“Easy peasy”, just like you’ve said, Kickstarter, banners, companies interested in sponsoring the forum (which may actually work as a source for future employees).
I’ve used the quotes because none of this is actually easy, it’s easy to say it and think it though 
I think I would prefer kickstarter than banners and the like being posted over the forums.
Yeah sure, I actually never wanted banners on my forum, but for a Kickstarter project… it just needs more thinking I guess
I think I might be reiterating some things already said, but shwatever
When I wrote this up, there were only 13 members and 30 guests viewing the forum. Is this normal? It seems like the forum needs to draw more of these casual viewers into discussing on our boards. Reducing the barrier of entry, I think, should be the primary focus of the board if we want it to grow.
The community should start some “What are you working on” threads to get some casual discussion going regarding people’s projects and technical focuses. Many people ask hard questions here, and then go showcase their results on other forums such as polycount or cgsociety. This is ick! We should publicly set the precedent that it is acceptable for users of all levels to not only ask questions, but showcase their work on this forum.
The site just added a VFX section, but maybe consider trimming down the number of sub-forums for technical and general discussion. We do cover a very wide range of issues on the forum here, but there are rarely more than two or three forum threads that are active within a given week. I’d bet that the number of old threads in a subforum discourages posting. Allowing older forum posts to be pushed into the annals of page two or three might make the forum seem livelier and encourage interaction.
Everyone talks about wanting tutorial or walkthrough content for the site, but there’s very little encouragement for users to actually create this content (which was the case with the old wiki). Let’s have a front-page post on the site that showcases the best threads and tutorials created for the site that week/month. This way, the site gains more meaningful content, users have something to brag about, and the front page gets updated with content that’s more useful to people other than regular forum users.
And now, some emoticons.
:D::D::D::D::D::D::D:
There’s the problem of generating more (and more detailed) content for the site, then a completely separate problem:
Organizing what’s already here.
Does vBulletin support tagging? Can we run through some existing content and tag posts that are interesting for beginners, interesting for Maya plugin devs, etc? Searching by keyword is not usually ideal. Having categories of information might make what’s here more visible and useful, especially if we tag only the highest quality posts.
With regards to mentoring, can we have a show of hands of people who already do this? Mentoring is a great way to grow our community, and surprisingly low-cost time-wise for mentors. It would be interesting to see how many people are experienced in this area, and how many people would consider participating. It’d also be pretty interesting to read mentor/mentee communication, too, as a kind of coming-of-age in Tech Art story, if anyone were willing to blog or post about the experience (with permission from both sides, obviously).
I’ve looked into this mentoring website previously and watched a couple of their web seminars, but never actually signed up:
http://www.mentornet.net/
They do have “professional organization” partnerships, and plenty of resources and advice for mentors, as well as access to loads of university students. Might be worth a discussion.
Does vBulletin support tagging? Can we run through some existing content and tag posts that are interesting for beginners, interesting for Maya plugin devs, etc? Searching by keyword is not usually ideal. Having categories of information might make what’s here more visible and useful, especially if we tag only the highest quality posts.
vBulletin does support Tagging and we could add a TAG Cloud. That would make it a little easier to see what most people are talking about and enable quick access to those subjects.
- Everyone talks about wanting tutorial or walkthrough content for the site, but there?s very little encouragement for users to actually create this content (which was the case with the old wiki). Let?s have a front-page post on the site that showcases the best threads and tutorials created for the site that week/month. This way, the site gains more meaningful content, users have something to brag about, and the front page gets updated with content that?s more useful to people other than regular forum users.
This is also a great idea, updates to the wiki are usually only posted in a forum but this would definitely increase the visibility of these updates.
This is what we have set up at Slant, the CMS is a little different from the layout that we currently have.
We could set this as the default, and set-up sections for the different Tech Art disciplines
that image is exactly what I had in mind…
Alright, first some updates.
I’ll repost the contents of the announcement:
There have been a number of updates to the forum, based on suggestions about how to grow the site from here and elsewhere.
[ol]
[li]Company badges are back.
[/li]> [li]Each thread now has a Google +1/Tweet/Facebook Like button. I tried to do this for each post but the client-side slowdown was too much.
[/li]> [li]There is a Twitter box on the homepage, that will post the newest tweets with the “#techart” hashtag.
[/li]> [li]There is a box that shows the newest posts from the planet rss feed.
[/li]> [li]I got rid of the Administrative VFX forum (moved it into the VFX General Discussion).
[/li]> [li]I combined “Visuals” and “Rigging” into “Rigging and Visuals”.
[/li]> [li]I combined “Languages” and “Tools and Pipeline” into “Coding, Tools, and Pipelines”
[/li]> [li]I’ve moved the Technical Discussion and VFX Artists categories above the General Discussion category.
[/li]> [/ol]
This was all good and useful progress based on the feedback everyone has given. Please tell me what you do and don’t like about the new setup.
Now, let’s talk about the work left to do. There are two major areas the work that needs to be done falls under:
Content Organization:
Community Involvement
I’m diggin these changes - however the front page doesn’t seem to support a resolution of 1280x1024 well, a good 25% of the homepage is off screen. After the addition of the widgets it just became too wide.
The “what you are working on” twitter trend is an awesome idea, I tend to do that in part as it is. It would be cool to see what others are working with as well
Like the updates you’ve done Rob but I agree with RyanT, the page is a bit too wide.
I usually like pages that use the full 1920x1080 most people here probably are running (would be fun to get stats on that?) but now a days I run all my monitors in portrait so I’m on 3240x1920 with each screen being only 1080 wide.
Maybe the left panel could be a bit smaller and the middle one can shrink even more?
The coding chalenges like you’ve said can be of low participation and from my experience that sort of thing tends to die after 2 or 3 challenges, one thing I would invite you to have a look at is the mini-challenges Denis Tropomov started at CGTalk, consists in really small tasks but the idea is to get the faster, memory efficient way to do it, or whatever you feel it’s a good challenge!
Samples:
As for the T-Shirt design contest… Let’s do it! :DDD
Wow! Thanks for the heads up! The problem was actually some giant images we had in the news- I didn’t realize they stopped the center column from resizing properly. I’m going to find an auto-resizer now.
Regarding challenges: What I’d like is to find a way to ‘code in your browser’. Combine that with mini-challenges and we’re good to go!
Edit: Well that was pretty awful. The built-in image resizer which resizes images in threads seems to not work on the CMS. Nor does any hack I tried. I can turn off images in the News entirely, but I’d rather not. So I just resized the images by hand (there were only 3). We’ll be mindful in the future! Thanks for pointing this out, it must have been broken for a long time.
The only reason the Polycount wiki is full of content is because 1 person keeps adding content that he finds interesting. That’s me. I just treat it like a public bookmarking system. Hopefully it helps out others, but mostly it’s a way for me to keep track of stuff I’m interested in.
I restrict editing rights to people that seem legit. But I’m totally open to adding any TA users as editors there, if you want to start adding content to the PC wiki.
I’ve added a ton of editors, but only one or two have actually added content. It’s just human nature, like Kameleon says people have a short attention span when it comes to editing wikis.
Adding and organizing content takes dedication and work. The only reason it’s worked for Polycount is because I’m a bit loopy when it comes to documentation, I guess I just like to organize things. :nod: You just need a TA here with a similar bent, one that’s not me. 
I absolutely love the PC wiki. I don’t think there’s anything comparable. Even though I like the idea of a TA wiki, I’m not sure if having 2 separate wikis, where much content overlaps, is a good thing. There’s just so much complementing knowledge, to me it just makes sense to have it all in one since we as TAs work closely with the other disciplines covered in the PC wiki. I’m thinking “Polycount wiki in cooperation with tech-artists.org” would be a great thing. Although I absolutely have no idea if PC would even agree to that.
I have absolutely no desire to run a competing with with polycount. I love those guys and came from the PC community. That said at this point the main problems are technical- first, get the wiki back up and running, then figure out how to get it over to MoinMoin. Either way I suspect the TAO wiki will be locked down and we may just point people over to the PC wiki until things get ported over. There are more exciting ways to invest our time. Either way, I need to re-poke the PC guys about it, I brought it up a while ago but heard no response.
Artur: Yes, pretty much exactly what I want to take advantage of.
one idea I had which I’m not even sure is if an feed of the tech-art irc could be included in the tao page. I can’t download things at work, but if it’s in a webpage I could join some. is the channel still active?
You can find the info for the IRC here: http://tech-artists.org/forum/showthread.php?406-TAO-on-IRC
I’ve also added it to the site navigation on the right site widget.
Thanks Shawn
Yep