I'm just pondering...what do you see as the future of Dexterity's Indie forum. By future, I mean, do you see us all here in 5 years still typing away or do you think it will ever become more than this? A club, a members site?

There are a few things I'd like to see; maybe a link list for one with everybodies links, catagorized into genre or application type etc.

:p

altough i'm a newbie here i visit this board quite often (daily).
the bulletin board software is pretty good, and i'm used to it,
and unlike on many other forums the people here are really mature and nice :)

sure, a club/member site would be a nice thing, i think it would
help use developers even more to network with others on
a more professional level. i'd definitely join.


the link list you mentioned sounds good, lately i often find myself
digging through 3-4 threads just to find a link to someones webpage i forgot :)


aspiral

It would be nice if this forum continues to be a free resource for all interested indie developers. A downloadable/browsable archive of all posts would be very welcome. Does this forum support that feature Steve?

I've been involved in many similar forums/mailing lists in the past. They usually run until they become obsolete. What I mean is, a mailing list for people who program games in a specific language or platform will continue until that system becomes obsolete. The beauty of the Dexterity forum is the fact that it's not tied to a particular language or platform.

I guess it will continue for as long as there is a market for Indie Developers and for as long as Steve is willing to support the forum. The "Shareware/Indie" game development scene has undergone many changes in the last decade or two and will continue to evolve. I suspect mobile gaming platforms will give indie development another big boost. 5 years is way too short for anything drastic to happen (i hope!) :)

So, maybe the forum will evolve or move home, but I hope we're sufficiently networked up to stick together :)

call me pessimistic, but i beleive like every other good forums out there, popularity will increase, at one point there will be a massive addition of ppl browsing/posting here, the quality of posts will decrease, and everyone who lurks around now will leave one by one, jaded by the mass...

i've seen this happen so many times...

don't get me wrong though, i wish the exact opposite happen, but if there is one thing that i do beleive in, its that history repeats itself.. over and over..

Smurftra

Originally posted by shoecake
I've been involved in many similar forums/mailing lists in the past. They usually run until they become obsolete. What I mean is, a mailing list for people who program games in a specific language or platform will continue until that system becomes obsolete. The beauty of the Dexterity forum is the fact that it's not tied to a particular language or platform.

So am I. But you have to consider the following:

1. Languages and Platform are Dynamic and keep changing.
there's always a new technology or a next version or new
algorithems to be learned. So does Indy dev. there's always
a new method of publicize your product, new tools to create it,
changing trends, market changes, new concepts in games ext.

2. You might say that after you've learned all that is needed to be
learned, you don't need the resource anymore. I had the same
problem with Gamedev.net . but when you run out of questions,
then its your turn to give the answers and each and every one
of us will give you a different answer to the same question
depending on our views. So i hope the newbie that will (hopfully)
learn and evoulve into a big-time-Indie, will return the favor by
answering the newbies of his time (is that called "Remembering
the grace of youth"? thats what it means in hebrew, that is).

3. You can never know what kind of affiliates you can find here,
or maybe even joined projects. Community is a dynamic being.

4. I didn't have the time to thank the people here who inspired
me to reach their level, and to those who are on their way to
become what they wanted. I don't want to mention names,
but i'm sure those who did made it (even if their break wasn't
a long time ago) provide the others the inspiration and hope
to continue doing what they do.

10x people.

I've been thinking about this lately too. I've participated in many online communities since the early 90s (I even met my wife on a BBS), and I understand the various ways such a forum can evolve (or devolve).

I also have to consider the cost of running the forum if it continues to grow. Right now the bandwidth used by the forums comes to about 8GB/month, which is fine to subsidize, but if it keeps growing and growing, eventually I'll need to find a way to monetize it to at least have it pay for itself. The maintenance work will increase as well.

One option is to put up advertising, which I don't particularly like, because then I'm suddenly in the advertising business, and I find forums with too many ads annoying. I don't like the fact that putting up advertising reduces the quality of the service itself.

Another option is to turn this forum into a paid subscription service for a nominal fee. This would prevent the forums from becoming so big and bloated in a couple years that they become of little value. This approach works very well for the ASP, which is able to maintain a tight spam-free online community. Depending on the subscription fee, it might be possible to evolve some additional services like a developer newsletter with good how-to content. Having been an ASP member since 1996, I see a huge difference in the quality of posts in the ASP newsgroups vs. on the general Usenet shareware newsgroups.

I also have to decide what kind of people these forums should continue to serve. Should it be all indies? Only the serious and committed indies? Anyone with a passing interest in indie development? Obviously these forums will attract the most members if they're free, but the quality of posts will be higher if they require a subscription fee. And generally speaking, the higher the fee, the fewer the members.

Many days, including today, this indie forum is getting more posts than the ASP newsgroups. Even though the ASP has over 1000 members, only about 100-200 post in the ASP newsgroups, which is comparable to here.

Keep in mind also that there's a limit as to how much can be done with volunteers. Even the ASP has a paid executive director and several other positions that include stipends. What's interesting is that within the ASP, there's occasionally a discussion about lowering membership dues, but many members oppose this and don't want their dues lowered because the newsgroups get just the right amount of high-quality traffic, and many don't want to see the ASP membership double or triple. With about 100-200 active members, you can get to know everyone, and there's a small community feel. But when you get up to 500-1000 members, you tend to lose that.

I'm not going to make such decisions in a vacuum, and they may not need to be made for many months, so I'd like to get feedback as to how others here would like to see these forums evolve. It's a good topic for discussion.

I like the subscription idea. I think I mentioned that way back when you were contemplating your book idea. I'd rather pay to be part of a tight, serious community with a two-way flow of information than pay for another book. I'd also like to keep the signal-to-noise ratio high, and the more popular Dexterity becomes, the more that's going to drop.

Perhaps you could look at GarageGame's model. They have some free forums, and some that are only available to people that have purchased Torque. The private ones are more serious and practical.

In any case, I wouldn't mind a subscription fee.

I would pay annual dues to access the dexterity forums any day. Even dues that matched the ASP dues. I realize however that's easy for me to say since I can afford it, and I understand that some would have difficulty coming up with that kind of payment.

However one would think that if someone was "serious" about Indie game development, then an ASP level subscription payment would be well worth the money. One of the primary reasons people subscribe to the ASP is for access to the newsgroups, as Steve says this forum is actually exceeding the ASP in terms of activity. Plus, the activity on this forum is 95% Indie game related. There really isn't another resource like this on the internet for Indies.

Personally I would not like to see this forum get over crowded. It's the best forum for indie game developers that I've found in the last three years as an indie developer. The size of the community and quality of the posts feels just right. I'm also a member of ASP and spend some time on their forums, but I don't find it to be quite as useful since the ASP forums concentrate more on shareware in general, where this forum just focuses on games.

I know I'm one of the newer members on this forum, but I'm also very serious about indie game development and one of the things that I really like about this forum is how serious the people here are about development. One of the things that really bugs me about forums like gamedev.net is all the posts from people who haven't written a line of code argueing about how games should be made. Or people who don't even have a game design yet asking for team members.

As far as paying to be a member, I would happily pay a little per year for a membership if it would keep this forum the way it is.

_________________
Damon Du Bois
www.wizardslab.com

I might pay to access these forums now that I have been here for a while, but I never would have when I first came here. I think the forum would lose a lot of great minds if it were limited to people who pay.

As the forum becomes bigger it might have to spit in to categories so that members can find the discussions they are interested in quicker.

I think these forums are perfect for a donation type program. Members that have been helped by the forum would be able to remember the grace of youth by making a donation to help cover the forum's cost, but new members would not be turned off by having to pay.

I think newbies can be controlled by deleting new threads that are pointless or have been discussed over and over again. I think most people see how professional this forum is and try to make their comments fit that atmosphere.

Like BlueWaldo, I wouldn't have paid for the forums when I first found out about the forums. Having been here awhile though I'm just amazed at the quality of the posts compared to other places I've frequented. I'd gladly pay now if required, especially if it keeps the quality of the board high.

I guess the obvious solution would be to only allow posting made by paid members. However, this may not solve the bandwidth issue. So perhaps to avoid this (and increase the value of the membership) you could close the board to non-members and periodically release the contents of the board in some downloadable format. Actually if that had a nice search feature it might be worthwhile even for members.

A trial membership might also work where you would allow access to view threads for a short period of time. However, I don't think you could prevent a knowledgeable person from being able to register multiple times.

I'd be happy to pay for a sub to post here, but not to read it. Make the knowledge available to everyone but keep the noise down with a fee to post. If it was pay-to-read it would probably become insular and wither eventually.

Cas :)

I have no problem with paying dues for access to this forum, although I'd prefer they were nominal. If you charged, I would want the forum to be completely private (not readable), but I wouldn't mind if selected threads were made public to attract new blood as necessary. If your desire is to only cap the bandwidth, you could split into several forums, where only some forums are accessible (for posting AND reading) to members with a certain minimum number of posts. Cutting down the non-involved lurkers is a major way to reduce bandwidth.

I think BlueWaldo has the right idea.. If/when bandwidth costs become too high, at least try a donation setup and see if it works. I'd gladly donate now if that's what it took to keep the place alive.

I'm less concerned with the bandwidth costs in the near future than I am with the forum's signal-to-noise ratio degrading over time. A donation system may solve the cost issue, but it won't solve the second problem.

One key advantage of a private forum (and this is true of the ASP newsgroups) is that members feel more secure discussing certain issues like crack-prevention and piracy in a private group than they do in a public one. Plus it's a little more secure if you want to post links to beta versions of games. Another thing that happens in the ASP group is that everyone posts using their real names, not handles, so you get to know everyone in a very professional atmosphere. Plus you don't have to worry about posting email addresses in a private group, since spam harvesters can't get in.

"where only some forums are accessible (for posting AND reading) to members with a certain minimum number of posts"

Very bad idea IMO. In most forums I know, people who post the most are also people who never post anything interesting.


Now that I know this forum, I'd gladly pay a $10 or $20 subscription per year to be able to read/write here. $100 sounds really high... (especially since I'm not earning money ATM).

However.. I think I'd prefer a donation system to pay for the bandwidth (with some counter so that people can see if the balance is positive or negative and are inclined to pay when it is negative), or a really small subscription fee just to cover the bandwidth cost, coupled with moderation if people start posting lame stuff like "need team for MMORPG, will pay on royalties".

Obviously, if there was a high subscription fee, there would be a higher ratio of successfull indie devs participating... But would the forum be really useful then if newbies can't ask questions ?

Regarding the problem of the high number of posts, maybe it could be solved by advising people not to read this forum more than once a day. Or by enforcing it. I think I would actually like that.

have you heard of micro-payments?

http://www.bitpass.com/learn/

With a few member testimonials on the signup page I doubt the dexterity forums would have too much trouble signing up sincere, dedicated independent developers. I used to post on gamedev.net a lot, but got frustrated with the noise level over there. I wrote the forum moderators about setting up a members only areas and having a subscription fee, however they adamantly stated that they wanted to be the site that helped new (inexperienced) developers get into game development.

Frankly I think gamedev.net does an excellent job at attracting people from their target audience, I don't think the dexterity forums need to get pulled into servicing the same customers. If people want to read free forums they will always be able to turn to gamedev.net, and for people who don’t have the time to filter out the noise of free forums, it would be nice if there were some private high quality forums like the dexterity forums for them to engage in.

Personally, while I feel guilty about suggesting taking this great free resource into a private, for pay context. I think it is the only way for it to maintain its usefulness. I would love to have access to the features of a private forum. For instance I would love to post an in work build of Katsu's Journey for you guys to play around with, however after some discussion our team has decided that it's really not appropriate to do so in a public forum.

I would also value the opportunity to get to know the rest of you more personally and become better acquainted with your projects. I know I’d be willing to talk about more about the personal aspects of our games development in a more private setting.

The process of changing as one grows is both productive and necessary. Even as a small entrepreneurial company grows, unless they change and adapt their processes to suit their new size, they will ultimately fail. As companies grow they move from being very ad-hoc to implementing repeatable processes, documenting them, organizing things etc. I think that changing to a subscription system is the natural evolution of a forum that wants to preserve it's relevance past a certain size.

It would be a major letdown if this forum goes the way of ASP. Steve, I request you to try the donation approach and see if it offsets bandwidth costs. If it doesnt, then you could charge a nominal fee to cover the same. However, if the aim is to make a profit with this resource (which I understand as the originator you have every right to do so), then its really sad. If the aim is to tune out the noise, then accept my apologies, but the forum could be made like Slashdot where comments can be rated and hence filtered.

I am 100% behind a subscription to access the forums. not much, but $10 - 25 a year sounds reasonable to me.
The signal to nosie ratio has become a problem already, I dont read all the posts like I used to when it started.

I'm not aiming to make a profit from these forums; rather, I want to keep them active and healthy, and money is simply one resource that can help achieve that in the long run, although it's certainly no guarantee of success.

I would be happy with a pay forum or a donation system.

If it's easy to try a donation system...it might be cool (and even fun) to setup a target goal such as "$x dollars needed for Q3" and have a sticky thread that shows how close we are in addition to the link for making donations.

Maybe users that donate can have an avatar or something to show that they are supporting the forum (or even a clickable logo to their site ;)
-Scorpio

The problem with comparing the Dexterity forums to, say, ASP, is that Dexterity, while quite excelent (perhaps the best?) does not have the same noteriety as ASP. And for it to attain that noteriety, it must be in view of the rest of the community in some way.

So an entirely closed, pay-only forum would certainly reduce the noise, but it'd also likely reduce the signal as well. If you're going to have a subscription service, you'd have to have something that draws new people in. Otherwise, it would wither on the vine because you'd have virtually no new subscribers.

I personally would gladly pay $100/year for these forums. But if they had been closed before I came here, I'd never have had any inkling that they were worth that.

Whatever solution you come up with, it will have to reduce the signal-to-noise ratio without reducing the signal significantly. (Ratio isn't everything, after all.) It should not drive away new... er, posters? Somehow, you must find a way to discourage frivolous threads, while not turning away people who could potentially make valuable contributions.

Naturally when any system converts from a free system to a for-pay system you do loose some of the members that compose that system.

DavidRM talks about his experience when he converted PaintballNET to a for-pay system. You can find the discussion here (http://www.dexterity.com/forums/showthread.php?s=&postid=8306#post8306)

But the odd thing is that the system still continues to grow. What does the ASP have to attract new members? The biggest selling point they have is access to other experienced shareware developers via their newsgroups. I'm not sure how that's any different then what the dexterity forums have to offer. Also, for those of you who have become ASP members in the last two years, did you do it because you went to the site and thought it was a good idea? Or did you do it because Steve and other successful Indies on these forums recommended them?

I would bet that you joined the ASP on the recommendation of someone you respected.

These forums will continue to grow regardless of if they are “pay-for” or not. They will grow in the same way sales for our games grow, by word of mouth. What an entry fee does is make sure that the system grows in a positive controlled fashion as opposed to disintegrating into near anarchy like we've all seen happen to many of the other small forum communities we once used to frequent.

Steve, This may be way out in left field, but I was thinking if you yourself reject certain "high noise ratio" posts for a while on the premise that they are "off-topic" to the forum, maybe others will see this and be less likely to post without researching more. Basically I guess what I'm saying is to be more strict with what is allowed on the forum. I have no idea whether or not this would work or if it is feasible for the time you have free, but its just an idea that popped into my head.

What does the ASP have to attract new members? The biggest selling point they have is access to other experienced shareware developers via their newsgroups. I'm not sure how that's any different then what the dexterity forums have to offer.

Yes, I'm sure Dexterity would probably grow via word-of-mouth. However, you must remember that ASP has been around for a LONG time and has built a reputation specifically because it has been a broad-based consortium of developers. Dexterity is much younger, and much more focused on a specific niche. Personally, I think Dexterity is probably the best available. But word-of-mouth travels at a speed that is a function of how many mouths there are available to spread the word. If ASP has 1,000 members (I'm sure this must be a low figure, I would expect the real number to be higher than this), then I can see how word-of-mouth is working for them. But how long would it take word-of-mouth to do something similar for Dexterity?

Personally, I think Dexterity could do the same, but not just yet. It would need a bit more noteriety, a bit more history, and a bit larger frequenteur base than it has now. Unfortunately, to get these, you have to risk weathering an increasing signal-to-noise ratio. But if the forums were closed to non-subsribers today, I tend to think the forum would shrink faster than it grew. Give it another year or two and things might be different.

Anyway, that's my take on things. I could be way-off. :confused:

Originally posted by BrewKnowC
Steve, This may be way out in left field, but I was thinking if you yourself reject certain "high noise ratio" posts for a while on the premise that they are "off-topic" to the forum, maybe others will see this and be less likely to post without researching more. Basically I guess what I'm saying is to be more strict with what is allowed on the forum. I have no idea whether or not this would work or if it is feasible for the time you have free, but its just an idea that popped into my head.

This would probably be unfeasible, since it's hard to even define what is noise and what is signal. It seems very arbitrary and heavy-handed to me to simply start labeling posts as "unworthy," and I don't want to exert that kind of manual control. I really haven't seen any specific posts lately that I'd consider deleting.

I'm not planning to make any major changes in the near future. Changing the nature of these forums may be a year or more away, depending on the growth rate. But I do want to gain a sense of how I might manage future growth, so I can have time to transition thoughtfully and not in crisis mode when options may be limited.

FYI The ASP has 1186 members as of July 15, as mentioned on the ASP site here:
http://www.asp-shareware.org/membership/statistics.asp

If the forums do move to a pay service, I'd probably get a separate domain and move the free articles there as well, so it develops an identity as a indie developer site, separate from dexterity.com. It may be possible to evolve other services as well, such as a monthly newsletter with solid how-to content.

I'd like to see the dexterity forms become part of the ASP. (Obviously this would require consent from both groups) A specific newsgroup related to entertainment software would be excellent. I find many ASP members here (myself included) post more to these forms then to the ASP newsgroups.

Having the forms included as part of the ASP includes numerous benefits:


Some members here are already ASP members.
Bandwidth becomes the ASP's responsibility.
Additional administration is already in place at the ASP newsgroups.
Non ASP members would get additional benefits to these forms from the ASP.


Personally I would like to see more consolidation on the web in general. Rather then starting a new place for shareware game developers, let's take a good place and make it better.

Michael Sikora
Guardian Light Studios (http://www.guardianlightstudios.com)

While the ASP has many great strengths, it also has weaknesses. In my opinion the way the ASP manages itself is a less then ideal system. Also, the newgroups in the ASP get a lot of traffic that doesn't really apply to games or even problems that indie game developers encounter. The net result would be adding even more noise into the indie developer resource. The unique needs and size of the indie game development community are large enough warrent their own resource.

Additionally, on a personal level, I find forums threads easier to follow and more efficent then the email based newsgroup system.

I tend to agree with Dan. The ASP's mission is specifically focused around shareware. There's certainly some overlap with indie game development, but there are unique challenges related to games that aren't shared with other types of software. Art, music, and gameplay are a few examples. Also, there are a lot of non-shareware options available to indies, so it's not all about shareware marketing. Sure, ASP members discuss non-shareware marketing as well, but it's not the ASP's primary mission. Having served as an ASP officer for a couple years, I'm not particularly enamored of the ASP's political structure. Given that it's run by a 6-member board rather than an individual, it tends to be very slow moving, and I think that can hamper its ability to adapt to the rapid changes ahead. The IGDA, on the other hand, has a more behind-the-scenes board and is run by an active Program Director, and this structure has allowed them to accomplish much more, even though the IGDA hasn't been around nearly as long as the ASP.

Hooking up with the IGDA is another possibility, and they have an indie games forum there, which I even co-moderated with Jeff Tunnel for a while, but it simply got no traffic. I eventually decided not to renew my IGDA membership (I was a member for 2 years), since I ultimately found little value there as an indie. The IGDA seems very retail-focused.

There's been a ton of good points that have been brought up in this thread and I have to say that it wouldn't hurt my feelings one bit if Steve made this into a subscribed forum, web site or service. The sooner it goes that way, the better. :)

Personally I wouldn't mind seeing Dexterity go to a pay to post system where everyone can read the forums, but you need to be a registered (I.E paying) member to post. The most I think I would pay is $50 a year though, even that's a little steep with all things considered.

I think a payed subscription is a good idea, though price shall not be big. I am ready to pay around $20 for the way the forum is now (place for indi developers information exchange), and up to $50 if some other benifits will be added.

I'd pay a nominal fee to keep the signal/noise ration down. 20$ sounds about right to me.

Anybody here a member of Ars Technica? They have a fantastic system whereby all forums are read-only unless you subscribe. Thereby still giving members a noise free forum however, still providing a great benifit to the community.

My suggestion would be to include a private forum as well as a read only forum. This way you can chat privately as well allow users some level of insight into what the forum is all about.

I would pay $30-$50 a year to be a member. $100 is to high.

I agree, the best solution is to keep forum free for unsubscribed members who cannot post.
And maybe include a private forum area, to keep privacy (for matters like crack, ecc). Even if it won't be a solution against piracy, they will crack your game anyway.
I would pay 20-25$ maximum to be able to post, but I'd like to keep it free to read-only peoples...

Yeah I agree that having a private forum is a good idea as well.

I'd keep it like it is now but add a "indie private" section for paying members where they can post stuff they might not want to share with any random reader. I might want to post a beta there for instance, but not for the whole world as it were.

I'd keep the general area readable but not postable unless you pay. In my view most posts would end up in the public area with a few in the private area for special cases like crack protection and so on.

I wonder though if there shouldn't be some limits to who can join the private area? Should it be restricted to people who've already published a game? If so certain people would be excluded that are good contributors though, but maybe exceptions could be made for people who have worked in the game industry but are just starting out independently or something like that.

In fact... I think I'd probably just wave the fee for strong contributors. People like Tom W. of Goodsol should just be given a membership. I wouldn't want people like that not contributing because it was too much of a hassle and not enough of a benefit for them to pay the fee.

Originally posted by svero
In fact... I think I'd probably just wave the fee for strong contributors. People like Tom W. of Goodsol should just be given a membership. I wouldn't want people like that not contributing because it was too much of a hassle and not enough of a benefit for them to pay the fee.

I thought we wanted to encourage contributing members,
not to drive them away...

Originally posted by gilzu
I thought we wanted to encourage contributing members,
not to drive them away...

I'm saying good contributors could just get free memberships because it's already clear that they provide a lot of value and they don't need to be screened, as it were, by the fee. Why should Tom W. pay 20$ to explain the difficulty of releasing a new solitaire game to someone starting out. Fact is Tom probably gives more than he gets on a forum like this so one has to wonder if the fee is worthwhile. It's like paying 20$ to help other people. Who knows.. maybe I'm wrong... maybe he gets a lot of value, but if it were me I'd just wave the fee for a lot of people. Here's another example.. David Nixon dropped by the other day and explained about the realarcade contest because I told him about that thread. I expect that if it was 20$ to tell people where to to visit on the web he wouldn't have bothered. Same goes for someone dropping by from cnet or whatever. I'm not sure how one would go about waving the fee or what the criteria would be, but I can see it as beneficial in certain cases.

Both the paid subscription and private forums have advantages .... but disadvantages also.

The subscription idea is cool. I like many others here would pay whatever small amount required. But the problem is with newbies, who dont have any experience with these forums. They wouldnt have the same level of attachment to this forum that we do, so would most likely not pay and join.

The private forum can also work, but only if the private members are still willing to pop into the non-exclusive sections from time to time, and help the newbies out. Ive been a member of forums before that have two sections. One for private experienced members, and one for the public/students etc etc.
The problem was the private members became a bit eliteist, and the forum simply split into two seperate communities, with the members never venturing into the public sections.

I dont actually have an answer, or idea of whats best, but the problems are obvious.

FYI The ASP has 1186 members as of July 15, as mentioned on the ASP site here:

Interesting... That surprises me. Has it declined? I'd have thought for sure it'd be larger than that, at least in the past which seemed like its hayday.

svero makes some good points about the possibility of losing contributors like those from sites like Realarcade. I might also add that there have been helpful and important contributions made here by representatives of various shareware registration services to answer some of the questions that were floating around here. Again, I wonder if those representatives would have any inkling that their input was needed were this forum closed.

Still, having a closed forum does seem to have definite advantages. Advantages that I think are very desireable. Like the ability to release a beta to this closed community. So perhaps the approach with some open forums and some closed, member-only forums still has some merit?

The further we get into this, the more complicated it seems. :confused:

Well if Steve could just drink a lot of coffee say, and monitor the board 24hrs a day, approving or disapproving posts as they're made (and possibly correcting grammatical errors) I think all problems would be solved.

Maybe it would help if people could not post until they had been a member for a week. That way people would be less likely to come here to get the answer to the question and then leave. They would be more likely to read the forums for a week and see the high quality before posting something that would bring the quality down.

There are many possible solutions, but all require some work and some trade-offs to implement. It wouldn't be too technically difficult to put the entire forum into a membership/subscription framework -- I have the knowledge/skill to do that myself.

However, I'm not sure how to technically tackle the idea of having a forum be read-only to non-subscribers but allow posting for paid subscribers and handle this in an automated way. Since this forum software is frequently updated, I don't want to get into modifying the forum code itself to handle subscriptions, expired accounts, etc. I'm also concerned about using the forum software to handle paid subscriptions, since it ties me to particular vendor, and who knows what will happen in 5 years.

In the long run I think it would be best to keep the subscription code as a separate wrapper around the forum. Then new services can be added independently w/o need to do further tweaking to the forum code, such as members-only articles.

The ASP has a non-members newsgroup, but it hasn't worked out so well. Sometimes people just use it to bash the ASP, and it becomes more of a technical support forum than anything else -- i.e. ASP members answering questions for non-members. The ASP is a volunteer org, so this works ok, but I don't like having a non-members and a members forum together -- it seems like it would be better to consolidate everything together.

Seems like something in the $20-50 range per year is what most agree would be a fair price, depending on the degree of service. That seems reasonable to me, since if you sell a $20 game, that's only 1-2.5 registrations per year, and the benefit obtained from a year's subscription should allow you to boost sales by much more than that.

Here's my current thinking:
- Move the forums to their own domain, along with the free articles, so the free articles can help draw traffic to the forums.
- Make the forums entirely private, with a nominal yearly subscription fee.
- Offer a 100% money-back guarantee on the subscription fee within the first 30-60 days, so new members don't have to take any financial risk to find out if the forums are worthwhile. But having to pay up front should be enough to discourage those who don't have a serious interest.
- Put up a nice sales page explaining some of the benefits of joining, perhaps with some testimonials from members.
- Include a link list of current members, so everyone who joins gets a free link if they want it. Also, potential members can see who's already a member.
- If we want to get new members more quickly, offer a referral bonus, such as if you refer 4 new paying subscribers, your account is free.
- Perhaps throw in some free honorary memberships.
- In the free section post some snippets of interesting threads, so potential members can get an idea of what it's like.
- Let word of mouth work its magic. If the forums continue to thrive, great. If the experiment is an utter failure, it's certainly possible to refund everyone's money and revert back to the old system.
- Possibly add new member services over time, like a newsletter, members-only discounts, etc.

Originally posted by svero
Well if Steve could just drink a lot of coffee say, and monitor the board 24hrs a day, approving or disapproving posts as they're made (and possibly correcting grammatical errors) I think all problems would be solved.

Can I start by disapproving of this one???

IIRC, the ASP peaked at around 1500 members in the early 90s, while the DOS shareware market was thriving. However, when Windows began gaining steam and the BBS market collapsed, many shareware authors and BBS operators went out of business, so ASP membership shrank to a dismal 400 members in the mid-90s. Since then ASP membership has been growing steadily every year. DOS developers were replaced by Windows developers. BBSes were replaced by web sites.

I don't think there was much the ASP could have done to prevent this yo-yo effect. It did a pretty good job adapting to the changing climate. Shareware as a marketing method didn't die, so the ASP still had its primary purpose intact.

Can I suggest splitting that to $10 for six months rather than $20 for a year? Psychologically, anything I'm spending money on for a subscription I tend to want a fairly short subscription (especially at first) to see if what I'm paying for is worth it.

Short length, cheap price, makes it easy for the people who're thinking they want to go this direction (but not yet certain about their conviction and ability to Make It) to get in and try it, and also easy to decide to leave.... if it turns out to them that they are just a hobbyist, they don't want to be pros, and they don't want to give up even the tiny portion of the income of their middling-sales game on supporting their forum membership.

This may or may not be what you want, it's just the sort of approach that would feel friendliest to lil old me. :) Money-back guarantee... well, I don't know about you, but if someone told me I could join their forums for $50 and get my money back if I wasn't completely satisfied, I'd still say no. For one, I don't personally trust money-back guarantees to give me ALL of my money back... I'm convinced they'll keep a chunk and claim it as administrative fees... probably even run scams convincing people to give them money and get it back and profit by pocketing fees! For another, I hate demanding my money back, I'm too shy and quiet for that. :)

Originally posted by Dexterity
Can I start by disapproving of this one???

We'll save the censorship debate for another thread ;-)

IMHO one of the forum's biggest draws is that it is a free resource for everyone to use. As said before, a subscription system will most likely put an end to people from publishers/web hosts/payment processors coming in and answering questions concerning their service.

I also think that a subscription-based setup would likely reduce the amount of new members to a small trickle. New free resources will always pop up. How long do you think we'll all be here? I can see the forums going the way of the dinosaurs.

When I was a new user, I felt very uncomfortable posting. I came and read nearly three times every day, but it took me four months before I worked up the courage to post. If everyone had to pay to use the forum, it would give an even greater "These guys are big time professionals and I know nothing" feeling.

Yes we have 443 members, but only 64 of them have 35+ posts. I have less than 35 myself. Most of the newcomers have no interest in posting, they just want to absorb all this great information.

Oh well, now I'm just rambling

I think a donation system could potentially solve two of the bigger concerns:

1) Getting some funds to Steve to help pay for the costs of the forum
2) Not losing a big chunk of the forum audience

A downside of a donation system is that if nobody donates, then #1 is still an issue.
-Scorpio

One solution to the public/private forums from a technical standpoint, is to have to separate versions of the forum software running, one secured and one not. You could use the webservers authentication to secure the one say www.dexforums.com/privateforum
and leave the other one open to anonymous readonly access
www.dexforums.com/publicForum
etc.

That said, I’m not convinced of the value of a public forum. Like steve said, it hasn't been paticularly compelling in the ASP. There is a trade off in that brand new visitors who are "toying" with the idea of going Indie wouldn't have access to this resource. But when you think about it, there are a TON of free game dev resources out there. GameDev, GameDeveloper, ludumDare, flipcode, garagegames, all the great Indie news sites (you know who you are). Because of all those free resources out there I don't feel bad in moving the DexForums to a private-pay-for forum, in order to protect and direct its growth in a positive manner.

Originally posted by Scorpio

1) Getting some funds to Steve to help pay for the costs of the forum


While this is an issue, I don't think it's the primary concern. The forums still have to grow a fair amount before this becomes an isse, according to what Steve said earlier in this thread.

The primary concern is how to control the growth of the forum in such a way as to preserve its usefulness as a resouce to serious indie developers.

Moving to a donation system may help subsidise bandwidth costs, yes. But it doesn't help solve the problem of an inordanate amount of noisey threads popping up as the forum membership grows. (This invariably happens in all forums that i've been apart of that have grown from ~300 members to 1000+)

I was a long-time (>10 years) subscriber to CIX (foo I was called), and although it's a paid-subscriber only system it had a few valuable lessons about how you might run a system like this.

On CIX we are able to set up our own conferences as moderators and invite other users to be moderators. A conference has a number of topics. A topic consists of threads. Threading is one of the most powerful features of CIX and it still hasn't caught on, probably as a result of HTTP/HTML being such a poor medium for threaded discussion.

The crucial aspect of threads is:

1. There is little or no need to quote anyone as a reply is shown as a threaded leaf display, much like Explorer, except all nodes are always expanded. The highlighted message title is the only bit shown in the thread view; underneath, the message body is shown.

2. You can reply to different messages in a sensible manner instead of having to stick 4 replies in one posting, as is the situation now. You can see people in here struggling to make virtual threads when the conversation is forced to be linear by the forum software.

3. Each thread can be individually moderated. The moderators can stop a thread at any point and withdraw messages etc.

The key to CIX's success was that the moderators were the active community themselves. The other key to CIX's success was that it used an off-line reader to do all your posting; you connected, downloaded all the messages to topics you were subscribed to, and then disconnected. You had all the time you wanted to reply; then you sent all the replies in the next connect.

This is eminently possible in a simple Java applet now, and doesn't need to be offline any more really. It will also cut down on bandwidth being wasted on sending topic reply notification emails, as they simply aren't necessary with the threaded OLR view.

Seeing as I'm home for a few weeks now (http://puppygames.net/forums/viewtopic.php?t=153) I might have a quick experiment with an applet and my MySql database and see what happens.

Cas :)

Originally posted by Dan MacDonald
While this is an issue, I don't think it's the primary concern. The forums still have to grow a fair amount before this becomes an isse, according to what Steve said earlier in this thread.


How bout some slack Dan ;) Although you don't think it's the primary concern, in one of Steve's first posts in this thread he did write:

I also have to consider the cost of running the forum if it continues to grow. Right now the bandwidth used by the forums comes to about 8GB/month, which is fine to subsidize, but if it keeps growing and growing, eventually I'll need to find a way to monetize it to at least have it pay for itself. The maintenance work will increase as well.

Anyway, I'm just tossing out ideas...here's my last one for this thread...

To deal with "noise" posts as the forum grows, one suggestion is that we could probably get some volunteer "moderators" (if this board has that feature) to either preview posts from newbies...or just remove new posts by new members that are deemed noise.
-Scorpio

Originally posted by Scorpio
How bout some slack Dan ;)

Oh I wasn't trying to be attacking, just trying to get down to the heart of the issue. Nothing like some good clean intellectual sparring to get down to the'ole gears turning ;)

The next version of this VBulletin software (current in beta) contains support for threading. You can choose to view all messages in either threaded, linear, or hybrid (linear + threaded) form. You can see the latest beta running here:
http://www.vbulletin.com/forum/index.php

When you view a thread, there are links to change the display mode (threaded, linear, hybrid). It's not as simple as newsreader software, but it works. I'll probably upgrade once it goes gold.

Considering the donation idea, does anyone have experience/advice here? Do you simply ask for donations via a persistent link? Do you request a specific amount or let the individual decide? Has anyone here successfully used a donation system?

Wouldn't it seem awkward for a for-profit company to be asking for donations? I suppose I could keep the donated funds separate and dedicate them to the upkeep and betterment of the forum.

I am not sure if you can view this link without logging in to the forum:

http://www.rx7club.com/forum/donate.php

They basically ask for donations to purchase hardware/etc and they have a target goal/date they are shooting for. There is also a link to PayPal (to make the donation) and there are no guidelines in terms of donation amounts (I think having suggested amounts would be helpful).

If you set a monetary goal for each quarter (or whatever time period you feel would work best) ...and you reach that goal, you could turn off the donations for the rest of the quarter (and we could all celebrate, etc.)

If you don't reach the goal, the forum should get really slow and we can all post about how slow it is. :)

I think this would help people feel warm and fuzzy that you are not using the donations as a profit mechanism, but to reach specific goals in order to maintain/upgrade/etc the forum.

The users could also be more involved if you let us know (through a sticky donate thread for example) that you need $X to purchase a new forum server. When we reach the goal, we would all feel like we helped buy the new forum server to make the forum better.

I also think some type of visual reward (e.g., avatar or member type) for donators would encourage more people to donate. :)
-Scorpio

I have donated money to one or two sites that had a "paypal donate" button. But only ones who's service I found to be invaluable to me personally.

The other thing I don’t like about donations is that they typically do not benefit those who provide the donations. Their donations contribute to the longevity and growth of whatever service or resources are being offered. However as that site continues to grow more and more "non donating" visitors start to emerge. They basically reap all the benefits that have been provided by the donating visitors but have no vested interest and typically bring the quality of the site down.

I'll give a specific example of this to help clarify. I listened to a web radio station called gamingfm. It provides non stop, back to back, game soundtrack music. When they got started they were very small, but soon grew. The moved from their previous domain raddradio.com to gamingfm and opened up 3 different audio streams for people with different tastes.

One of the best features was the ability to request songs via the web for their large game music library. When they started out you could request 4 songs in a row and you could do this every 30 min. It was great, I could pick four of my favorite tracks and they would be available on the station almost immediately. I was glad to donate a sizeable donation, because I really appreciated the service they offered me. However as the site grew in popularity so did the number of requesters. People started "spamming" the requests and teaming up with their friends to request the same songs over and over again 15 times in a row. As a result, you can only request two songs every hour, and you cannot request the same song more then once every 24 hrs.

I still listen, but the service isn't nearly as compelling to me as it was before. I can't help but feel a little disappointed that in wanting to support a service I appreciated, I inadvertently contributed to it's degradation.

In retrospect, I would have much rather paid a subscription fee and kept the service as it was initially, instead of allowing it to degrade as it tried to cater to more and more users with no vested interest in the service.

A very good point, Dan. I'm not too sure if that kind of abuse would happen around here, though.

I second the call for moderators. If noise/spam becomes a problem, I'm sure there would be plenty of people willing to help out.

Originally posted by Dexterity
Can I start by disapproving of this one???

Unfortunately, I think this has turned into a brainstorming session. There are no bad ideas in a brainstorming session, so this option is perfectly valid. In fact, I'll even buy the first pitcher of coffee. :)

A couple of other random thoughts here. I don't think having a small membership fee would be uncalled for. I've noticed myself that people here are far more helpful and responsive than most other places. Having moderators would be a good idea. Maybe give them a discount on membership for them, make it free, etc. The site would really need a central administrator to work on the code though and handle service for the board members.

Additional services can and probably should be added later on. I'd almost like to see an ASP for game developers, and this would seem like the right place to start one. It might be a lot of work to do all of this, but I think the resulting benefit to most of the people here would be well worth it.

There have been very few websites I've been to that I felt like I wanted to drop in a donation. One for a fallen soldier, another for a dog that someone ignited with gasoline, etc. Generally not for the upkeep of a website though. I think that as a service, the website should offer enough in return to the members to make them want to keep it going. A subscription ensures that everyone contributes, not just the people who felt they got the most out of it. These forums are an excellent resource for everyone here, and I think that continuing them either on their own domain or as an independent organization would be viable. I don't think there are too many people here who wouldn't pay a reasonable fee to keep reading and posting to the forums.

The donation idea got me thinking, so I decided to try an experiment.

In the last 30 minutes, I added Paypal donation buttons to the bottom of each free article page on this site, including the Indie FAQ (http://www.dexterity.com/articles/indie-faq.htm) and the main articles page (http://www.dexterity.com/articles/). I get lots of positive feedback about the articles, so I figured that would be a good place to try the donation approach first. If it generates some additional funds, it could help pay for these forums as well as provide for expansion and new services.

From what I've seen of other sites that request donations, it's common to set a specific monetary goal and then use the funds for some specific purpose, such as hardware and software upgrades. Right now we don't need anything like that, since the load on this server is still ridiculously low.

But in the same spirit, I'll set an initial goal of $100 in total donations. Once the donations reach that amount, I'll write and post a new indie developer article. Plus I'll still keep those funds available to use for the indie section of the site.

And if it doesn't work out... well, I only wasted 30 minutes, and at least I'll learn something.

I'll be happy to post here at some future date to let everyone know how well it works. Perhaps we can all learn something from it then.

<rant>
The problem with paypal is that in order to donate you need a paypal account and in order to get a paypal account you currently have to go through a procedure which I imagine is much like top secret CIA clearance background checks or something like that. I know because I've been fighting with them for 8 months now to re-enable my account after they arbitrarily decided to disable it and ask me to fax them an autobiography. Whatever I fax I just get requests for more documents. Keep in mind as well that I've never had any problems with paypal while I was using my account like a fraudulent payment etc... It's no wonder there are sites like paypalsucks.com -- I could go on and on ... like every time you log into your account you have to sign off on a bunch of new rules (things like I can never sue paypal etc...) or.. whoops! account disabled. Ugh...
</rant>

Might I suggest you also ad the nice and easy to use amazon donations button. It's 15% but then you don't need to spend a year setting up an account to donate.

Good idea, Steve. I just added an additional link for Amazon donations. It only took about 10 minutes to sign up and get the HTML code. The donation snippet is dynamically included on each article page, so I only had to modify one file to change it.

With regard to the suggestions about ways to facilitate the removing of "noise" posts, I don't think the issue is quite so simple as this. Alot of what would constitute "noise" could be stuff that's not really off-topic, but perhaps a rehashing of something already thoroughly covered. There are other similar examples I could think of for posts that wouldn't quite seem delete-worthy, but would contribute to a sort of "noise" that would drown out the more helpful and meaningful posts. I think an attempt to thwart this noise by simply deleting posts that don't seem to be the best-of-the-best would only be perceived as being heavy-handed and would probably lead to resentment on the part of some and an overall chilling effect on participation.

I think there needs to be a more "natural" method of discouraging "noise", like the subscription model already being considered. Just playing "God" with the forums/threads I don't think is a good solution.

My humble opinion and proud of it. :)

Not to put too much of a damper on the donations thing, but for a company, private or public, that is not involved in providing charity as the main function of their business, it seems to me that asking for donations would be an admission that they don't know how to make money any other way, and I would be less likely to do business with them.

Not that I'm saying I believe you don't know how to make money, Steve, but from an outsider's perspective, that knows nothing about your company other than the website, how does it look to find pages asking for donations? Am I wrong in thinking that it makes the company look less stable?

Originally posted by Punchey
With regard to the suggestions about ways to facilitate the removing of "noise" posts, I don't think the issue is quite so simple as this. Alot of what would constitute "noise" could be stuff that's not really off-topic, but perhaps a rehashing of something already thoroughly covered. There are other similar examples I could think of for posts that wouldn't quite seem delete-worthy, but would contribute to a sort of "noise" that would drown out the more helpful and meaningful posts. I think an attempt to thwart this noise by simply deleting posts that don't seem to be the best-of-the-best would only be perceived as being heavy-handed and would probably lead to resentment on the part of some and an overall chilling effect on participation.

I think there needs to be a more "natural" method of discouraging "noise", like the subscription model already being considered. Just playing "God" with the forums/threads I don't think is a good solution.

My humble opinion and proud of it. :)

I fully agree. I think the idea of trying to use moderation this way would kill the spirit of the forums. In every good forum there's a healthy bit of off-topic antics.

1)
I think there can be forms of moderation besides deleting post. Simply saying that a certain topic has all ready been discussed to death, and suggesting the search function work for most people.

2)
I think it would be cool if members who had donated a certain amount of money became silver members or gold members, or something like that.

Originally posted by BlueWaldo

2)
I think it would be cool if members who had donated a certain amount of money became silver members or gold members, or something like that.

Now there's an idea!
donate 10$ and you could use an Avatar pic!

Originally posted by Mark Fassett
Not to put too much of a damper on the donations thing, but for a company, private or public, that is not involved in providing charity as the main function of their business, it seems to me that asking for donations would be an admission that they don't know how to make money any other way, and I would be less likely to do business with them.

Not that I'm saying I believe you don't know how to make money, Steve, but from an outsider's perspective, that knows nothing about your company other than the website, how does it look to find pages asking for donations? Am I wrong in thinking that it makes the company look less stable?

I agree that if mixed with regular sales, it can look a bit strange. This is why I only put donation buttons on the indie articles pages and not here in the forums -- i.e. only on pages our game customers don't visit. I know of a couple for-proft companies that similarly use donations to support free sections of their sites.

One is a friend's site, www.comicbookresources.com. He has an extremely popular comic book message board and occasionally requests thousands of dollars in donations for upgrades, which has worked well for him. He has many paid ads on the site, but people still donate to help improve the community.

The second site is Mothering Magazine's forums at www.mothering.com/discussions. At the top of every forum page, there's a "Community Chest" link which requests donations.

Mothering also has a clever second method of getting donations called DDDDC: Dirty Deeds Done Dirt Cheap. For a small donation you can pay to have the title of any member changed for a certain period of time. For instance, someone could pay to have your "Senior Member" or "Junior Member" title changed to "Cowardly Troll" for a week.

Both of these sites I mentioned have many thousands of members.

If donations work they might be a good short-term method to balance a business' need to profit with the desire to give back to the community. If I put profit above all else, I'd never have put up an indie board, written articles, etc. If the free parts of the business grow too much, they risk draining resources from the rest of the business, which creates pressure to either shut them down or make them profitable. We all know the stories of great free sites that had to shut down due to the cash drain.

On the Mothering site (my wife used to be their webmaster), there are sometimes threats that the boards will have to be shut down if a certain level of donations isn't reached. The boards are apparently a big financial drain on the magazine, which has been around for 30+ years. To keep the boards open, members said they'd be happy to donate, but then when the donation requests were made, hardly anyone actually did. As a result of this cash drain, Mothering has made (IMHO) some rash decisions about the administration of the board that only hurts the community in the long run. For instance, you must pay if you want to have your URL included in your signature, and no one is allowed to post links to their own sites (since they consider that spam, regardless of intent).

In any event I think donations are a worthwhile experiment. If after a month there are little or no donations, I'd feel fairly safe about dismissing that idea and would plan to move to a subscription model in the long run. If the donations generate more funds than expected, I'll explore that option more thoroughly. It took less than an hour to setup the donation buttons, but it's a lot more work to test a subscription model.

I'm interested to see the results of the donation test, nothing like hard imperical evidance :)

I'm also of the opinion that asking for donations is a bit amatureish. The thought that comes to my mind is "Haven't you figured out a way to make money, besides just blatently sticking your hand out and asking for it?" One could sell t-shirts through a place like pixeltees.com. Or any of the other sites on the web that allow you to sell branded coffee mugs and other memoribilia.

Maybe have a reccomended book once a week that links you write a reccomendation/summary for and have it link to your amazon affiliateID. That type of thing. There's so many subtler ways then just blatently asking for money.

Anyway, I look forward to seeing how this turns out. It has piqued my interest.

Does anyone like Slashdot's comment rating system? Give (almost) everyone a finite number of points that can be used to moderate posts.

Comments on Slashdot are frequently annoying, but they are annoying in a consistent way.

Of course, the signal to noise at Slashdot is close to zero, so maybe that's not such a good idea. :)

And I love the DDDDC idea!

Regarding the DDDDC idea, on the local BBS where my wife and I met 9 years ago, a bunch of us used to get together and play poker with the sysop. By mutual consent the top winner got to decide what the other players' BBS handles would be for the next week. It create some buzz about the poker games, since other board members would notice the strange handles. You could always tell who won the last poker game by noticing the new handles.

Like Dan, I'm also very interested in what the results of a donation system would be for this type of thing and I'd be surprised if it worked to satisfaction. This is certainly the best time to try an idea like this though, because I don't think it could actually hurt further possibilities at this point.

Just throwing in my 2 cents here. I'm a massive lurker of this sight, and placed well within the hobbyist camp and so I don't feel qualified (probably to strong a word) to contribute to a lot of the posts. Anyway, I see the donation method as a way to contribute to the site while I'm still learning the ropes. I think we'd all agree that Steve's articles are excellent and I, for one, don't mind making a small donation to hurry the next one along.

Pete
(Who's well on his way to reaching his pre-hard-drive-crash total of 5 posts.:D )

You've been fairly successful as a shareware company and you didn't grow that business on a donation concept. Why not try think along the same reasoning for your message board business. Consider doing it for profit. Excellent products have come from people who work for profit.

You could try some of the same concepts you used with your games. For example, the try before you buy concept. My kids bought two of your games because they tried them and liked them.

If you do attempt a paid site, you could try having a free trial period (it seemed to work well for AOL in their early years). I personally like the try before you buy software concept. It may work for a message board too.

Of course, I would rather see your board up for free. Or see you go to a donation board so other people would pay for it. That would be more profitable for me. But not if you go out of business eventually. I would much rather see you making profit from your board and continuing to offer a good service.

Just my thoughts.

A few years ago I suggested that the ASP newsgroups might benefit from a try-before-you-buy concept, where potential new members could have a 30-day trial period during which they could read the newsgroups but not post. I noted that the ASP itself didn't even use shareware marketing. We had already figured out that the technology would allow for read-only trial memberships, but members shot the idea down -- they preferred a fully private newsgroup where the only people reading or posting were paid members. They was also some concern that people would simply download the entire archive of messages during the trial period and then never join. I guess that depends on how valuable people perceive the privilege of posting their own message and participating in discussions vs. just reading what others have posted.

I'll let the donation method run for about 30 days and then evaluate the results after that. So far there have already been some donations. Much thanks to those who contributed!