gday
as we all know
getting new people into editing and modding is
not easy at all.
I think everyone agrees that ArmA I has caused a
significant drop of editing members.
While ArmA II gave some strength back, it is by far not back to the levels from OFP.
While the
rising complexity of editing, a
higher user expectancy does make it harder as well,
we have also seen
better tools and
many different ways of contributions (guides, wiki, tutoring, etc).
Dev heaven is
targeting experienced people and is a
project support site.
Forums like
OFPEC,
BIF,
Armaholic and others do play to some degree also the role to
teach new people,
the
primary function of a forum is a
place for discussion and
extensive feedback.
We have some
new guides and
tutorials, as well as gathering
wikis to share knowledge,
we want to attempt an
additional tool more targeted to
educate any level of editing guy.
http://stackoverflow.com is a
question and answer site for normal programming languages,
yet the system is also available to build new sites for different topics.
Our
purpose would be to use it for people to
ask simple questions and offer a
as big as possible
community to
give answers and
insights at very timely manner.
The concept appears to work very very well over at stackoverflow and many of the new spawn sites.
Unbelievable high amount of contribution and high level quality show this very clearly.
Another example is that google shows more and more the site when searching for relevant topics.
The core elements are
- Strong search, rss, tags, filters to make the use as convenient and efficient as possible
- A wiki system that allows collaboratively edited question and answers to achieve the best result as possible
- Voting to make the most useful information available
- Voting and badges to encourage users to contribute
- No registration required for easy access, but accounts have several benefits
More details (very recommend to read):
AboutFAQNow what is the plan?The plan is to check if there is
enough interest in the various existing communities in this approach,
and
willingness to contribute to it, despite with question overlapping to a degree with each existing site.
The system can be used without fees in the beta phase; and if this new ArmA community project gets
successful to get BI pay the fee of 130$/month as a service for the community.
The target time to get this started (full power) is the release of OA (and it being at least a2 quality level).
Please share your thoughts, ideas and feedback on this project. Thanks a lot.
PS: The visual appearance is something to get used to for sure. The design was made for programmers so far
as main target group, but it seems it can be adapted to a degree.
That said it appears to work very well like this.