License for upgrading the board to Invision Community
Donation protected
Introduction
Hey there! I go by Spirited in the game development community. I own a game development / preservation board, primarily targeting the preservation and private server development of Conquer Online (an MMORPG from 2002). You can find our community here: https://cooldown.dev.
Problems we face
While our little community has continued to grow and gain small popularity with the community, we encounter lots of small hiccups with our current board software:
- Pages not loading correctly despite there being no issues from the host
- Poor support for member customizations and projects (blogs, clubs, etc)
- Poor support for downloadable content (which would be great for hosting client mods and themes)
- Poor support for SEO (a huge issue if we want to continue growing)
- Poor plugin integration (plugins conflict and don't play nicely with each other)
And while these are the main reasons, there're more that make administrating the board difficult.
The path forward
In my own testing, Invision Community (referred to as IPS) fixes all of the issues mentioned above. IPS is a paid board solution that offers lots of tooling and plugins for growing our community. It also offers conversions tools that work with our board so we can keep our memberships, topics, sections, and more. The cost of the solution is $499, which I can contribute $100 towards for getting us started. I'm asking for help from the community to crowd fund our forever license to use IPS for Cooldown.
Future vision of the board
After we obtain a license to IPS, I'd like to make Cooldown more game preservation focused!
- Conquer Online, Era of Faith, and other TQ games would be under a new "Game Preservation" section. We'd still have our independent section for Indie development, but that'd be a secondary focus.
- A Downloads plugin with IPS will let us host mods for customizing / extending Conquer Online and other games, and let it all be easily browsable.
- Clubs would allow groups of developers to share code and more using their own, private forums.
- Blogs would let members write about their project development / showcase their work.
- And eventually, I'd like to add a plugin for showing private servers that are online, what their online status is, and how many discord members their discord has.
On top of that, having a more modern forum and theme would be very nice additions to the usability and management of the forums.
How it will be delivered
After the funds are released to me, I'll purchase the license and begin work. The forum may not be upgraded for a month or two while I prepare the upgrade, but I intend to perform the upgrade as soon as possible after the purchase is made to alleviate peoples' frustrations with the current board. Thanks for your time and interest, and I hope you consider contributing (even if it's only a small amount).
Organizer
Spirited Snowcat
Organizer
Los Angeles, CA