, even possibly from different halo games. i can think of so many groups of people who would like to be given a place to be able to put their ideas to work. you could also include all general halo discussion as well.. just my input for an idea.
Wow that is a great idea Knight, wish I would have thought of that And this way you don't have to wait till the VGA's to make your site.
How about a name like ProjectHalo, its simple to remember and it fits with knights idea. Id help out with it if it was made because I know you would get members definatley for that idea, not so much to start of with tough. You WILL need to know how to code or hire someone to code for you. PHP is not something you can learn in a week and it will be needed if you wanted this idea to go ahead, you would have to make a lot of modifications yourself.
Depending on the forums software, I can be a major help. I've run quite a few phpBB forums and have an extensive Moderator knowledge with vBulletin and basic Admin knowledge.
i like everyone's thoughts, but IMHO, if luckie wants to do it we could keep at it, but if he doesnt want to we could discuss this elsewhere