Right, I’ve got a few more ideas and comments to make. I think that time is running out and we need to get to a point where some decisions are made so that we can get everything in place:
Aim and focus of the site/forum:
We focus on geek culture. Gaming, Anime, Tabletop gaming, comics, consoles, the whole works. We make sure we cover conversations covering the entire spectrum. This will give us the best chance of getting more and new people. I honestly don’t think there is any site like that in SA. most are specified on one, but not to all the aspects of geekdom
Costing and financing.
This will always be a problem. There will be cost involved hosting and maintaining the domain of the site. There will be marketing and other costing involved in gaining more people and more options. I’d suggest we put a Patreon in place and give people the opportunity to donate via Patreon or Bitcoin. Let’s be new and bold! Once the site picks off (hopefully it does) we can get advertising onto the site as well. While people may frown upon this, it’s is a good way of gaining financial independence. There will be tax implications, however, and I’m sure that the business side will need to be ironed out first. Like who the owners are, where the money goes to, who decides on where it is spent and stuff like that.
Blogs, Articles and Content.
The site will live or die on the content we create. At the start we as the community will need to manage that. We’ll start out small, focusing on threads and posting links to news articles. We don’t need to write them ourselves, just link them and perhaps add an opinion. But, we will need to add one big “article” or “blog” to the site. Something written by the community. We might even get a few different people writing it, and only selecting one per week. I am more than happy to write one article per week for consideration. In the meanwhile, we keep on adding content to the community through the Game Club thing, Official threads and other stuff
Marketplace
While I am reluctant to the idea of a marketplace, there is no denying the fact that it brings in traffic. Carbonite is extremely locked down to new people, and I’m pretty sure using Discourse we can get a much more user and newcomer friendly way of implementing this. Especially with the levels. The levels will absolutely enable us to manage it much better
Marketing and Social Media
Big risk area. Marketing and social media management of the site, getting the name out there, is going to be a lot of work. Perhaps we can come to an arrangement where there are multiple people with login details to try and assist with this, but this might be difficult. We absolutely will, however, need to market the site. On Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and the likes. Perhaps later on adding things like podcasts and Youtube videos to the list of stuff and get our community out there that way. Then at conventions, we must have a presence, taking pictures, talking to people, handing out business cards to the site or something like that. Also perhaps leverage some of the current community contacts to get people in Anime, Tabletop, cosplay and other geek circles into the community as well.
Logo and name
Probably at the moment the biggest thing to be focused on right now. At least we’ve got some time, but we’ll need to add a poll somewhere to let the community vote on the name, perhaps get someone with an inkling to the creative side of life to make a couple of logos for the chosen name, then we vote on that as well. We keep it within the community if we can.
Right, those are some ideas I’ve been mulling over.
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