Conselhos para divulgar minha pequena comunidade de desenvolvedores de jogos?

So for the past year and a half I’ve been running this game development group called Bit Phoenix Software (formerly “Watercolor Games,” I need to update my username here lol) as a hobby. I’m looking into turning it into a full-time career and into an actual company when I get out of highschool and finish college. First I’d like to spread the word about my little community and see if I could actually manage it.

I have a few questions about it though and I could use some advice. For those curious, I’m hosting it at https://community.watercolorgames.net/ (I need to get a new domain name, I know) with the help of @HAWK and @pfaffman (those two are awesome. :))

So…here I go I guess.

How can I properly organize my categories?

I’ve been looking at some blogs and some posts here on good practices for category organization but I’m really not sure if I’m on the right track.

I want to be able to post updates for my own games, while also allowing people in my community to freely discuss programming/game development, etc, and ask for advice much like I’m doing here. I also want to create a general hangout spot.

Finally I’d like to have a place where people can post their own games and get feedback from the rest of the community. I feel like that could really help people get their foot in the door when it comes to building a community around their games as well as seeing if their game would be well-received.

Where would be some good spots to spread the word about this community?

Our community is very small right now and I’d really like to grow it. I’m about to release the first alpha build of my game as well and I myself would like to see how well it’s received. I know I can’t just roll up here or on some rando forum and advertise it, and YouTube suffers from the same sorts of issues when it comes to getting the word out, so… I’m really not sure.

One of the issues I’ve definitely noticed as well is our Discord server despite being inacyive a lot of the time because of the small community, it’s way more active than the forum. Seems like people tend to prefer the Discord over it and I’d like to give people a reason to use both. Announcements/updates are easier to post to the forum for me, I can do it from school, and things posted on the forum are more “permanent” in that they don’t get buried by other topics as much. Keeping in mind that a Discord chat is… a chat… so naturally there’s a frequent amount of little messages going in rather than a forum where there are less frequent posts going in but they’re more in-depth.

What would you guys recommend I set up for my use case?

Are there any plugins I should install, settings I should set, etc., for my use case? I’d like to get the most out of Discourse because…out of all the community platforms I’ve tried over the years (phpBB, MyBB, Drupal forums, etc)., Discourse has the best user experience and feels the most modern to me. I really like how clean it is even though it’s definitely not as easy to set up as something like phpBB.

Thanks for reading, and thanks in advance for the advice.

EDIT: So that’s a bit of a sack in the face… I just found out my domain name’s about to expire next week so I need to get the Discourse instance reconfigured… Yikes…

Our general advice is captured in

and

Note that when your community is very small you might actually be better off with a chat solution as @erlend_sh noted . However, for any kind of medium to long term updates and your own ‘research notebook’ purposes, you’ll probably want a more permanent location in Discourse.

We also have Discord integration you can set up.

Oh, there’s Discord integration? Awesome! I decided to set up Discourse on my new server (someone in our community offered to host the new website for us since they didn’t have literally any other use for one of their DigitalOcean VPSes so now I have root access to it.)

Two things I definitely need to figure out before I officially roll out the website is some sort of Discord integration so announcements I post get linked in the Discord automatically, and OpenID Connect login. I’d like all my community members to sign in using their Bit Phoenix Account which allows them to sign into more than just the Discourse instance. The OpenID stuff is out of the scope of this question though.

Anyway, thanks for the links. I’ll look into them. I think the big issue is there’s no healthy bridge between our Discord and Discourse.

Edit: I have created a separate topic regarding my OpenID Connect issue.

Edit 2: This one’s specifically for @codinghorror.

How can I convince my other community admin to like Discourse? He’s being really stubborn about it and prefers I use phpBB for the new site…which I can’t really do since its openid connect support is barbaric at best. He complains mostly of the “Latest” screen looking like a clusterf-gorilla, and categories being not able to be nested beyond one level… both things that can either be configured or, in the case of category nesting, aren’t needed.

How can I sell him on it in at least two sentences? I REALLY want to keep using Discourse. From a security, backend, extensibility, and usability standpoint… this thing’s awesome.

Oi @Watercolor_Games, em primeiro lugar, muita sorte com o seu projeto, de um colega gestor de comunidade de gamedev. É um esforço difícil, mas recompensador, como tenho certeza que você já percebeu.

Então, para a parte do Discord, o Discourse Chat Integrations deve atender às suas necessidades. Eu o uso no(s) meu(s) fórum(s) para fazer exatamente o que você está descrevendo aqui.

Uma coisa a considerar, seja como alternativa ou como complemento, é o Babble Chat. Menciono isso porque, embora o Discord seja ótimo e obviamente muito elegante, você não possui nenhum dos dados ou relacionamentos que surgem dele. Não estou dizendo que é totalmente ruim, mas é definitivamente algo a considerar. Há também algo muito bom em ter o chat integrado ao (ou “dentro”) do Discourse, incluindo seus recursos de automoderação (sinalização) e até mesmo um chat/fórum pareado na mesma experiência de usuário.

Quanto às categorias, tente evitar a tentação de categorizar em excesso. Aprendi isso da maneira difícil, apesar de outros terem advertido o mesmo, e teria me poupado muito trabalho se eu tivesse pensado mais sobre o uso adequado das tags.

Para plugins, confira Customization > Plugin se você ainda não o fez. Há muitas coisas legais por lá. Em particular, porém, recomendo:

• para moderação:

  • Discourse Canned Replies
  • Discourse User Notes

• para suporte à comunidade:

  • Discourse Solved
  • Question Answer Plugin
    • nota: este pode ser usado no lugar do ou junto com o Solved

• para diversão e utilidade geral:

  • Discourse Cakeday
  • Discourse Who's Online
  • Discourse Topic Voting

Eu uso vários outros, mas estes se destacam como meus favoritos no momento.

Already this kind of stuff is miles ahead of phpBB and those extensions prove it even more. I’ll check them out tomorrow once I get my OIDC fixed

Another feature I really dongle-ing like:

“ replying…”

I got in a PM conversation on my forum with one of my moderators who’s also working on a logo for it. It actually feels like we’re in an IM chat despite not being in one, simply because I can see exactly when he’s writing a reply and he can see when I am. Couple that with the features I mentioned above and it makes for a very fluid experience and I love it so much.