>>40634
OK, so what do you have so far?

A group of three bronies have been working on the back-end and some site design ideas. We’re trying to build everything from scratch (user system, comments, idea listings, etc). What we have so far is live at http://bronyideas.com/main.php (work in progress).

Please check out the pics below to see what we’re planning:

Rough website front page design (picture)

VERY ROUGH example idea pages just content, no design here

Initial page view - all areas collapsed (picture):

Expanded Sections (picture):

Anyway, thanks for reading!

Please let us know if you have questions, feedback, or want to help! We'll be checking this thread as well as taking emails at contact@bronyideas.com

I wish I could help, but all I can do is act and write. I wish you luck though! It'd be nice for there to be a place where directors and projects can request help more easily and share ideas better.

When the site's 100% operational, be sure to post it on /chat/ as well. Spread it around and advertise... When it's done, of course!

>>40635
I would suggest ~950px on the site width. 1000 is too much for people on 1024x768 monitors (common netbook resolution). Otherwise, the design looks solid.

I guess the biggest decider of if this'll work or not is how you go about sorting the wheat from the chaff. There's a lot of people who come into these kinds of things expecting free workers.

I guess it's up to the users to decide what they think is and isn't substantial, though.

Is the rating system ("Highest rated...") intended to get a gauge on how much people want the idea? I guess that can help prospective collaborators find stuff that's likely to have an audience, but I can't help but feel it'd be filled with implausible wishes rather than reasonable ideas.

Not hosting comments is a good idea for reasons you already said. You'll end up with a lot of dead links, but that's to be expected. Active projects should keep their info updated anyway.

Are you going to let people set up a page that lists their qualifications/past projects (a resume, basically)?



Getting a lawyer's view on the legality of non-profit fanwork could be interesting. I don't know much about the specifics, but from my brief searching it does seem like a bit of a grey area. I'm suspicious that people actually have more rights than they're let on to believe. (Also—just so people know—saying "I do not own the characters blah blah blah" is worse than saying nothing at all, since it's acknowledging that you're wilfully breaking copyright laws. It's a confession of guilt.)

Good luck getting a free lawyer, though. Hahaha.

My 2c.

You're going to have to advertise your site heavily for it to take off. Right now there isn't any real demand for what you are asking so you have to create. This needs an edge. From what I read it seems all of its services can be elsewhere where the community is already formed and entrenched that they won't pick up and go even if your site is more streqmlined and efficient.

Best of luck with it.

>>40644
Advertisement is not the real solution. Content is.

Hey everyone! Thanks for the feedback so far!

Publicity and content
We want the site to be useful to people before we hit 'critical-mass' in terms of popularity or content.

We're hoping that 2 things will encourage people to post their projects on the site at the beginning:

1 - Easy linking / independece
If each idea page is a simple, organized place to find all the links relevant to a project, people can post to BronyIdeas just as a bookmarking location.
Ex: I've got a website for my idea, posts in several forums, and an Imgur or DeviantArt gallery. If I put all of those on a BronyIdeas page, I can share one link to list all of my site resources.

Also, my vision for the site is that people would put a link to the projects they cared about in their other social media outlets, including things like forum signatures.
Ex: I've got a cool idea for an MLP board game - check it out here! -link-

What features or listing would make you want to do this? What standalone functionality could make the site useful to you?

2 - Idea creation speed
If people can spend only a few minutes posting their idea, they're more likely to post something on our site that is posted elsewhere.
Ex: I already posted something on a chan and my favorite gaming forum, but I could use some php help, so I'll just toss it on BronyIdeas.

If we can hit 'critical-mass', the site can also serve as a place to find help for projects and find interesting projects

Three ways to search:
* Keyword/Test Search
A standard fulltext search to answer questions like: Is anyone doing a project about parasprites?

* Category Search
Similar to browsing through projects or a tag search to answer questions like: What video game mod projects are there?

* Positions Needed Search
Similar to a help-wanted search to answer questions like: I'm a vector artist but I'm out of ideas. Who/what could I help with?

Idea ratings
I was planning something similar to a 'like' or '+1' system to mostly gauge popularity.
One of the core goals of the site is to produce a searchable 'idea repository' even for ideas which no one is working on right now.
Have you ever just had a brony project idea (or any idea, for that matter) but lacked the time to work on it?
If people post these 'it would be cool if' ideas and we make it simple to search through them (an 'Ideas without a leader' search), the site can become a place to get that cool idea off your mind and a place to find cool ideas if you're looking for a project to lead.

Comments
We actually are planning a comments system, but atm it's strictly text-only.

Suggestions
Site width
Thanks for the heads-up. Any other design considerations?

Need to add directors to the positions list
What other positions and project categories should we add?

Project needs an edge to get started
As listed earlier in this reply, I'm hoping for the site to be useful to people even without a lot of users on the site. Do you have any suggestions for helping us do that?
What would make an idea-listing/idea-organizing site useful to you even if you had to find your own help?

Personal resume
We've thought about a feature like this, but this implies a 'search for help' model instead of a 'search for projects' model.
What does everypony think? Would you rather post what you're good at and have project leaders find you (could result in spam), or would you rather list projects and make volunteers find projects to help on? Would it be useful for us to do both?



Thanks again for your feedback!



(Is multiple-delete/multiple-post the way to preview here? I keep needing to change my bb-code)

>>40646
I disagree. advertising is a very real solution, more so than content. If you keep rubbing something in someone's face they'll eventually smell it no matter what it is. For example, there is a guy I used to work with, he was the biggest whiner and was always complaining about work and his pay. He did an OK job but nothing special, over the last 2 years he has had 3 or 4 pay rises just because he kept complaining to the boss. On the other hand another guy I worked with was an absolute work horse, he shut's up, did his job and did it well, he never complained about work or his pay... he hasn't had a pay rise since he started there (almost 2 years ago). Advertising yourself, your company, your product yields better results than sitting back waiting to be found.

I'm sure there are 100 other good examples but I can confidently say advertising is a very real and solution and to be honest your product could be quite bland and nothing special but if you keep pressing it someone will bite down on your hook and you are set.

We can take FaceBook for an example, they can do whatever the fuck they like with the design, layout, messaging feature and people will always bitch about how it's stupid but they have so much advertising via word of mouth that they don't give a shit. There is nothing else out there that shouts as loud as facebook so why should they care about "loosing users" there is no where else for these "ex-users" to go.... what, google+, myspace... they don't have that huge reputation and advertising power like facebook.

Your company is like a house you're trying to sell and your users are potential buyers;
Advertising is the key, content comes after you're actually inside.

I'm not saying content isn't important! hell people can easily turn around and walk out then tell all their friends it was shit, but you're not even going to get THAT far without effecive advertising.

>>40634
I'm self taught html and css, currently learning php and know enough about js to keep me happy for now.
Supposedly I know java (got 80+% in the unit) but really... I don't know, google is my mother... I've had servers since I was 14 (started off with shared servers and cpanel hehe) now have 2 dedi's (both offline atm though haha), 1 dedi I share with a friend, 2 vps's and 2 shared servers. I run a couple of websites for brony and non-brony stuff/people.
I'm the admin of https://anypony.com a brony email server.
I would be all for lending a hand server or site managing wise the only problem would be I work crazy hours and am doing a computer and network security degree at UNI so am not available all the time.

>>40653
>>I disagree. advertising is a very real solution, more so than content. If you keep rubbing something in someone's face they'll eventually smell it no matter what it is.

Or they could decide that said something is the most annoying, invasive thing ever and will actively avoid it from now on, because the constant flooding they received from it made them hate it with all their might.

Case in point, the recolors that keep appearing in the OC ponies thread. No matter how many times is said how much they suck and how annoying they are, the recolorists keep ignoring everyone, posting them anyways and getting angry because they don't receive the same praise or acceptation than the other guys who actually create great OC stuff.

People isn't loving the recolors, in fact they keep getting more and more annoyed with every new recolorist that pops out there.

tl;dr: the abusive, invasive strategy of spamming a project over and over on other people's faces only works IF the project is good and IF the definition of "good" is the real one, not the one that the project's leader wants to shove down everyone's throats.

"Is the rating system ("Highest rated...") intended to get a gauge on how much people want the idea? I guess that can help prospective collaborators find stuff that's likely to have an audience, but I can't help but feel it'd be filled with implausible wishes rather than reasonable ideas."

This is an interesting point... My hope is that people would like good projects, but I do see how this could be a problem :/. My only hope is that an unreasonable project with lots of support could become a reasonable project (?)

I like the idea of a ratings system so people that like a project but can't help can still do 'something'...
Do you have any suggestions for how to make this more meaningful or less prone to abuse?

>>40653
Advertising helps bring in people. Good content makes them stay. Living content makes them return for more.

Outdated, broken or otherwise useless content will make people move on.

But fact remains, advertising is important. If no one knows of the content they won't even visit in the first place. How you advertise matters too. Annoying ads without any clear incentive isn't going to get anyone anything. Where the ads are located also matter, the right target audience is critical. Getting recommended by someone people listen to (like fancy Pants) is extremely valuable.

But content remains king.

I think one of the best methods of advertising is to have good content and good users. If people link to the pages for their BronyIdeas pages, more people will know about BronyIdeas, especially those that actually visit the page. Then we won't have to say what the site is about because visitors will already know.

That said, I've considered some small advertising, perhaps with other brony sites.

On a different note: at the moment, the site contains no ads. I'd love to keep it that way, but we'll see what happens. If BronyIdeas ever needs to move to dedicated hosting, it'll probably need ads.

http://bronyideas.com/view_idea.php?i=1

This is a link to an idea description page
1) about an idea collaboration website,
2) on an idea collaboration website,
3) linked from an idea collaboration chan board.

"we must go deeper!"

Anyway, check out the sample idea post! I'd love suggestions for content and layout included for an idea page. Know that the content is currently static and a lot of part of the site aren't working yet. Also, we haven't really started our page design (it's ugly right now). Also, there's currently a lot of 'implied' usage for each field that we'll make clearer later. For now, ask questions if you have them. Thanks for your feedback!

  Working on a whiteboard-style introduction video for the site. So far we have only the audio.

What do you think?

>>41388
Frame 10, c) I will be extremely disappointed if I don't see the line "i++; //increase i by 1" or "return 1; //returns 1" in your squiggles of PHP code, sounded good though, a couple of strange voice changes (suddenly different pitch from cut recordings)? or was that just me..

>>41454
Unfortunately, the description after PHP is a description about the position, not a snippet of PHP.

Yeah, I think I turned away from the mic for that bit near the end. I'll probably re-record after we get the animation done.

What did you think of the content? Does it make sense? Is it fast enough for Internet viewer attention spans?

>>41475
oh, how disappointing..
yea, it was easy enough, it'll be good once it's animated.

Also, I'm pretty sure someone sneezes in the background at the start, I laughed.

We've got a few PHP coders, but we're all part-time. We would love some help to get the site finished as soon as possible!

We also *really* need some help with CSS.

If you are interested in helping, please respond here or email contact@bronyideas.com

>>41645
Thanks to the CSS volunteers who just joined!

I think we're doing ok for helpers now, at least until everyone gets settled / finds a role.

>>41696
I'm glad you've found plenty of helpers for the time being, /collab/ has been very good to anypony email as well, all (i think) of my current and previous moderators have been from here.

The site is looking great, i can see why you need css coders :P
You may want to look at changing "Give me a login cookie" on your sign up page to something more "standard" like "Remember me" just because a lot of people wont understand the statement. Having said that, if you know what a brony is then you probably know of the term "cookie" but it's something to think about at the least.

Also you may want to consider adding some css to stop the page jumping to the left whenever a scrollbar appears, it's some simple css but i think it's a nice addition.

html {overflow-y:scroll;}

(I'm not sure about its complete range of compatibility, probably pretty much everything)
is all it is. Forcing scrollbars on all pages may be less esthetically pleasing then leaving it as it is maybe? eh, with a light background you barely notice scrollbars.

It's looking good though and can only get better, my suggestions are trivial.

>inb4 tuq see's this and in that case:
I want to show you some beta code of Anypony, complete php/ajax signup upgrade and contact forms, as well as port monitoring so if one of my ssl ports starts to fail (fucking cpanel), users will be redirected to another port. + a whole lot of other pretty jquery and css stuff, it's by far the most sexy thing i have ever coded. you better be pleased :D still trying to get my head around jquery's cookies, i want it to be something like what you have, but for a <select> tag. ill skype ya next week, uni is busy atm.

Know a good, free CMS?

Since we've had a lull in activity, I'm considering switching from our homebrew PHP backend to a content management backend. We're not planning to be very image heavy, but there are a lot of links and text. Any suggestions for a free, stable CMS that doesn't require server-side install (we're on a shared host with cPanel and FTP).