VGH Community Enhancements (We need your help!)

Hey Everyone,

As you know we are a continually growing site.

We are currently looking into the next big update and with that we are going to include major community enhancements. (This includes us actually moving into a legit server, with all the features all inclusive.)

So far here are some of my ideas:

1. Enhanced personal profiles for each member made at the site with avatar and user information.
2. New improved forums and comment system for the main site (with comment rating system) (Separate Server, which gives us a 95% Up-time)
3. User blogs
4. Enhanced chat, and perhaps even separate Aim-like chat module for the AIM users or perhaps ICQ, MSN, or Yahoo as well.
5. User Friend's list
6. VGH Store
7. Press Release Panels

This is all slowly in the works, but I wanted to get some of your feedback as well, because I don't want you guys to be left out in the decision making process.

So...any thoughts?

Perhaps a option to allow users to "follow" or "friend" other users to be alerted on what they are doing?

You can already see that. Just go to their profile page, right below the name it'll tell you what they're doing, or the last time they were on if they're offline.

Aside from that, I really only care about the improved forum chat, this current one tends to lag a lot.

Well the chatbox does crash sometimes but this ain't about site issues so back on topic. I would really like to see how the user blogs will turn out since the community could be a bit more involved in news and discussions of games and whatnot. The enhanced user profiles sound interesting as well and would like so see changes in those.

Hmmm..:

1.A forum jukebox where members can request music for all to hear, paid via Credits, or something...
2.An indicator somewhere in the main forum page that signals whether the feed is Live or not.
3.For newly registered users, limit all other threads besides like "Your name/chatname; Favourite games/Genres; Tell us about yourself; etc." and when they hit, maybe 3 posts(?), all of the threads are open for them.


btw, whoever is doing the site is really doing a great job. I have been following the changes, and I really like what you have done with it. It's not hard in the eyes, and it's pretty nifty looking. Thanks for all you do!

Where did Henchmen of the Month go? I'd like to see more of that. As well as Gaming Headlines and the Live Feed.

Also, I hink user blogs would be a cool idea. The chat does lag, so it'd be nice to have it working better.

But yeah. Blogs would be nice for people who play all sorts of games. You could see what kind of games interest them.

Left4DeadFan wrote:

You can already see that. Just go to their profile page, right below the name it'll tell you what they're doing, or the last time they were on if they're offline.

Aside from that, I really only care about the improved forum chat, this current one tends to lag a lot.

There's kind of a friends list already, but it provides next to no function. I think what he was thinking more along the lines of a Twitter-like page that will list stuff that your friends have done recently.

Say I have VGH Evan on my friends list. He posts in a thread, posts to his user blog, and then comments on someones profile. If the page existed, I could go to the Twitter-like page, and see all of that activity, including the activity from the rest of the people on my friends list.

At least, that's what it sounded like to me. And that'd be a cool feature, if it's even possible.

Yeah, that would be kinda nice. I mean, we don't need to turn the forum into another social network with status updates and stuff, but there are enough lurkers around here that someone (me?) will want to creep up on what the other members are doing.

As for blogs, while they seem like a nice idea, I question if there will be a lot of interest in them. If people aren't paying attention to review threads that are right there, I'm not sure they'd go to the trouble of checking a member's personal blog. And anyone who would pay attention to a blog would have probably noticed a thread that user posted to begin with.

I'm all up for enhanced user profiles, though. Seems like a small, simple addition that doesn't waste a lot of time or effort, while still improving the site somewhat.

MenstrualGravy wrote:

Hmmm..:

1.A forum jukebox where members can request music for all to hear, paid via Credits, or something...

yes yes yes!
Fucking forum jukebox!

MenstrualGravy wrote:

2.An indicator somewhere in the main forum page that signals whether the feed is Live or not.

I remember way back when the feed was embedded on the front page. I liked how this showed very easily when the feed was up and when it wasn't. Something similar to this would be nice, especially with how jtv is and not sending out emails when broadcasters are up for some reason. Not saying the feed should be embedded on the site but something similar to that effect should be on the front page.

also, like the user blog thing I would like to ask will we be able to make any blogs private or just viewable by friends or will it be public always?

These all sound great, and I look forward to seeing them come to fruition. I've got a few thoughts, though, so I'm going to respond to some of these ideas.

Regarding the enhancement of the personal profiles; One thing I'm curious about is the avatar bit. We already have avatars, so will this be a sort of enhancement that will allow bigger avatars? Or do you mean avatar as in the Xbox 360/Mii sense? The latter avatar thing could be an interesting idea, especially if you add a sort of "mall" where we can buy clothes/accessories for our avatars using Henchmen Credits. Then again, that might be way too tedious to accomplish, and might not be what you meant in the first place.

Regarding the comment rating system; The forums already has a comment rating system, but it's something easily overlooked and mainly pointless. There probably should be a reward system for serious posters, you know, to smarten up the community. Maybe the comment system could reward the poster with HC, with the amount dependent upon the rating. And then you could add a sort of meter on the profile page that has how many of each rating the member has gotten. Also, it might be helpful to show ratings when looking through a member's posts.

Regarding the enhanced chat; Definitely needs updating. Archives take an absurdly long time to load.

These are just ideas that I'm throwing out there. Right now, I'm satisfied with the forums. Is it perfect? No, but it does its job, and that's really the most important part. There will always be something that will need to be improved, but regardless I'm looking forward to what comes next.