IskatuMesk wrote:So PQ was the only one working on the site? What are you going to do with it now?
PQ and I were the only official team members. He did coding, I did whatever else.
The plan was to build a front page that used the wiki and forum as a backend, fetching content from them and displaying it in a custom, streamlined manner. CampaignCreations does this with its
front page and the
News forum here, allowing us to manage who has posting rights through existing software.
PQ coded the same sort of
news system on
Modcrafters. In addition, we planned for the tabs PLAY, LEARN, and CRAFT to pull from specific categories on the wiki. PLAY would have been a mod download database, LEARN a tutorial database, and CRAFT a tool and resource database.
To add to any of these databases, you would create a wiki page, use a designated template that the database would draw from to summarize your entry, and assign the page to the appropriate category. Since it's a wiki page, you can add more info outside of the template on the rest of the page, with wiki links to anything you want. Users could jump to the wiki page from the database to see all the additional content.
For example: Program downloads like FireGraft and DatEdit in CRAFT could inter-link to appropriate tutorials in LEARN. If you wanted to provide extensive stats and descriptions for units and buildings in your mod, you would have the freedom to do so on the wiki. The idea was that by using a wiki as a backend, the community could build up, refine, and update the content as time passed.
When PQ had to retire, I didn't have the technical knowledge to implement the full concept. I forget what was going on for me at the time, but I know I considered scaling the project down to just the wiki and forum, without all the fancy aesthetics that the databases would bring to those browsing.
Right now, I am preserving the site as an archive. Many people contributed awesome content, so I don't want to see it just disappear into the night. Unfortunately, the webhost has forced a version upgrade of PHP, so the wiki hasn't worked for a long while because it needs to be updated to work on the higher version of PHP. Bleh.
IskatuMesk wrote:CC has a lot of registrations that aren't bots but never actually contributed anything. I don't take that kind of statistic into account for anything.
I wouldn't use the memberlist as a metric for CC, either; we're too old. With MC, though, I only expected a couple dozen people, at most, since we were in very early development and I did almost no advertising. Take away me, PQ, you, the generic user Modcrafter that I made, and the 13 people who never made a post (e.g. WarGiant), and that's 74 other people who popped in and posted at least once. I was happy to know there was more interest in SC modding in 2009 than I anticipated.