Site is going to change! Make suggestions!

If you want to prevent the wiki from going down shit creek again, best to have a special staff force responsible to review edits before they go live. I don't see too many edits being made to something like a xbox debug kit page, other than some user submitted pictures, so hopefully there wouldn't be an overload to the staff in charge.

 

It would be great to see a flash/HTML5 game arcade here. It would unite everyone in trying to dominate each others high scores.

Really liking the idea of a wiki for the site, there's a wealth of information hidden on these boards. Consolidating all of the scattered info would certainly make it easier to preserve.

A news/downloads page would link in really well with a wiki, twitter/RSS feeds, Youtube links, and forum threads too.

 

I know you've been hosting blogs and the like- any thought to adding svn hosting or the like?
Feedback / trade tracking system.

 

Better inbox system.

I know I bitched about this before but it would be nice to have a message organization option- possibly with different presets like sender, newest/oldest, etc.

Also-Chatbox can be opened in a new windows with notifications option

Just something I would think would be nice. I'll go dig around on other forums for features that I like/are feasible and aren't too complicated.

 

I'm happy with the wiki side! I have lots of time on my hands Kev, so if you're looking for 'staff' for the wiki I'd be happy to do that with some others.

- Feedback system and easily viewed by everyone

- A banned list of users to help prevent future scams

I'll add more when they come to mind.

 

* Proper User rating system for sales (see other sites like neo-geo).
* More control for us mods (like being able to flag an account to be banned from parts of the site)

=)

 

What subbie said plus the ability for mods to ban IP addresses. This would save us a shit load of work at times.

 

A redo of the articles css would be nice, as I've noted some people using it only to have their content crushed down into one column.

 

Whatever you can do to stop spammers, idiots who vandalise the sections and also stuff posted that is incorrect, would be good. Also, daily backups so if there are any attacks, you can recreate from backups.

 

RSS feeds for market/subsections would be great.
An improved chatbox would be nice too!

 

The original homepage should return with updated links to the forum etc as it was always the best part of the site. This is the kind of thing that could happen now and then amend as and when you can be bothered

 

Please keep all the images used to indicate a forum posters post count the same size (i.e. small, a consistant size would be welcome too).

Please free the logo of Sonic. It's not very work friendly, and there was nothing wrong with the last one.

If I could avoid seeing the picture of the week that would be great. Again, this is primarily to make it SFW, but the pictures mostly seem to be efiminate, and I feel like I'm looking at a website for teenage girls rather than what I'd consider this site to be about: serious games enthusiast / collectors.

 

I would suggest:

• More site task-force: Have local moderators specific for each section, and also global moderators who can act across the whole forum (like Yakumo, Legit, subbie, etc.)
• Small site dev-team: We could have a small dev-team who can address things such as installing plugins to the forum, fixing bugs, keeping backups, or trivial stuff as adding new emoticons, working on new images, sorting categories (donors/etc). I can happily help organizing/planning as I basically do that in web/mobile development for a living, unfortunately I currently don't have time to lend myself as a developer, we could even implement a public or private issue tracker to keep tabs on everything.
• Return of the Wiki: Bad_Ad84 could be in charge of this, also have a small team of authorized people to add/edit/remove content.
• New CSS: I could happily buy and donate a theme for the case, don't have the time to work on one unfortunately, so buying one is the only way I could help on that.
• Plugins: As many people suggested, more plugins can be included to the VB to satisfy different needs (like tapatalk, automatic image resizing, etc).
• Organized site fundraisers: Fundraisers (just for the yearly site expenses) could be organized over IndieGoGo (I'm not a big fan of KS) so as to keep track of the funds more easily, and ASSEMbler does not have to be counting each paypal donation and looking at the users and doing all by hand.
• Public repository: We could have a public Git repository for user projects.
• Official seeders (Torrent): Have a list of voluntaries, and make them official/fixed, that will host/seed downloadable content such as the ones from the digital conservation projects (Acclaim for example) so we have a steady supply of torrents.
• Better Spambot filtering
• Marketplace access control: Make posting in the sales forum unavailable unless 50+ posts, but blocking access programatically, not by hand-picking.

And some not necessary suggestions (social):

• Assembler Steam Group (so we can find each other for some gaming ) - actually I just went ahead and created it: http://steamcommunity.com/groups/assemblergames
• 24/7 Teamspeak server/channel (could be cool to join for a quick chat)
• Have links in the footer of the site for: facebook/twitter/youtube/steamgroup/TS/etc.

 

IRC channel (+webchat) instead of the ChatBox. eg. on QuakeNet or EFnet

 

My two cents.....

• Wiki - Great idea, but a lot of sites tend to just clone information off Wikipedia, and I hate that. As we're primarily about dev gear here, maybe we could keep the wiki more development / hardware related? So the PS2 page would have information on the TOOL and the TEST etc.... but it could also have information on the versions of the retail consoles perhaps. More of a technical nature, really... but also stuff to interest the collector on variants. I dunno, something to set us apart from the rest!
• Museum - Absolutely! It's long overdue. However, have we perhaps outgrown the old format for the museum? Back then, there was no such thing as a wiki. Would the wiki not suffice? Looking back at what I said about the PS2, the TOOL could have its own page, which would be like the page it would have had in the museum. Of course, wikis don't tend to have a nice front page, so perhaps there's still room for a nice museum front page, which links to pages within the wiki?
• Mobile device support - The site is REALLY bad to navigate on a phone! The theme isn't totally responsive (resizes for various resolutions), so it doesn't know how to behave on the phone. Maybe look into what the best solution is - be it a responsive theme, some kind of mobile version of the site or even a dedicated app. I'm sure the vBulletin forums will give clues.
• General forum issues - There are a few niggly things.
  
  - Smilies need to be restored properly.​
  - The marketplace is constantly littered with people not reading the rules. I help out wherever I can when a moderator has missed an illegal sale, but it needs better moderation. That may not mean that you mods need to pull your socks up and check the sales more often - I like the idea of a user class for people with <50 posts (and whatever the time limit is too, if possible) that is banned from creating a new post in that forum.​
  - Banned users need to be clearly marked for us to distinguish them in threads - maybe using the custom class field to explain briefly why they were banned, too (scammer, racist, whatever).​
  - And a general tidy up - the forum is getting very cluttered and the list of forums is long now.​

On the last topic, it's lovely that we're being charitable and hosting the Everdrive forums, but that has added seven new forums to the list! Do we really need a whole category for Everdrive (sorry, forgetting the correct terminologies here)? Here's my proposal - a Tech Support category. We could put ONE Everdrive forum in that, then subforums as per the forums now. Perhaps move the Modding and Repair forums into the Tech Support category, too. Perhaps Dumping belongs in there, too. Likewise, the Digital Conservation forums could become subforums. Maybe even the dev forums - have one Sega forum, then subforums for Saturn etc. and so on.

There seems to be some confusion between Feedback up the top and User Feedback down the bottom. Even ASSEMbler himself has left feedback for others in the Feedback forum instead of User Feedback! Perhaps Feedback needs renaming Site Suggestions or something clearer?

We could always put up pages in the wiki on console modifications (RGB etc.), unreleased games, development tools, lists of known betas etc.

Going back to the marketplace, that could perhaps be dealt with in a more modern manner.. some sort of classifieds or auction page, although I think that's complicating things a bit too much. Stick with the forum method for now

 

How about you get a notification if your nickname is mentioned in the chat? Although that could become stressful for members like "retro"

 

Lol yeah, screw you! haha

 

How about a little bit of an online arcade emulator system for classic games? Something like what Emuparadise does for the NES games. You can play them directly in the browser thanks to some sort of emulation system. Might be limited to 8 and 16 bit consoles for those with low powered PC (Like me ATM...) and RISC (Reduced Instruction Set Computing as is used for mobile, ARM, IOS, Android, ect.) setups...

Also the usual stuff.

Better reputation system to distinguish between those who actually contribute to the site and those "Post a few, get issues fixed, never contributes anything useful" type of users.

Fixing of the little status quo customized message some older users have up in the top of their ID profile on each post. Some have it, others don't.

The way the text works seems glitchy. Above I had issues trying to bold certain letters as the cursor kept jumping all around the words causing me to mistype it all several times.

Lastly the "Insert Image" tool is also glitchy. Every time I use it I click on "From URL" and either paste the address or uncheck the box it reverts back to the "From Computer" selection. And the option in the "From URL" section that reads "Retrieve remote file and reference locally" doesn't work.