What would make SimCity Forum better?

[Ken]

I'm doing a little housekeeping on SimCity Forum (sweeping dust under carpets, etc.) and would like to know what you think would make SimCity Forum better. I'm looking for simple things rather than major feature enhancements as I'm not keen on plopping down a couple hundred dollars to update vBulletin and the forum skin.

One of the big things I've already done is to turn off the banner ads for users when they are logged in. Ads are most effective for users hitting the forums from search engines and turning them off should make things a little nicer for registered users.

Another thing I did was to turn the RSS feed on (I have no idea why I never did this in the past). Adding this feed to your live bookmarks, Firefox bookmark bar, etc. would allow users to easily see when new posts are on SimCity Forum without having to make a special effort to visit here.

I'm considering turning moderation off for images, but this would require everyone be more vigilant to make sure no one attaches inappropriate images. I could also increase attachment storage allowances as I have no shortage of storage space right now.

Your thoughts/ideas are really wanted.

[Ken]

We've had the same title graphic on these forums since the very beginning and one thing that has become annoying about it is that our (or at least my) desktop size has become much larger. As a result, there is a large black area on the left hand side of the title graphic. One idea I have is to make a new title graphic based on screen captures from our cities (the SimCity Forum logo would also have to be reworked). I think it might be possible to automatically rotate the title graphic through a series of different screen captures from different members cities. The size of the graphics could be between 1400x200 1600x200, which would be wide enough to accommodate most people's desktop resolution. I could then add some kind of grid background behind the title image such that it wouldn't look incomplete if a user had their screen wider than this.

Anyone interested in seeing a screen capture of their city in the title area of SimCity forum can upload them to this thread. You can crop the screen captures yourself to either 1600x200 or 1600x200, or you can upload a full screen capture and I'll work on finding a good crop.

I'm also open to new "SimCity Forum" logo suggestions as a new one would be needed because the current one is part of the title graphic.

[Comkid]

For the logo, I suggest, we essentially blend/fade the end part of it into the black so it looks like the black is part of the design and possibly change black to another color. Though, I've never looked at the logo enough to notice that it just cuts off haha. I'm thinking we should turn the ads back on for members as we don't get that much traffic, and all the ad revenue we can get we should get. We should also start building up a more active base for this site, as we wouldn't want it to die off would we.

EDIT: Another way to get more popularity would be to run like a competition where'd you may give away a copy of SimCity 4 Deluxe Edition for doing something, like getting the most referrals to the site, or so on. This would really help gain more members, and if we get active members more active members will follow.

EDIT EDIT: A great idea I have is we create a region, and each user can reserve their city/area of the region, then they will be able to modify it how they like so we essentially have a SimCity Forum region, or we could have one city/area which is the size of a region, then we have a topic where you reserve it to be the next editor, where you can have the save file to play for 24 hours, after that you will pass it on to the next poster, and eventually we can see the outcome of everyone's hard work.

[Infernus]

We've had the same title graphic on these forums since the very beginning and one thing that has become annoying about it is that our (or at least my) desktop size has become much larger. As a result, there is a large black area on the left hand side of the title graphic.

Aha! I just noticed the new banner up there, Ken. Looking much better now without all that black space Even my modest-sized laptop showed quite a bit of it, so it's definitely a marked improvement!

[Ken]

Thanks!

I was wondering how long it would take for someone to notice. The title and the cityscape are separate graphics so things should always line up right no matter what the browser width. The background logo is 1900px wide, which is the widest most monitors are set to. I'll work on a seamless repeat of the background for wider desktops.

Anyone on IE7 or lower may see the title display a little ugly since IE didn't introduce alpha support for PNGs until IE8, but they should be updating to a more current browser anyways.

[koreankid11]

Maybe some downloads? Of regions... or the money tree... I need that badly.
Just a suggestion, but if that happens, will that mean changing the rules? Like simtropolis. You HAVE to be 13 to enter.

[Sim_City_Fan]

What about a City Journal where members can update their cities and update us with what they have created such as this on simtropolis: - http://community.simtropolis.com/topic/54903-vizoria/.

[Infernus]

We used to have journals, but they got replaced with blogs after our recent update:

http://simcityforum.com/blog.php

This should be roughly the same thing. I notice our old journals haven't yet managed to be transferred over though...

[Ken]

I have all of the old journals saved on my local hard drive, but I need to work with each individual member to get the put into the blog so that they get credited to the right user. If you would like to repost your old journal posts, please let me know and I can provide them.

[Infernus]

Ah, I see. In that case I wouldn't mind having my old journal posts, that way I can put them up when I have some time. It hasn't been updated in forever, but it's better than nothing