Guild Website - Consensus

We'd like to make the guild website as generative as we can. Particular ideas:

• Guildie Spotlight.. Suggested by Mori at the October 23 Meeting. It would be kind of fun to mimick the "celebrity profiles" that a lot of magazines have, e.g. doing in-game photo shoots with the guildie and such. Whoever does each profile should be encouraged to be as creative as they want, though.

• Wiki-like. The guild website should have a lot of the generative features of a wiki. In particular, the ability to track changes and revert to a previous version of content is very important, because it invites experimentation: no one has the fear of "messing up" because their changes can easily be undone.

• Personal message system. A PM system could be part of the forum system or be a separate feature. Sometimes in SC, email addresses in profiles weren't up to date, and the only way to reach someone outside of the game was to write a post on the board. Something slightly more private is sometimes appropriate. ~Chao

IMO, the "whisper" feature on our current Vanilla forum software offers this functionality without providing a whole different interface for it like many forums do. So if we don't end up using Vanilla for our final website, we should definitely copy this feature. Simplicity FTW! -Mareyn 15:01, 28 October 2008 (UTC)

• News features. Maybe for certain events, such as guild nights or server parties, guildies can choose to be a "reporter" for that event. Reporters can take screenshots/videos or get them from other people, write down quotes and notes, and then do a news feature on the event. People can then upload additional screenshots into a gallery, etc. Then we'd have a nice consolidated document for each major event in the guild's history. ~Chao

• Open Community Section. Having a portion of the website open to non-members for input, feedback. Might be a good way to find potential members, seeing contributions from others. It will have to have monitoring for trolls, abuse, etc. ~Marwyn

• Fashion/Costume Gallery. A section of the site containing images of cool outfits, with links to the items that comprise them. Perhaps a rating/review system so that the most well-liked ones got pushed to the top or publicized on the guild's front page.

• Foes and Allies. When a guildie groups with someone new in a PuG, if they have an especially positive or negative experience with the person, they can note it on a special section of the site that aggregates feedback about all players on the server. This kind of rating system could make it easier to find people outside of the guild to play with.

• Chat Box. A chat box feature would help foster people visiting the website, communicating with each other, getting to know each other. While people may not make a thread just to say good morning to everyone, they might post this type of short snip-it in a chat box. Here is a link to the one I use on Chamber of Guilds. ~Charyse

• Roster. A roster is very helpful so anyone can see who the members of the guild are. Incorporating a way to link a guild member and their alts in the guild together on the roster would be a nice touch. ~Charyse

• Calendar Tie-In. Is there anyway to tie in to the in-game Calendar and have it show guild wide events on the website? Might be handy for those stuck at work to be able to see up coming events. I like the calendar feature on the SC site for birthdays and such. Not sure how hard it would be to write a program for that. ~Marwyn

Forums

• Forum Sections. We'll need separate sections within the forum itself to support different group activities such as raiding, tradeskills, mentoring activities, general topics, pvp, blah blah blah. I'll be starting a Forum Section Ideas Wiki Page for brainstorming. ~Marwyn

• Spell Check Function. Okay, so I am a horrible speller. I admit it. Pretty please with sugar on top can we have a spell check function for the forum area? ~Charyse

Modern browsers, e.g. Firefox, have built-in spell check for multi-line text input areas. That is the correct place to implement it, since every web app benefits and all the work is done client-side. ~Zakones

• Emoticons. Need I say more? *big grin* ~Charyse

Profiles

Also see the "Discussion" page for more thoughts.

• Micro-blogging. It's a big word for a simple concept: little "status updates" that you can post whenever you want that say something about your current state of mind or what you're doing in-game. e.g., "Mareyn is diplomatically slaying Warmaul Ogres by the thousands." These can be aggregated into one page to provide a sort of stream-of-consciousness for the whole guild. For more information on this kind of "ambient awareness", check out the New York Times article Brave New World of Digital Intimacy or the Wikipedia entry for Micro-blogging.

• Alt list. A member's profile page should have a list of all alts linked to that member. The site can be cross-referenced so going to the alt's page redirects you to the main's page. Or if the alt has a strong identity in its own, it can have its own page (for example, participates in separate raid groups or has a different focus from the main such as RP-ing vs. PVP-ing).

• RSS Aggregation. Similar to "planet" aggregators or Facebook's feed importers, guildies should be able to specify feeds for their WoW-centric blogs, Flickr accounts, and so forth so that it's easy to see what everyone's doing in one place. Also see discussion here.

• Galleries. This might just be lumped into RSS aggregation in implementation, but it would be nice for guildies to be able to upload screenshots easily. A gallery of a member's experiences can tell a good story about what that member likes to do in game.

• Addons list. People can list all of the addons they use. Guild statistics can show popular addons and help people discover new addons that might be useful to them (all other healers in the guild use this... maybe it would interest you if you're a healer, etc.)

• WoW CV. How long you've been playing, what servers you're on, raid groups you've been in, your guild history, and all that.

• RL interests.

• Subforum. Other members can talk directly to the person about their interests in both WoW and RL.

• Custom Achievements. The website could interface with the WoW Armory to award special achievements that aren't already part of the game's achievement system. These achievements would only be visible on the website, of course, but they could be broadcast out to anyone who visits the website and so forth.

• Barnstars. These can be titles/achievements that can only be given by other guildies. These are essentially a form of user-created "awards" that guildies can give each other as a way of expressing gratitude; it's a practice that's very big on Wikipedia. For more information, check out the Barnstars Wikipedia page; Jonathan Zittrain also describes them nicely here.

I really love the Barnstar idea. It would be fun to implement it and recognize contributions people make to the community. Should they be 'tacked' on someone's talk page or in a specific spot set aside for that or? marwyn

I think they're tacked on to someone's user page; check out wikipedia:User:AxelBoldt#Awards for an example. -Mareyn 13:52, 3 November 2008 (UTC)

• Posts made on forums. A history of posts made by this member on the guild forums. You can see what topics this member is most passionate about.

• Mentor checkbox. Whether this member is interested in being a mentor.

This could probably be implemented using Mediawiki categories. That is, a user who is interested in being a mentor can just put the text [[Category:Mentors]] at the bottom of their user page. -Mareyn 13:52, 3 November 2008 (UTC)

• Bank activity. Log of interactions with guild bank, muahaha.

More technical details on the Consensus server infrastructure can be found at Guild Server.