The secret of successful game and mod development projects (aside from awesome gameplay) is an active community of creators and players discussing ideas, hunting bugs, sharing concepts and helping one-another. A key part of fostering a community of fans is discussion forums, and whilst the majority of projects listed on the Mod DB have forums, we wanted to open our technology up and enable teams to create Mod DB forums for their teams public (and private) use.
Apart from the obvious benefit of having an uber-powerful, fast, forum system running in 5 minutes (in your game, mod, engine or groups profile), we believe their is a lot to gain by using the Mod DB forum system should you choose to do so.
- Instant access to a community of 250,000+ members
- Create "staff only" forums for your team to privately chat in
- Members can watch threads and add boards their favorites which will show up in the Mod DB forums
- Manage members permissions, ban members from your forums, you have complete control
- Stable and dependable, with an accurate and smart "in-place" search system
- Unrivaled code embed system, so coders can share information
- UPDATE: (new feature) Browse all active forum communities
Check out our getting started guide which will help you setup your own forums and look out for more community oriented features coming soon - which are built for you to use, to help you create your games as quick as possible without worrying about setting up and managing "time-hog" stuff. As always, we want to hear from you, regarding what you want us to implement which will help you develop your projects. Ask us and chances are we can make it happen.
Vety nice addition indeed. Will see what becomes of this.
YAY~~~!!! I'm making one!!! in the dos group!!!
made one it's realy col!
Moddb.com
excuse the self promotion but i love this feature
Well it would appear to be very simple and very easy to setup and use.
Love the user icons :D
This is really a great addition! I can see this be quite popular.
Setting one up for UT2D right now.
This is so cool :D
Yeah... this is going to be very useful
Great!
In future we hope to make the forums embeddable - along with other "community oriented" enhancements like this, so mod teams can make the forums look like their homepage and just embed them whereever they want. so whilst the forums are running from ModDB, you wouldn't even know
I'm still not sure if this is entirely useful, but hey, I'm not going to argue ;)
Isn't this kinda superfluous for people who run their own server? I can see some benefit for people, who don't use FTP or Wiki to organize their project. I definitely think this helping beginners, who want to set up a first organizational structure for their project. As far as I understand every project has to get a homepage of their own anyway, so you'll probably have to make a decision, whether you want to document things on Moddb, or on your own server. Interaction between my server and my Moddb profile would be nice, but how that would work is probably difficult to imagine...
Having a website is no longer a requirement now that Mod DB profiles are virtually "mini-sites". You just have to have a good updated profile with images, videos, files etc to qualify.
Oh and yes we do plan on exploring ways content can interact between mod profiles and mod homepages - any ideas on what you want would be awesome.
could you release code so that we can host our own forums on our own servers, the way forums like phpbb do it?
I think part of the strength of the forum system is that the back-end is completely private and not in use by many websites - as a result it's very secure and not as interesting for spam attackers or hackers.
whilst I agree with ambershee, though our forum system is coded in a LAMP stack (php, mysql, apache etc) unfortunately *unlike* phpbb, it requires a custom apache config, mysql 5.2 etc. So even if we could separate the forums from the site and release them, getting it running would take a long time and require significant backend knowledge, since they were not designed with install scripts and all that "pretty" stuff that most forums have. So its not on the cards... we do however plan to visualize everything so you can pretty much make the forums and other features your own, such as "embedable" polls etc, which is what I'm looking for suggestions regarding.
ok, thanks for explaining
Good project, nice idea!