I really wanted to reply to this sooner, but I kept having stuff interrupt me every time I tried to sit down and do it. It's a bit late at this point, but thanks for throwing yourself to the proverbial (actual?) wolves, Axem.
You made some very well-founded points in there. That other ****ty thread aside, I can definitely see how a relative lack of feedback on a new release can seem discouraging, especially when it's a FREDder like you throwing all sorts of crazy complicated tricks under the hood. I think the one problem there is that, to the uninitiated like me, it can be extremely hard to tell from the outside that a certain mission took a massive amount of trial-and-error to pull something amazing off. I've always enjoyed reading threads where FREDders/coders go into more detail about specific tricks they've pulled off; stuff like your more advanced tutorials, or Battuta's legendary bughunt threads, help give the rest of us a peek into that side of modding. If there is something that you're not sure was worth the time investment, maybe try making a thread like that, and see if something comes of it.
I completely agree with the idea that we're not doing a proper job of making content visible to even our own community, much less outsiders; there's a whole lot that flies under people's radars, even those of us who are fairly involved here. Black Wolf had a great point in that, for the more casual visitor, HLP is primarily a website about FS2 modding, not just the forum that most of us skip directly to. The front page really needs a significantly-higher rate of news posts, to get out there the amount of work that's actually happening. I can't help but think of the few times I've visited the Wing Commander CIC site, which seems to have one or two news postings
per day...they can't really be that many times more active than we are, can they? I don't know if the answer is to bring on a few new staff members solely dedicated to making news posts, or for those of us who already can to step it up, or both, but something has to change there. As it stands, if you've created something cool and haven't seen it promoted, please, feel free to bug me or one of the other global mods/admins about it, and we'll get it posted. We usually respond well to prodding.
The points about the general user-friendliness of mod pages on the wiki and FSMods is another good one, though that's an issue that's a bit more difficult to resolve. While any of us can edit the wiki, the sort of really comprehensive presentation that'd work best is something that I think is best suited to the mod's original creators. And as far as I know, FSMods changes like that would fall solely on Swantz, which is too much to pile on top of someone who's already doing a ton by running the site in the first place. We could probably use some brainstorming on this part.
I agree that we should try to diversify the site's overall focus somewhat; giving the MechCommander and StarShatter projects/communities a home here sets a great precedent. Obviously not every space-sim-ish/open-source game under the sun is in need of a home, but I'm sure there are enough out there that it'd be worth pursuing. Trying to tap into the excitement over Chris Roberts' new campaign is an opportunity we shouldn't pass up either.
And finally, I'm completely behind a "Campaign of the Month" project; lord knows I have a pretty massive backlog myself. I'm a fairly-active anime viewer, and I've always found that it's easiest to sit down and watch stuff if I'm doing it as part of some external ongoing discussion, so something like this would definitely get me playing on a regular basis again. If someone sets it up, I'm there.
