Few ideas perhaps worth mentioning:

- We could make a site partners list and group together SEN, ICCUP, Nibbits, etc. and have a news announcement on each describing their new partners

- There's tons of hints for making sites more google friendly, we could also use some tags/auto-generated site maps.

- Most of us already do this: link to SEN on our SC applications, sites, SC profiles, and mention SEN when anyone's looking for SC help.

Post has been edited 1 time(s), last time on Aug 11 2016, 4:42 pm by jjf28.

The precise slogan is irrelevant. Mine was just an example. The important thing is the slogan should concisely explain what this site actually IS.

SEN - Social Excalibur Network

Slogan and acronym. Now everyone will know our true nature.

Let's go back to the original slogan: "Pushing Starcraft mapmaking to the limit".

We used to have a pretty big affiliates section, but that was removed a while ago.

Doesn't DevliN and Ahli know people at Blizzard? Couldn't we ask to get some exclusive information about the update and host it here?

That might be a interesting idea! Oh, also you'd think they will ask bout including the "Unused" units to be included in some way?

Way more interested in getting more clarification in the announcements and rumors that have been coming out of South Korea.

Nothing I have suggested is a "cut down", it's a merging.

There have been 14 threads active in Modding Assistance this year, 4 threads active in Modding Projects and 18 threads active in Modding Tools. It's not exactly as if there's so much activity that it would swamp 1 forum if they were merged together. It's also highly likely that anyone interested in modding would already be looking at all 3 forums anyway.

In other words, some people will be upset, and we can't have anyone upset, so lets not do anything. Of course, there are people who are currently unhappy (such as myself) with the current situation.

There are people who are going to unhappy, or happy, either way. A lot of people don't like change. Neither of those are reasons why changes for the good shouldn't be done. That's not saying that determing what "good" is is a straightforward walk in the park or incredibly obvious, but it is possible to come to some determination.

It seems to me that there is a fair amount of support for trimming our bloated forums down. I think it would be wise for the admins of this site to at least consider the proposal. It also seems likely that while there might be some areas where there is a lot of contention as to how or whether things should be merged (SC1 forums), there are other areas where there is very little contention at all (SC2).
Yeah, right. What *else* is happening on SEN that would mean merging the forums would take time away from those other activities? Nothing, as far as I can see. Pretending like time would be spent "better elsewhere" is silly if no time is actually being spent anywhere.

I would imagine there are at least a couple of Korean SC1 mapping communities that are much more active, and actually interested in mapping, than we are. Clearly we'd be the #1 english-langugage mapping site.

Blizzard hasn't worked that way since about 2002. They have a PR department that approves this sort of messaging. They would have no interest in doing anything to help us (or they would have already reached out on their own accord).

Post has been edited 2 time(s), last time on Aug 11 2016, 10:45 pm by Lanthanide.

They have changed the way the interact with the community the last couple years with Heroes of the Storm and Overwatch. The difference is that people there want the information and ask for it. Also that those two games have their own PR crew though lol

There is no harm in asking if someone working in the SC1 team to reach out to us through another person. This was how the Korean sites have always got their information, but it was through the Melee community.

On a side note, does anyone have names on who is working in the classic games team right now? I only know of Robert Bridenbecker because he was talking in some video about WC3's patch: https://youtu.be/KgBPaj4o5KY

Oldest active Mapmaking community (since '04, right?)

Hah, 'active'.

The last Korean mapping forum I know of died a couple years ago, don't know if something replaced it though.

I am Excalibur and I approve this message.

http://cafe.naver.com/edac/

Why do you take the upper part out of context and address it as if the sentence/point stopped there?
Why do you ignore the part where I said what you want already exists in a superior version?
Why do you ignore the counter arguments I quoted?
This is not how meaningful discussion will happen. If you want your arguments considered you gotta address the whole point instead of what suits you.

Also, what advantages do you even hope to gain by the mergers? (e.g. more activity, more incentive for productivity, faster finding of stuff, etc.) And why? (beyond a broad "makes sense" that has no practical impact)

About your last part:
There's not much being worked on, mainly because we have no active coder, but SEN still does have many issues that need fixing. And to me many of those are more pressing and have a bigger acceptance.

There are no active coders because you guys refuse to let people fix the problems. A lot of people have offered to fix simple problems, but nobody wants to share SEN's shitty precious code.

Most people we've invited to code see SEN's code and either:
A. run.
B. take a very long time to do very little and then go inactive.

Cecil, DJC, and others have all volunteered at one point or another to help out and were granted the opportunity. Very little results ever came of it.

Despite the history, Dem0n's statement is true, myself among others have offered to chase down bugs affecting our QOL on SEN and have never gotten the opportunity due to security concerns and what-not; instead I've been back-seat debugging and hacking around front-end files which takes a greater time commitment for less results. It's a problem when capable people want to make fixes and are not allowed to do so.

I strongly advise putting the code up on github (or make a private repo on gitlab if you're worried about it being public) so interested parties can make QOL fixes and add nifty features which can be reviewed and copied onto master branches/SENs server by admin(/ish) members.

Regarding the codebase, a brief discussion about v7 came up today in the shoutbox in addition to this thread. Two major improvements I would like to see for SEN's codebase, at a high level, are more defined requirements and less reliance on single coders. It goes without saying that there are other infrastructure issues I'd like to see addressed as well.

We need to define what we want SEN to be, what features it will have, etc. SEN also needs many people to help build it. While many contributed to SEN v5 and v6, they were mostly products of single coders, being Isolated Purity and Devourer, respectively. While they put forth great efforts, I think we're well aware of the downsides of this process. Thanks to collaborative technologies (ie, issue trackers and git), we can move beyond this and have a better product while taking on significantly less risk. We have a lot of capable coders here who can help.

I'm throwing out the ideas of v6.1 or v7. I'm not opposed to either one, but ultimately I can't decide where we go because I won't be doing the majority of work. No one person should be doing the majority of the work. I can provide sysadmin support. Depending on what languages we use, I may be able to contribute code as well.

What do we want for SEN as a community? Is it worth going through with a big development process even if the patch is completely lackluster, disappointing, and doesn't attract new people? Assuming we do really want this, do we want to improve v6 or start over working towards a v7?