I have created a document describing my thoughts and ideas for a new community-based mapping resource site. If you would like too, please take a moment and read the following…
http://www.rebelscum-pa.com/backup/lvlsource_v11
After you have read it (completely) would you please vote to express your thoughts on the subject. Please DO NOT vote if you have not read it from beginning to end.
Thank you. 
Conceptually, I support the idea that the full blown concept could be useful to me. However, your proposal doesn’t sell me. I think all of my comments below are constructive in nature. Take them for what they’re worth - opinions:
Scope. What is the scope of your site. All mapping related to ET?, ET and RTCW? Quake 3 engine powered game? All mapping? Be a little more clear on what your vision is. People will support visions backed by resources and credible project plans. I don’t think people will support pie-in-the-sky idealism.
References. While I totally understand that I am new to the mapping world, the names you threw out at contributors mean nothing to me. The only name I recognize is rgoer and I can’t even call up the name of a piece of his work as a reference. You might want to drum up a little more support from names who would be instantly recognizable to a large cross section of a particular mapping community for the credibility.
Resources. What are they are what makes you think they can support the site you envision. You don’t really mention what kind of resources you have to power this site other than “Because I have the resources to do it”. If you get hammered by traffic, is the person donating servers, storage, and bandwidth still going to support you? According to Gaminghost, RTCWOnline.com, was using $400 PER MONTH is donated services. At some point, they (GH) decided they couldn’t support RO anymore and track towards profitability. RO lost their hosting and is now more or less dead (reborn as FPS Heaven)
OK, great. I have a mega site to which I can contribute content. Are you planning on helping me get my content posted or is that all up to me? What if I have problems accessing my account? Is that all on me? If I get hosted by Planet*, they offer e-mail support, tech help, unlimited storage, … What alternative are you offering?
I think you have misprioritized the issues you addressed. I don’t think the first mental block people will have about contributing is going to be over “credit”, yet you spend a great deal of time talking about the prestige system. To me, that’s totally irrelevent.
Instead, buried in the Q&A, you mention that levelsource can change my material. That raises a HUGE red flag. You need to explain in much more detail how that will work because right now, it means more work for me. My understanding is that if you make changes to my material, then I either have to 1) update two versions of the doc, if I make edits, changes, or updates or 2) run the risk of overwriting your changes if I’ve uploaded edits without realizing you did too
Spelling and grammar count. You are writing a persuasive document and your spelling and grammar need to be in order. At a mimimum, run a spell check on your document and strip out the net slang “gonna”, “thx” and imprecise language "I am here to propose some stuff to you "
How does hosting work? Can people run their own sites like they do at Planetwolfenstein/quake/…? Or will they have to fit some template dictated by your team so that “it ‘fits’ to our websites’ theme, etc”
Just a couple of thoughts. As I said, they’re just opinions, take them for what they are worth.
Scope. See 2-b.
References. Glossy, truffles, and Reaper are all respectable names from the quake3 editing world.
When I said I had the resources to do it, I meant that I will have exactly 1000mb of webspace and 20gig of bandwitdh per month. I would imagine that that would be enough for what I am envisioning… Wouldnt it?
Yes, you can contribute content… but none of it can be admined by you (the contributor). Once you give it to lvlsource, we determine how we want to organize and catagorize it into our resource database. Its not as if we will be a hosting service and people can just randomly throw stuff however they feel like onto our site (they will NOT have that option)… We will have complete control over design, management, and execution of the site. Thus, making it a clean, well organized place for resources.
What then is the first thing people will think about when contributing?
5 1/2) Topic: Lvlsource changing content… You have the entire concept wrong. Refer to #4. This may be my fault for not explaining it properly.
Will do
You have an incorrect understanding of the situation again. See #4.
Thanks for taking the time to look it over. Obviously I will have to revise some stuff to make it a little bit easier to understand what is trying to be accomplished.
I support your idea, eventhough I don’t know much about mapping for Q3 or ET engine, but if I ever write something for Q2 or Half-Life, you’ll be the first one I’ll send it to.
I have only one thing to ask about your site and the way the given material will be managed. You say that contributes could be altered by the staff. I suggest that, in that case, you ask the original authors for their permission. If that is what you’ve already planned, you should point that out in the document, so that the potential contributors won’t be scared away by this.
I think this is the only statement that gave me doubts about supporting your site.You should think about it and declare yourself in this matter.
Anyway … good luck with your site :drink: .
I guess I could see how a potential contributor would be concerned about us modifing material. Perhaps I didnt layout the reasons why we would do this… Here are some valid reasons:
We would change\modify content…
To correct an obvious spelling or grammer error. (lol, and I suck at both these things!)
To correct an obvious content error (like outdated or incorrect information or bad links).
To better organize information. For example, modifying a couple steps in a tutorial to make for clearer reading, etc.
To make it “fit” into our website. For example, trimming an image or replacing images in a submitted tutorial. This would be done for consistanies sake.
Those are the only reasons why we would modify a submitted work.
Personally, I wouldn’t sumbit anything unless I knew I had complete control over my work. You could change the layout of the text, but nothing in the text itself. If there were gramatical mistakes, logical errors, etc., that should be up to the contributor to fix.
I just wouldt want people either a)taking credit for something I did… “hey, I edited this document you wrote so it’s partly mine” or possibly screwing something up or altering it in a way I don’t like.
It’s kinda like…say… submitting a nude art piece to a museum. Should the museum have the right to… say, draw black circles over over the nude parts of your painting because they don’t fit in with the scheme of the museum?
If you made the site correctly, there wouldn’t be this issue. You’d have a set template, the document would be placed in the template. No need to mess with people’s work. Leave the fixing of the content up to the contributor. That way, you’ll get more people willing to contribute AND people who wont be ticked when you change something.
Oh, and I don’t think 20 gb of bandwidth is going to be enough. I know a clan that goes through that much on their forums with maybe 30 people accessing it. You mayb want to check into that. Find out how much bandwith the q3world forums take up a month, etc.
I had a site hosted myself. More or less bios site with guides and help. In less than a few months my bandwith went over 20. That’s over 2,000 ppl per day. Now this is a site that I created with very little picture content, mostly text. Imagine it with alot of pics…
Good luck.
Hmm, now that you mention it… I suppose I could give a set amount of credits to ALL submittals whether they are modified or not, and then just give an extra credit to the person who modified. This way the contributor will get the same amount of credits no matter what happens on our end.
I asked Astrocreep and he said that he uses 8 gigs per month for Map-center (w/ forums and all). Though, that number seems very low.
redfella I don’t think you got hummer’s point. It’s not about any “credits”, it’s about ppl not wanting others to mess with their own stuff. If I write a tutorial or an article I won’t want anyone to change anything except for myself (at least concerning content).
I would say that content editing/management would be the biggest issue.
If you put contributors content up essentially as-is, you will have varying quality, different styles, overlap between documents, etc. Essentially no different from just hosting.
If you edit all the content to fit the site (as you suggest), you need staff who have a very good understanding of the topic, and are willing to take the time to go through each tutorial and verify that it is correct. At the very least you would need one staff member who was knowledgable in each supported game, and in reality, you would likely need more, because when RL issues come up for the staff, volunteer stuff like this is the first thing to get put off. That is all assuming you can find contributors who don’t mind you editing their stuff.
If you can pull it off, it is a good idea, but I suspect that getting the people to actually dedicate the time to making it work will not be easy.
Hosting may also be an issue. Whatever arrangement you have, 20gb a month is costing someone a bit of money, and it may not be nearly enough, especially if you are going to be hosting a lot of files.
I suspect the whole prestige system may cause more trouble than it is worth. Think slashdot karma… In reality, people decide which members to respect by reading their posts and seeing their work. If people are to have special priviledges on the site, that is best decided by human judgement, IMO.
Agree with the previous two posters.
IMO, the prestige system is going to be like post count in any forums, important to some, irrelevant to most. People will judge me, or anyone else by the quality of what write, not by the quantity. If I add one, well written tutorial on a previously unaddressed topic, people will be a lot happier than if I churn out a bunch of tuts that basically echo what a lot of others have already said.
Ifurita goes back to working on his “a new tutorial posted every day of the week” project
;^)
I’m just kidding, Ifurita. For a lot of people out there, I’m sure your new efforts in the tutorial arena are becoming invaluable.
Well, let me set aside the prestige system for a sec… I wanna talk about lvlsource modifying content.
I think that SCDS_reyalP put it best by describing both sides of the coin. On one side we have a levelsource modifying resources… Which leads to clean, consistant, and striaghtforward design. Which IS a big thing… If levelsource did not have the ability to streamline all the information thats out there, what would levelsource become? It would become a big, worthless heap of information not doing anyone anygood for there would be no consistany between the authors work.
And on the other side, we preserve the authors work, by not modifying anything. Which is a major point for anyone looking to contribute.
So all in all there needs to be something implemented somehow that would “clean-up” resources so they could be presented in a logical manner, while still keeping the authors happy. How to do this seems to be the prob.
On another note: I must be doing something right in this project, for it is the first time I have gotten a reply back from SCDS_reyalP that isnt shunning! w00t! 
warning: long rambling post
LOL. I fully support the idea of a well designed site dedicated to clean, correct, up-to-date tutorials and resources.
What I found less sensible was the idea that one could create such a site specifically to consolidate all the existing resources, or that trying to do so was a good idea. To illustrate with a story…
At the height of the .com boom, the company I worked for, after yet another re-organization and redifination of their “core values” announced at an all hands meeting that their buisness would now be centered around a “web community” would they would “unveil”. Now, even though these people were native english speakers, they clearly didn’t understand what community means. You can, with sufficient money and power, create a strip mall or a gulag by simply issuing the required orders. You cannot create a community by decree. Needless to say, what they unveiled was a web strip mall, not a web community, and within 6 months, they had a new CEO and another massive layoff to help them redefine their core values again.
While I credit redfella with more sense than those marketoids mentioned above, I think you are falling into the same trap. The reason quake3world and mapcenter are what they are has everything to do with the history and people who formed them, and very little to do with anything else. If you make a great site, with excellent up to date content and sensible administration, it is very likely to become one of the pillars of the mapping community. But that will only happen because of the community that forms around it, not because you declared it to be the one true mapping site.
At a more practical level, i see the following:
Perhaps you can work this something like a magazine or trade publication. Anyone is free to submit articles to be published on the site. Just like a magazine, the submissions will be formated and edited by the staff, and the site will obtain rights to use the submissions as they see fit. In return, the contributor gets their work in a widely recognized central location, and they do not have to invest any futher effort in maintaining it. Of course, unlike a print magazine, if someone does want to submit version 2.0 of their article, that is also possible.
Just like a real magazine, you would have editors for different areas. You could also allow peer review of the submissions before they were put into the main site.
IMO, systems like wikis or slash that let anyone comment on (or edit) every article do not lead to coherent useful information, no matter how much karma and trust and ranking is built into it. A system with a human editor who has final and absolute say is much better.
Thanks for the feedback SCDS. I understand what you are saying.
I’m just gonna do it. I’m gonna buy the space tonight and get the forums up sometime this week (as soon as I can). Hopefully, I can attract a few members and see where it goes from there.
Once its been rolling for a week or so, I’ll decide what the best course of action will be… But for right now, I’m just gonna do it. I’ve been doing too much damn thinking and not enough doing. Grrr… I feel like a newb.
Wish me luck!
:chef:
Absolutely nothing wrong and just rolling up your sleeves and getting going. Best of luck