QCDN Update February 2006

S

Sculli

Guest
Alright, I am just not going to get a newsletter out this month. It's too late too, I don't want to send one out now just to send another on March 1st.

I am just going to go over some things that have been happening or are about to happen:
  • January contests were successful, congratulations again to the winners, I am sure they have spend their spoils already - thanks to all participants as well.
  • I am working hard (as in spending a lot of time) on getting sponsors for upcoming contests. I was able to secure a good deal on the contest sponsorship for the March contests. I don't have anyone for the following months yet.
  • I am looking for someone to help me with QCDN marketing. See the announcement: Immediate Opening: QCDN Director of Marketing while it sounds like an executive position, it's really much more of a part time deal, perhaps like 2-4 hours a week or something like that. Of course I don't mind someone putting in more time, but I am sure there will be some cut off where the gain doesn't warrant the time invested if one looks at it simply from a monetary perspective.
  • I do want to create a QCDN branded FFXI themed vBulletin style to give QCDN an FFXI look and feel while at the same time also giving it a unique look. I will be asking for CoP screenshots and like soon to take elements from those and pass them on to the designers. The custom style will run like $250 or so, and I don't have that yet, but hopefully the tax return will come in soon and I can get that done.
  • In preparation to the move to one vB style I may discontinue the support of any styles other than Nightshift sometime soon. The reasoning is that QCDN will shortly receive significant feature additions and maintaining multiple styles is not practical given the time available to me.
  • Features to be added to vBulletin in the near future (March/April) are: user donation processing, picture gallery, referral program, forum store (you earn points for posts, and can then spend the points to buy custom user titles and additional content), user blogs, potentially a bookie system where people can place bets using their forum points. Some of these features may be premium features while others will be free for all.
  • There will be some template changes sometime soon to include links to QCDN affiliates to help monetize this site (i.e. small (88x31) GKWorld banner at the very bottom instead of the large banner rotations.
  • LINKSHELL SUPPORT I I want to expand the linkshell support QCDN provides. This will include URL forwarding, like http://yourls.qcdn.org will point to http://somefreehostwithacrazylongurl/somemoredirectories/yourls
  • LINKSHELL SUPPORT II I am looking into providing linkshells with their own subcategory @ QCDN instead of just a forum. What that means is that you would essentially get your own category like Final Fantasy Offline and you will be able to specify how many forums you like and how the access permissions will be set. I could currently do that manually, but it would be quite work intensive. I am willing to try this for one or two active linkshells, meaning linkshells that actually have the need for multiple forums and would make ample use of them.
  • LINKSHELL SUPPORT III I will also be offering hosting to linkshells. The details are still a bit sketchy, but it will be a hosting just like anywhere else, you get your own cpanel access, php, mysql, emails, etc etc. If your LS currently owns a domain name, and you would want to get hosting here at QCDN on a fast system with quality bandwidth, please contact me and we can talk. I am currently only looking for one or two linkshells that have active web sites that would want to move their domain to QCDN hosting. Again, the setup I have to do is manual at this time, so I really can't deal with a lot of requests.
I am probably forgetting a bunch of stuff, I am beat, but that's sort of an overview of what is going on behind the scenes. Some of these things will be implemented very shortly (before March 1st), others will have to wait some, but they will be done.

Improvements to the user profile are still on the table and not forgotten.

That's about it.
 
There are other styles apart from Nightshift??? :D

But seriously, is there any way you can show us statistics of the different theme usages? Would be interesting to see.
 
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Its nice to see that QCDN is constantly growing and changing. Makes me wonder what it will be like a year from now. ^^
 
Using Default Style 3407
Nightshift 84
Office 24
Blue-Breeze 2
Grape 9
Spring 7

Default style means Nightshift without to actually specifically selecting it.
 
Sculli you amaze me with the amount of work you put into this website, I hope your using the skills your learning here (or currently use those skills) to make the big money in life.

Get that donation thingy set up, I've got some of your well earned money.
 
you promised that the skins were gonna return D: I want my isignia :P or something darker than what I use now :P
 
Nitram said:
Sculli you amaze me with the amount of work you put into this website, I hope your using the skills your learning here (or currently use those skills) to make the big money in life.
Click to expand...
My day job has nothing to do with the kind of stuff I do for QCDN. I am a GIS Analyst who is taking classes to work on a career change and become a CPA. :biggrin:

Elemmire said:
you promised that the skins were gonna return
Click to expand...
That I did. One of the reasons I switched QCDN to vBulletin was that it is infinitely easier to administer multiple styles when it comes to modifications that need to be made to them.

The limiting factor is time.

There are some great 3rd party extensions and plugins for vBulletin that would be an asset to QCDN. Some of those I listed in the first post, others are more "behind the scenes" having less of an apparent impact, but are nonetheless very useful to make the board more user friendly and attractive. Many of these additions require modification of style template files. Maintaining a variety of styles to the same high quality is currently too time consuming to be possible.

I spend about 20 hours a week (which is truly crazy) on QCDN in an effort to improve things, and you can tell how "behind" I am with the things I want to do. Between 40 work hours, 6 credits, and whatever else there is, I just can't fit more QCDN related work in. Granted, some of this time is spend on a learning curve, but nonetheless, task at hand will have to be prioritized based on what will likely result in the greatest benefit to all users.

The one thing I believe will be beneficial to current users and attract new ones is giving QCDN a unique FFXI related look. I definitely want to get that done before the X360 release. Combine the look with implementing the features, and you got a workload that will barely fit into the remaining time before the April X360 release.

I would also like to get to a point where being the admin of QCDN isn't a 20-hour thing. I would be blissfully happy if I could do it in 7 hours a week, and I would be ecstatic if I could get the admin part done in 30 minutes per day. Hopefully that will happen once the things on the first post list are done.
 
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