Important Developments Thread

I figured I would make this update thread to keep everyone up to date with everything we're doing in the background. I'll be as detailed as possible since we're dealing with a lot of stuff right now.

I'm in the process of reevaluating staff roles, promoting current staff and adjusting some staff duties. No longer with this be a couple man show with 3 people doing a lot of the work. I'm taking into consideration the abilities of people on the forum and assigning them new staff roles where applicable. There's a lot of tech savy people on this forum, a lot of people with business skills not being used to better suit the community and a lot of people who have had the urge to contribute. I will make a formal announcement within the next day or two about what staff members will be doing what. Nobody is being removed from their positions, but new people will be added on to new jobs and some staff members will be doing a little more work.

Now to the part everyone is curious about, our server situation. We're moving servers on April 20th. On June 6th that server will be renewed with the adsense payout until July 5th or 6th. Unfortunately we don't gain enough for adsense to payout monthly, so it pays out every other month. Sev and I have been pricing other servers and seeing which cheaper ones will better suit our needs. We're pretty confident on what server we will be moving to after July 5th. This move will save us money on server payments, allowing us to rely less on donations and having adsense be a more practical method of site income. With that being said, donations are still open if you would like to contribute. The money raised will be used to make more practical site developments. Once again, the donation paypal is [email protected] .. A donations page is being setup so everyone can easily donate and track the donation progress. Thank you to everyone who has donated. It is something I appreciate beyond words and gives me hope people still care about this community.

We're currently in the process of developing a vbulletin forum. I weighed this choice against other possible options for a new forum and to me, this is is the right choice. We will be importing everything from this current forum to there, user accounts, threads etc so there will be no re-registering or re-making threads. After that switch is fully complete we will begin development on a new site design and structure and moving away from wordpress. Apart from that every aspect of the site will remain the same. We will be keeping the reviews section and everything else.

saywut just finished his (32 page?) report addressing the traffic issues with this site. He will be making a simplified version of this data to present to the community so everyone can be aware with that isn't working in terms of traffic. He and I will discuss the report together and address all the issues present.

Look forward to more updates coming soon with our sites development. In the meantime continue posting as normal, nothing else has changed.

 

Just a quick update for everyone. We moved servers last week. This one is much cheaper but not our final home. On may 6th we'll be paying for another month here and then before June 6th we will move servers one final time. After that switch we will be using a completely new CMS, getting rid of Wordpress for Drupal and moving from a bbpress forum to either vBulletin or XenForo. The forum migration won't even force you to re-register or re-create any threads. We're not getting rid of any aspects of the site such as streaming, reviews, the monthly contests or games but we will be having a different approach to how our site is setup. We will no longer be focusing on the review end of the site but instead shifting focus back to the streaming end. This is a change that will eventually bring us more traffic and forum members. Keep an eye out for more updates as development continues.