There has been some discussion recently about the 'slowing' of the verge community. To me at least, this kind of seems like the same old song-and-dance that's been going on since after the release of V2 (the community surged, then promptly died for reasons I'm not prepared to even ponder). The verge community at the moment does seem smaller than it could be. I imagine we could support a very large community of independent rpg (and other genre) game makers who are just dying for the opportunity to express their views and show off their newest screenshots and media.

The people are there. Perhaps hundreds of them, eager to be heard. In fact, many of them probably even browse the verge site, but don't actually contribute to the verge community. There are probably many reasons for that.

What I propose is the transformation of verge-rpg.com into a community website. With very little work, perhaps a week's worth or less, verge-rpg.com could be completely transformed into a dynamic, living, breathing community site with participation not only possible, but encouraged. You need only go to my site, futurenext.org, to see what is possible with the content management system called postnuke. I created that initial site (which is served off my home cable connection, incidentally) within a week, and within another week of tweaking templates, I have a site which I think looks both professional and unique. It is fully community-centric, with public news publishing submittal, and bulletin boards all integrated into the package. Once I figure out how to integrate comments with my custom publishing engine, I'll allow comments on all of the news items.

Now imagine if verge-rpg.com was like this. People could come to the site, post the newest news concerning their game, post a screenshot, and have immediate feedback from other registered members (or even anonymous - it's all admin configurable from anywhere on the web). Because of permissions management, registered members would be able to submit their own news items, and a moderator could decide which ones make it to the front page. RSS newsfeeds are available BY DEFAULT without any work required. All content on the website, even the html, can be accessed from anywhere with a web connection, so it would be easy to moderate and admin. With a little work, you could even reuse the themes available on here.

It's not that the current verge-rpg.com site is bad. It's not. It's a far cry better than the original (especially the message boards), but I think it could be SO much more with so little work. Postnuke sites practically run themselves after the initial work is done. The bandwidth from what I've seen so far is very efficient per page view, which is a plus.

I don't know if your website is using php and mysql, but those are the only real requirements (I'm running PHP5 and Mysql4). I'd like to see what everyone thinks about this. I think it would be absolutely awesome if you guys made the change.

And if you had any questions about installing some of the custom modules or anything, postnuke has one of the best communities there is. And I wouldn't mind helping either.

edit: And, after thinking about it, Google Ads probably wouldn't hurt, but I bet they'd provide a new source of revenue that would help pay for bandwidth as well as other development costs, if time is money. :D

edit: I'd make such a site myself, but 1.) It would be counter-productive to take traffic away from verge-rpg.com, 2.) a split in the community would be bad, and 3.) I don't have the kind of bandwidth for people to download the amount of games that verge-rpg.com has.

That's almost exactly what I was worried about. :p

Yes the Post/PHPNuke thing is VERGE-NET's domain. McGrue obviously wants Verge-rpg to be unique. As such, both the message board and website content are custom made. Personally I agree with the decision not to use a content management system, but a message board that is custom seemed unnecessary, and it has many qwirks. However it could be fixed up so that the problems don't exist. The website doesn't need a huge facelift, just adjustments. Also the verge community just needs to be assisted financially enough to spend time actually doing verge stuff rather than spending ALL their time at work/school and playing new 3D games.

I agree - I like the feel of this site a lot ,,, but there are a couple things that would add a lot to it.

For one it would be nice if we could leave comments in a thread unique to each file people release. I think that would be an extra incentive for authors to put up their work.

I think someone mentioned this somewhere else but here goes - some way to add a news item .... it needent be something thats automated ---- maybe just a formmail to grue so he can pick out things worth mentioning.

--- that was my 2 cents

Here are some suggestions in order to add new features to the current Grue-site-engine.

Make a forum that holds to-be-moderated news. Make all threads created autolocked, so that comments can't be made until the news post has been moved to the main page. Then, make it possible to move threads to the news area. And, if you want to be really fancy, make it so that only the thread creator and administrators can see the to-be-moderated news. And maybe, if the user puts images up somewhere for the news posts, like PhotoBucket or ImageShack, have the admins copy them over to the /images/news/ folder or what have you.

And, for inspiration on the not-added-yet teams:

For a teams MySQL table, here are some basic ideas (with crappy variable names for some):
* 'team.id' - your standard AUTO_INCREMENTING PRIMARY KEY
* 'team.name' - the name (duh) -- Allow to rename if the team admin chooses to do so.
* 'team.desc' - the team's description -- Allow to modify description, if the team admin chooses to do so.
* 'team.acceptfirst' - if true, the admin must first accept you to join a team
* 'team.invite' - if true, the outside user must be invited to register to a team.
* 'team.hide' - if true, don't allow outsiders to view your team's threads or post in the team area.
* 'team.admin' - the id of the team admin's user id.

For the team MEMBERS MySQL table:
* 'team-member.id' - team member's user id.
* 'team-member.teamid' - the id of the team the user is in.
* 'team-member.banned' - if true, the team member has be shunned from the team.
* Implement a method of checking so that the user can't join multiple times by accident.
* Make banned members unable to post in team-only threads, and if the 'team.hide' variable is true, hide the team from them as well.

For the team-specific threads:
* Modify either your 'topic'/'thread' table or, if you just use the actual posts, 'comment'/'post'/'reply' or whatnot. Add a 'teamid' variable of some sort, and voila.
* Modify the topic-grabbing queries for the boards so that team-related threads don't show up in area 0. Do likewise for team-thread-grabbing queries.
* Make team-specific threads check the permissions set by their team admin before letting it become viewable

The actual way to achieving this might need a bit of tweaking, but that's the rough idea.