Messages

I've fixed that, it was a permissions issue on the server.

https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Extension:FontAwesome#Usage <- I installed the FontAwesome extension; please see here for the markup.  If you're curious, you can see a list of the installed extensions and their versions here: https://www.adventuregamestudio.co.uk/wiki/Special:Version.

SMF is already on the latest version, as of last night. It loads almost instantly for me, so no idea why you'd have issues!

On the cross device question, I have access to BrowserStack, which allows me to test the site in all sorts of device and browser combinations, including some very old ones.

The majority of the wording used so far is copied directly from the current site. That site was written by one man 15 years ago, so could definitely do with being revised. All text, just like the images and site structure, should please be considered placeholders for now. For now we're just suggesting a basic look and feel.

I checked out the new design both on desktop and my phone, and I agree with most comments here that it looks fantastic. Much cleaner, more modern, and easier to navigate. My only nitpicks would be that "Think you've got what it takes?" sounds a bit too aggressive, and that maybe the list of features could be arranged in a nicer-looking way, but that's about it. I'm amazed at how this project got off the ground so quickly!

Indeed it's been great to get so much input from people so quickly, and huge credit goes to tampie85 for managing to get so much done while juggling care of our ten month old son!

Yes, but perhaps there are ways around it. For example, what if people didn't have to jump through quite so many hoops just to register, but we put limitations on their accounts (e.g. not able to post on the forums, or posts held for moderation) until more fully vetted.

I've just reenabled Bad Behavior, just in case it decides to work this time.  Let's see.  But yeah, a simpler quiz, probation period, mod authorisation of accounts, we'll find something.

Cool. Do I understand it correctly that the current site is hand-coded in PHP and CSS? Are you planning to stick with that, or move to some kind of CMS?

Handwritten in PHP and CSS, yeah.  An idea I've floated elsewhere is to maybe use the wiki as the source of less complicated pages' content, as that's access controlled and has decent editing options (including visual options nowadays).  I did a little POC of that a while ago, and it's definitely doable enough.  I'd rather not use an off the shelf CMS, I quite enjoy writing my own stuff.

I see that we have Hotjar and Google Analytics running on the site. Some of that data might be useful to inform the user journeys.

Hotjar isn't running anymore, as I think the trial licence I had expired, or the markup for including it changed or something.  Google Analytics has been running unbroken for years though.
Turns out Hotjar changed their pricing model so that you have to manually start recording on the free plan, rather than it being rolling.  So it hasn't been on in forever because I didn't tell it to.  As is it I get a 100 visit 'snapshot' that I can restart as required.  I just started one, to see what I see.

In particular, I think the user ratings of games are clearly not working as-is. Even games like Lamplight City, Feria d'Arles and Until I Have You don't have enough votes to show a rating. That whole form to fill in is just way too much, and hardly adds any valueâ€"the sub-ratings are pretty much useless anyway when so many of the games in the db aren't covered. Let's pare it down to a single star rating, which you can click to set directly on the game's page, and then an optional review. Maybe that way people would actually do it. And if we kept track of games that the user had downloaded (in a cookie), and showed a request for a rating/review the next time they visited, maybe we could get enough ratings that sorting/filtering by rating would make sense and not leave out major titles.

By 'refinement' I mean very much things like you suggest.  We should keep user rating, but trim the fat, and make it more usable and approachable.  Even a thumbs up thumbs down system like Steam has can work if you userbase is big enough.  We already track per user download stats, to avoid for instance game authors hammering their own download buttons to increase the download numbers (which again was implemented because it became necessary, not just to be mean spirited!).

Please no changes to the forums! I swear it's the best thing I use on the phone. Discourse and all similars are dreadful to use. It's 2021, phones have big screens with 4k resolution!

Don't worry, the most that would happen to the forums is a more responsive scaling on mobile devices (along with maybe some colour changes to match the main site).  The core functionality of the site wouldn't change.  You can also just do 'view as desktop' on mobile if you really hate responsible designs!  I personally hate using the forums on mobile though, and I have a Galaxy S20+ with 6"+ screen!

About the Web Port, if archives hadn't been killed it would be cool to integrate, I am down for helping with it in any way possible if people have ideas. Does itch.io or gamejolt allow for an embedded view of a game be placed in a different website? It also may be possible to unzip in JS and load directly from a zip to the webport, I haven't done because I was lazy, but if it helps in any way I can do it. Maybe if people want to select some free games (and AGA has the bandwidth), I could prepare them in web playable format.

I have all the Archives files.  I'd have to look at the feasibility of streaming them, but it's certainly not unthinkable.

I think it's fine to put a donation button in the landing page, paying the servers costs is important. The things people are saying in the forums is gone, is this intentional?

I don't think anything's been deleted by staff, so perhaps the original authors edited or deleted their own posts?

User accounts (and, more specifically, security) comes up all the time, as you may have noticed.  Spam is a constant battle though, and SMF apparently an easy target, so I can't promise too much!

We should definitely aim to map out some user journeys, and to design the structure of the site before I get stuck into actually coding it.  Whether we need any tooling, or could just sketch it on the back of a napkin (figuratively speaking) is a question though...

I would aim to refine what we already have, but not lose any functionality (somebody asked for every feature the site has, after all).  I think the games listings should be more like a web store, so ultimately it's a giant list, but can be dynamically searched and filtered to find exactly what you're looking for.  Rather than the current way of doing things, which is very web 1.5 and involves lots of different screens, submission of static forms, endless clicks to find what you want.  This will need a lot of input from the community for stuff like tagging games with categories, languages, platforms etc.

Discussions are going on elsewhere about moving how-tos and technical details off the main site and onto GitHub and the wiki, which I definitely agree would be better.  Helpful resources should be added to and maintained by the people doing the doing, rather than authored by people like me who haven't touched AGS itself in forever.  This would leave the main site as mainly about the games and the core info about selling the engine and editor's benefits.

Should be fixed now!  I had some left over config from an older version of an extension that was causing mischief.  Please do confirm that you're now able to edit successfully.

Back now!  I've upgraded it to the latest version, please do let me know if anything seems to be broken!

I also installed a mobile friendly extension + skin combo, which should render a more streamlined version of the wiki on mobile devices.

The wiki is temporarily offline, while I upgrade some stuff.  Won't be long!

Just to warn you all, someone is working on a mock up of a redesign, so please nobody else start on one!

The same URL you used to disable the game (I won't post it publically!) can also be used to reenable it.  Otherwise, just let me know and I'll sort it.

I edited a couple of posts to remove my personal email address, since I'm not fond of avoidable spam!

Hobbes, much as I applaud the effort you've made in creating a potential plan, it would almost certainly fail due to same reasons every similar endeavour have: people.  Most of us have lives and work outside of AGS, and real life comes first.  You can appoint as many 'head of x'es as you like, but they will probably end up disappearing for years at a time.  This is why there are only a handful of people on both the community side and development side who've contributed consistently over the years.  Restructuring the website would be enough effort, but is at least doable by one or two people, but reorganising the whole community is far less likely to succeed.

I'm all for redesigning and reorganising the website.  One thing we do need though is a list of what needs to be fixed.  The list that Babar posted about various things being wrong with the main site, that's the first time I've seen that list!  Why wasn't it posted in the Site Feedback forum long ago, so it could be addressed?

The main site is 100% custom written by me, aside from a small amount of integration with SMF session code; the forums are SMF, the wiki is MediaWiki.

SMF is maintained just fine; there's a new patch for the current version a few times a year, and the next big version is work in progress.  Our forum has a lot of plugins and custom tweaks running in the background that may well be available in PHPBB too, but why reinvent the wheel?

The wiki exists because traditionally we've been a community first, not just a technical resource.  I agree there's probably no need for the wiki to include stuff that's also in the manual, but it'd be a great place to host dynamic content like tutorials, lists of modules, whatever.  We could also probably find archived versions of the pages that are now dead links on the main page, and recreate them in the wiki.  A wiki is a freely editable tool for a community to use to document itself, but nobody seems to really do that unfortunately.  I wrote a little proof of concept once for a way of pulling wiki page data into the main site, so dynamically editable content could be included; going forward that could be a good way of keeping the site content up to date.

The main trouble with Patreon is what rewards would we offer?  They're often tiered, so people get more back for donating more...  PayPal seemed like the easiest option, as people can just chuck some money into the pot as they choose.  It costs me about $300 a year to keep the site hosted, and while I usually make a loss that really isn't an issue.  If people were donating on a regular basis, they may feel they deserve some sort of return, whether it's their new feature request being prioritised, special treatment on the forums, whatever.  Whereas the current system offers no promises, and is up front as 100% a donation.

As for shifting the focus from game players to developers, why not just focus more on better supporting both?  What if you came to the main site landing page, and it had two big icons, 'Play Games' and 'Make Games'.  Clicking either would lead you to a section of the site that was more streamlined (Play Games would of course be driven by the games page, advertising best rates games and Awards winners etc, Make Games would be much of what we have in the AGS section currently, just more up to date and focused.  The top nav bar could then also have a big Community link (so maybe "Play Games | Community | Make Games" in the top navbar), with both Play and Make sections linking back to relevant sub-forums.  This is all stuff I could hack into the current site design, but it does feel that doing a restructure and a redesign at the same time would make more sense.

What I Think We Need

• Someone to produce a mobile-friendly (responsive) redesign of the main site.  As far as the main site is concerned, I'd need an HTML + CSS template of how the landing page, games pages, etc (essentially any page with a unique design and layout) would be structured, plus one generic template that could be used for all other pages (i.e. the free text pages with similar layout, like most other pages on the current site use).
• Someone to produce a mobile-friendly (responsive) redesign of the forums.  This would need to work inside the SMF template system, which allows you to edit the core HTML and CSS that sits behind the dynamic forum content.
• The community (with or without a project lead, stakeholder panel, whatever) to decide what the site (and forums if a restructuring is really wanted) content, flows, etc. should be.
• Me to apply the site and forum content to the template pages provided.
• Community members to take ownership of actually keeping the site up to date, whether it's through a Content Management System I build into the site, using the wiki as the data source, whatever.  I have no interest in our using WordPress; getting it to interact with our existing data, integrate with the forums etc, would be just as much effort as writing a CMS myself.

Should be fixed now, please try again.

Was the signature size reduced? I can't seem to keep my signature as it was before.

Not in years!

Thanks! I wondered about that one. It shows up in search with ratings and descriptions, so perhaps it was deleted by the authors? I'm thankful there are traces, though, or else I wouldn't have known what to look for elsewhere.

Whoops, that's actually a bug.  It shouldn't be in the search results, as the game has been disabled for whatever reason (usually at the author's request).  I've fixed the bug, so it's no longer visible.

My attempt to go on a small Indy-spree was a bit more cumbersome as many links were missing in the database.

Indiana Jones and the crown of Solomon is at https://archive.org/details/indiana-jones-and-the-crown-of-solomon

Indiana Jones: Coming of Age is at https://archive.org/details/indiana-jones-coming-of-age

Indiana Jones and the Seven Cities of Gold is at https://archive.org/details/indiana-jones-and-the-seven-cities-demo-v1.2.1.1

Indiana Jones and the Fountain of Youth (Rolling Demo) is at https://archive.org/details/indiana-jones-the-fountain-of-youth

Indiana Jones and the Fountain of Youth (Playable Demo) is at https://archive.org/details/indiana-jones-and-the-fountain-of-youth

Indiana Jones and the Temple of the Spheres is at https://archive.org/details/indiana-jones-and-the-temple-of-spheres

Indiana Jones and the Passage of the Saints is at https://archive.org/details/indiana-jones-and-the-passage-of-saints

Indiana Jones and the Passage of the Saints isn't actually in the games page, but I've added the rest.

Adding itch io profile as a new social network on the forum profile would be nice.

Done.

We already have a free (open source project) Bitbucket licence, which I set up a few years ago before it was decided to go with GitHub instead.  I'm busy this weekend, but I'll send the details to you ASAP.

If that doesn't work, I can probably set up a private Git repo on the AGS server for you to use.

I didn't raise the issue of Mittens this year, since I didn't think there was any guarantee it'd be safe or even legal on whatever date we planned.  As we found last year, just because you have a booking somewhere, doesn't mean there won't be a lockdown in place when the booked date arrives!  The UK is gradually coming out of lockdown at the moment, but we do have a larger percentage of the population vaccinated than anywhere else except Israel (45%); most of the Europe is nowhere near that number.  That's no guarantee there won't be another wave, resulting in travel again being restricted.

Personally I think it'd be wiser to wait until next year, when almost everyone is likely to be vaccinated, and they've hopefully gotten it to be more like the flu vaccinations, where we get boosters for the new strains each time they arrive.

I've reenabled Ashina.  Thanks for confirming they were all actually made with AGS, arj0n.