[Fury]

Currently we have pretty much all of our eggs in one basket, but sadly all the other community websites like Game Warden and Sectorgame have fallen into obscurity. The others no longer exist. Nevertheless, I could launch another community website if there is sufficient interest among the community to be active part of such a website.

The reason why previous websites failed to gather enough activity I believe, is two-fold.
1) At least one popular and actively developed hosted project is needed to gather an active audience and build momentum.
2) Modding these days require at bare minimum version control, bug-tracking and wiki in addition to website and forum hosting.

Still, it's hard to make anything out of it if community at large prefers singular place for everything FreeSpace. I can't deny that it is advantageous for all projects to be in the same place to receive the attention they deserve and need. But at the same time, I can't help but wonder if this is actually healthy to the community to have only one big place like HLP. I'm not discounting what GW and SG have or did have, but the sad truth is that they're almost meaningless today.

What if we had two roughly equally popular community websites? This would at least promote choice and little bit of friendly competition to keep the community progressing to provide best possible service to the community and hosted projects. On the other hand, would having two popular community websites serve as a dividing factor among the capable modders and coders? Would these and other people prefer to stick to one website, instead of being actively part of both?

The bottom line? Does single community website serve our interests the best? Or would two equally popular communities help us progress towards something better? Both have their pros and cons.

Even if vote is cast towards two websites, the tricky part is making it popular. Of course the new website would provide at bare minimum same services as HLP does, meaning project websites, forums, wiki, bug-tracker, version control, etc. Assuming you'd get all of those and more, would you consider moving your project to the new website to help it grow?

Time to give it your vote, folks!

[Black Wolf]

Seems like... well, massive duplication of effort if I'm honest. FS isn't Star Wars or Trek or Half Life or anything like that. We're a tiny community kept alive by a significantly tinier pool of modders. I see very little advantage in splitting that pool in half, personally. And then there're big community projects - primarily the FS Upgrade and SCP but also the wiki - assuming none of them moved... well, what would be the incentive to visit the other community more than sporadically? What would it offer that HLP currently doesn't?

[General Battuta]

This is a very good idea. I don't think it'll work, but I think it's a good idea!

[Mongoose]

Can't say I see much of a purpose to it.  Not that it's a comparable situation, but the main Descent community forum wound up splitting into two nigh-identical sites after something of an ego clash, and all that wound up accomplishing was two somewhat-deader forums with a significant cross-over population.  I feel like the same thing would most likely wind up happening in this case.

[Terminator]

I don't think the community is what it once was and as such probably wouldn't sustain another full time community site. I still remember the Descent Chronicles vs. Planet FreeSpace days.

[karajorma]

I don't think it would work. I can fully see and sympathise with Fury's reasons for wanting it to work, but I don't think it would.

1) Whichever site the SCP remains on is always going to be the main site. Other sites have come and gone, the SCP is almost certainly one of the major reasons for HLP's longevity. Any users who only go to a site which doesn't have the SCP on it are at a significant disadvantage. So at best you'd end up with two sites where most of the active community visit both. More likely you'd end up with two sites where the SCP hosting site was the more popular one. It was largely this which sunk Game-Warden. Even during its heyday it was always much less popular than HLP. And that was when it was hosting BtRL and SoL at the peak of their popularity. 

2) Without the community all in one site, there are significant problems keeping everyone abreast of what's new. When GW was popular I spent quite a bit of time explaining new SCP advances to the other modders on the BtRL team.


Now obviously I'm an admin here on HLP and you should ignore everything I've said as an obvious attempt to stop you escaping from my evil clutches.

[Dragon]

I prefer to keep everything in one place. It's convenient, except when the site crashes, of course.

[Nuke]

i like to keep things centralized. fragmentation kills communities.

[Rodo]

I'll stick with HLP, it's very me having all things related on the same place so the actual configuration feels almost natural.
I remember when I frequented GW, I did not like that cause my attention had to be spread out between two sites.

[Mobius]

If it doesn't focus too much on FreeSpace, a new site would work. I know some three other forums which are way too focused on particular subjects (a game, a series, an author, despite having their own versions of HLP's "General Discussion") and that is leading to their death. In order to survive, forums should evolve; if your goal is to create one big forum for all space and flight sim enthusiasts, for example, you may eventually succeed. If you're going to focus on FreeSpace, only, I hard believe you'll get anywhere.

There are many space sim mods and indie games on sites like ModDB which probably don't have a proper place where their teams can manage progress and PR properly. ModDB itself is apparently structured in a way that discourages long and detailled discussions on plots, improvements, concepts and other things. You may go there and show project leaders what they can do with dedicated private and public subforums, and a place where they can upload dev files. Just throwing in ideas.

That said, however, I don't see the need for an alternative to HLP. I see the need for bringing more people to FreeSpace and space sims in general.

[MP-Ryan]

i like to keep things centralized. fragmentation kills communities.

QFT.  The fewer logins, the better.

[castor]

What is a "proper alternative"?
Having the site "duplicated" doesn't make sense, so what radically different/new would it bring? Something that wasn't already tried in the past and then forgotten.
 

[Lorric]

It seems plenty of people have already rejected this, and I too am puzzled by it. I see no reason to do it, and think it would caiuse harm rather than good. Keeping everything and everyone gathered in one place seems both easier and mutually supportive and will be best for the good of all. I can't see any benefit to a split.

[headdie]

In principle its a great idea as it means that if one site goes down then the community just use the other site for the remainder of the down time.  In practice I dont think the English understanding FS community is big enough to support this, otherwise SectorGames which was a perfectly functional site by my understanding would still be relevant.

[Zacam]

Site outage issues are being worked on, so those will soon (hopefully sooner than later) no longer be an issue.

At a machine level, we served a combined total of ~200GB worth of traffic for March. This takes into consideration the Wiki, Mantis, Hosted Projects, etc.

And trying to split all of that when we already have 2 other mostly phantom sites (Game Warden and Sector Game) just doesn't seem feasible an idea tbh. I'm all for making necessary adjustments to better be able to serve the community (better up time, faster ability to address issues, etc) that are currently being deliberated.

[Fury]

Results of the poll is clear, people here prefer to stay in one place. Makes me wonder though who were the six people who voted other than first option and what were their reasons for doing so. Perhaps they should come forth with their concerns.

[Scourge of Ages]

Well those 6 should definitely check out game-warden, it's still open for business. Why not give it a kick to try to revitalize it? (answer: ongoing spampocalypse, for starters)

Actually, there's still a relatively active project hosted there... the Stargate SG-1 mod is running again.

[General Battuta]

That isn't relatively active 

[Fury]

Game-Warden is not active, it doesn't even have active administration what with MatthewPapa all but abandoned it. It also doesn't provide services beyond regular hosting. All in all. inadequate.

[Luis Dias]

I'm completely puzzled by the proposal and why should it be a good idea, and therefore I conclude that I am probably a dumbass.