Ulthuan

a) Battle Report Section
- IMO should not be links to youtube. (or even links to army list threads but thats a smaller thing and ok)

b) Painting and Modelling
-should not be an advertising page for painting services. People putting in touched up model pics with their painting service insignia don't add anything to the forum. Keep the sub forum for the people with work done by the people.

c) I'd like to see a big stickied thread in warhammer fantasy or even sub-thread of tournament accomplishments by established members of this forum. I'd also suggest not just putting any random tournament up there but limit it to podium finishes of say 50+ players. Include the full details.. person's name, forum name, number of players, final finish (1st, 2nd, 3rd overall or best general), name of tournament, date, location. It would be even better if there was an army shot as well.

Qualifying for the masters and ETC should also be something in there as well as that's an accolade in itself

These could grant a title or something.

Putting just anything small tournament reduces everything's significance.

d) Site Newsletter? Would be a cool hobby and some folk might want to get it started. Not everyone will have time for this but some folk might want to submit something. Can include a battle report, some painting and modelling, and a tale of 4 gamers kind of thing.

A\ I do dislike all the one post threads with links to other places, even blogs.
B\ Some of those Commission Painters do amazing inspiring work, I think it best if they keep all their stuff together, rather than have clients spread bits and pieces all over the place.
C\ This was brought up a while ago, the admins were considering it or something was all we heard.
D\ Newsletters are a lot of work, do you mean things like the old Citizen Levy?

I'll raise the question over at the Lore council but it doesn't hurt to ofer my views here as well.

Lord Anathir wrote:a) Battle Report Section
- IMO should not be links to youtube. (or even links to army list threads but thats a smaller thing and ok)

I agree with that partially. If there is a writen report people shouldn't just post links but rather copy and pase it on our forum. I myself rarely click on links, I just had bad experiences with following links in the past and am not very trusting. On the otherhand quality youtube reports have been quite interesting and since as far as I know we embeded videos can't be posted on Ulthuan I have no problem with youtube links. Though members could add a little more description in writen form what am I clicking to see since not everyone has unlimited internet access and as the month draws to a close people have to chose very carefully what they open.

Lord Anathir wrote:b) Painting and Modelling
-should not be an advertising page for painting services. People putting in touched up model pics with their painting service insignia don't add anything to the forum. Keep the sub forum for the people with work done by the people.

There is no point in such a subforum since it wouldn't have enough trafic. The only reason we made the trading subforum was that at one time there was a serious spike in offers, but these days a topic a week is general trafic and could easily be reabsorbed into the general forum if we wished. So no I do not support this notion because I find the work of those people quite inspirational even if it sometimes/often isn't directly related to HE but has more to do with converting, painting and modeling techniques.

Lord Anathir wrote:c) I'd like to see a big stickied thread in warhammer fantasy or even sub-thread of tournament accomplishments by established members of this forum. I'd also suggest not just putting any random tournament up there but limit it to podium finishes of say 50+ players. Include the full details.. person's name, forum name, number of players, final finish (1st, 2nd, 3rd overall or best general), name of tournament, date, location. It would be even better if there was an army shot as well.

Qualifying for the masters and ETC should also be something in there as well as that's an accolade in itself

These could grant a title or something.

Putting just anything small tournament reduces everything's significance.

I don't think that is really necesary. And finding regular 50+ tournaments outside UK, Poland and USA will be really hard though I doubt people in my region, or France, Germany, Spain play WH any less than people in US or UK. It often depend on the infrastucture and organisation needed to create and support such an event.

Also what purpose would that use except proclaiming to the rest of the site that certain members are really good in certain form of Warhammer?

Lord Anathir wrote:d) Site Newsletter? Would be a cool hobby and some folk might want to get it started. Not everyone will have time for this but some folk might want to submit something. Can include a battle report, some painting and modelling, and a tale of 4 gamers kind of thing.

Been there, done that. To much trouble, to little benefit, not enough interested people in the long run.

re b: By "sub forum" I meant the painting forum.

c) Obviously its not necessary. Nothing is necessary. This site... isn't necessary. But it would be nice to have it.

"Also what purpose would that use except proclaiming to the rest of the site that certain members are really good in certain form of Warhammer?"

-For the same reason people show off their painting. Its nice to see it, talk about it and provides inspiration.
-Its not "proclaiming"... such a harsh word. Its just acknowledging something well done. Its also about representing the forum community with pride.
-ok, change the number.. make it 30 or whatever. For the record, Australia and Canada have 50+ tournaments as well, as do at least a few more continental european countries. It was just a number I picked out quickly.

In regards to A is there any way we could get the site to support embedded videos? I think it would pep up the Battle Report section and possibly merit more traffic rather than linking people off site.

On B) I do see where you are coming from, but I also like the pretty pictures. Heck I could even see some people complaining that my Mordheim thread is that way, simply because I'm willing to sell anything I build. I would like to see them keep all of it to one thread, and update the title as needed.

C) It's actually not as silly as I thought it was in my initial reaction. Since tournament play is a much bigger deal on the site these days it might be kind of cool to see something like that.

D) I remember a few (maybe a lot) of years back almost every site had one of those. Some of them produced some very good content. The hard part isn't really interest (though I can see where it would see that way to the people putting it together- but likely it's just more lack of feedback then lack of interest), it's just finding someone who wants to do the work of heading it up every X amount of time. Finding people to do articles and then formatting it all is time consuming. And while I'm sure there are tons of people willing and capable to do articles, it again is a fairly time consuming thing. For instance if someone were to decide to do one Citizen Levy in June just for old times sake I would love to do a write up on either terrain building or shadow warriors in Mordheim. But the fact of the matter is, even if I started now there is a very good chance I wouldn't have time to get it done to the quality I want. And that's one time 3 months from now.

I think if you want a 10th Anniversary event, why not form a sort of 10th Anniversary 'Showcase' thread? As Giladis has said, I don't think the other ideas will get too much breathing space here at the moment.

With a showcase thread you could do all sorts of things related to cool stuff that has happened here in the last 10yrs with regards to everything: painting, gaming, number of members increasing, etc and I feel this might be better received than simply making site changes and would also be more of a 10yr celebration.

a) I can understand why both cases exist, not much of a problem. More description of the linked content as Giladis suggests would be nice.

b) As long as those people reply in the threads and do not just advertise, I see no problem. Those we have now mostly do.

c) Not realistic as I do not think our mods have the time to do the searching. There will always be someone left out, people in question may not be comfortable with it.

d) Again, lot of work for someone to keep something like that up. Maybe advertise the Library of Hoeth more?

@ Giladis, the Trading subforum has one problem as it is now - it is very hard to find unless you know the forum really well. It would be better either on the main forum page or not so far up.

Aicanor wrote:@ Giladis, the Trading subforum has one problem as it is now - it is very hard to find unless you know the forum really well. It would be better either on the main forum page or not so far up.

Will be taken into account.

What about new online campaign as Ulthuan in Flames? It was great idea and many many users took part in it. Just a thought

b) Painting and Modelling
-should not be an advertising page for painting services. People putting in touched up model pics with their painting service insignia don't add anything to the forum. Keep the sub forum for the people with work done by the people.

Honestly, that problem concerns me partially. I'm a ulthuan.net user since years and I don't see anything wrong with banner signature following to private blog/painting service etc.
Recently, only one painting studio is posting here just to encourage clients, which is Brovatar'sPainting/Bania's work. Still, they are not pushy wtih their stuff and show a lot of inspiring works, so I think it is not a problem.

I had an idea to make another mini exchange, the same like Secret Santa, but it is still not enough reliable, there are 8-10 people who didn't get their present, including me myself, what I find really disappointing Also, event like these often than once per year had to be limited just to "trusted" members, there is no way to select such a group.

Painting contest around the 10th Anniversary theme? With special rank as a prize?

@Aicanor - as it was mentioned, trading forum should be visible on main forum page.

Galharen wrote:What about new online campaign as Ulthuan in Flames? It was great idea and many many users took part in it. Just a thought

This was my initial thoughts as well. How successful have these been in the past in terms of getting many forum members involved?

Jimmy wrote:

Galharen wrote:What about new online campaign as Ulthuan in Flames? It was great idea and many many users took part in it. Just a thought

This was my initial thoughts as well. How successful have these been in the past in terms of getting many forum members involved?

Very. I'm just not sure if we still have anyone with the ability, time, and passion to do one of those again.

However a couple of contests- painting (maybe with a couple of categories/skill levels), story writing (though I'm NOT volunteering to judge THAT ) would probably be a very good idea.

Problem with every kind of competition is the award. Without it, few people will decide to take part in it.

But the online campaign was a great success. I remember that many many people registered on our forum just to take part in it.
A lot of guys from bugman's brewery or druchii.net even, in my opinion, a great success!

Painting competition sounds great. Nit sure about writing one, but why not a 'challenge'? What about UB tournament? Is it viable?

Awards don't have to be something physical. Fancy title next to the winner's name would be enough in most cases. And maybe we could even put some nice prizes together as a community.

UB tournament, what a great idea!! I'm lovin' it!

Really, that would be awesome.

Aicanor wrote:Painting competition sounds great. Nit sure about writing one, but why not a 'challenge'? What about UB tournament? Is it viable?

Awards don't have to be something physical. Fancy title next to the winner's name would be enough in most cases. And maybe we could even put some nice prizes together as a community.

I was sitting here thinking, the painting and fluff parts are easy to cover, it's just to bad we can't do something on the gaming side. My only excuse is that I'm old.

The only "challenge" I see in it is getting people to agree on a comp package haha. Personally I'd want uncomped, but since I'll most likely not be around to participate that means nothing.

Comp score is not a big deal I think. We mostly play ETC or swedish comp.
Due to time zones, it's not possible to arrange it in 1-3 days, so we would need to organise it as a week event or so, to get players some time to arrange the battles.

A) Youtube embeds would be nice. I'm fine with image battle reports as well. Do we have any decent instructional stickies on how to get into battle reporting?

C) I think this would be cool. It would add an extra sense of community to follow some of the best players on the site and congratulate them when they do well. It would be a great way to encourage up-and-coming players and find out about tournaments.

D) It might be easier to just try making a monthly post to update us on the site and see if you can get some support. Pick an interesting battle report and/or tournament to write about, write about the implications of a recently released book or rumor monger about the next one. Maybe get Aicanor to do a one-panel comic or Furion to write a paragraph about the current ETC meta?

If it get's a lot of support and contributors we could evolve it into a newsletter.

I think that this site doesn't get enough traffic to justify anything but youtube embedding. Unfortunately, Warhammer has really died as a hobby in my area, and I don't think that there are a ton of users active on this forum anymore. I'm rarely here as well.

Malhandir's Feed wrote:I think that this site doesn't get enough traffic to justify anything but youtube embedding. Unfortunately, Warhammer has really died as a hobby in my area, and I don't think that there are a ton of users active on this forum anymore. I'm rarely here as well.

I'm actually fairly surprised at the traffic we do have.

Hi LA,

I didn't know we have 10th anniversary Great!

A) Battle Reports

Hm, I was not aware that providing links there might be a problem. Could you elaborate more?

It seems people have different ways of organizing their topics. It may be a good habit to add some kind of information in the title so that people know what it is. But even then it is up to the player.

B) Painting and Modelling

I am afraid I haven't added to that forum as much as I should have There are a lot of examples of inspirational works there. Maybe it is due to the less frequent appearance of mine but I didn't feel I am overwhelmed by advertisements. Why do you think is that a problem?

I understand that posting a picture of a space marine is not connected to HE theme but do they appear so often?

C) Accomplishments

Well, as long as it is in good spirit even posting some good achievements to claim bragging rights it is ok. Obviously, if it is used to prove that member A is more important than member B because he won a tournament is not the thing to do.

Personally, I'd rather see the players who achieve these successes to write reports from their games. Surely, everybody would appreciate such a quality report, in particular if accompanied by pictures and maps. That, in my opinion, would be the best recognition of their triumph, if other forum members would be able to witness their success and applaud their generalship.

In fact, I find it sad that many players who do well in tournaments are not reporting their games at all.

D) Newsletter

There used to be Citizen Levy long time ago. It is a huge effort for one person to organize this but who knows, maybe it could work in one way or another?

The help of the community would be mandatory here. I wonder if something like that could be achieved:

1. Decide how often that should be published. It can be monthly, bimonthly or whatever it is suitable. Personally I would go for bimonthly release as it is relatively often and gives some time to prepare.
2. Take something from each section, General Warhammer Discussion may be good to take some talks about new releases. Tactical Section may provide a poll for the best topic of the month/2 months (there used to be enemy of the month too!). Battle Report section can add their report of course (another poll). Painting Section is even easier as thanks to Jimmy you have monthly challenge already. Why not add a poll and reward forum member with internet cookie for her/his effort? It does not even have to be the best painted miniature, it might be in recognition of a lot of effort somebody put. Like finishing the army or something.

Thanks to that you simply compose some kind of headlines page with links to awarded topics. The whole voting would be done by the members so that it takes away the job from mods. The only thing to do is to provide a topic for nominations, votes and with the poll.

Would it earn a honorific title and what that would be, is also the matter for discussion. I simply think it can be nice to encourage each other further to contribute to the forum.

I would also like to say that wondering now and again to other forums, this one produces really nice traffic, the great diversity of topics and despite some heated discussions, in general it is a very civilised place to be.

Cheers!

I'll have a think about it some more. But here's my initial ideas.

A) youtube-embedding: not going to happen. It's a simply bandwidth issue. Clicking on a link takes the user away from the site and all the bandwidth usage then is for Google. Embed them, and all that data passes through the site, increasing our bandwidth usage exponentially. And that costs money (and lots of it...)

B) don't realy have an issue here. As long as people not try to actively sell stuff but just show pictures of their finished stuff it's fine by me. Also, where do you draw the line. For instance, is Shannars mordheim terrain stuff over it (since he mentions being willing to sell it) or is it fine.

C) By all means, go ahead and create the topic. I'll sticky it for you once you have it in place. And if it turns out to be popular enough, we'll create the subforum for it.

D) Feel free to create / edit a newletter. We can put it up on the site and have a sticky topic for it (or several even). I personally feel that most people don't have enough time to create such a newsletter. Perhaps a sort of topic index like the monthly painting competition but then with the best topics / posts from last month listed are better.

Rod

Galharen wrote:What about new online campaign as Ulthuan in Flames? It was great idea and many many users took part in it. Just a thought

*Twitch*
What makes you think that me or Anarion have any time anymore?

*scratches neck*

Just so that I am certain I get you, you are giving ideas for a 10th anniversary in 2014, for a site that has been around in its earliest incarnations since 1999?

Now, my math might be off, but I am fairly certain i've been in this community for more than a decade...

Ruerl Khan wrote:*scratches neck*

Just so that I am certain I get you, you are giving ideas for a 10th anniversary in 2014, for a site that has been around in its earliest incarnations since 1999?

Now, my math might be off, but I am fairly certain i've been in this community for more than a decade...

Well if you've been using that account the entire time, you joined in June of 04

Eirik wrote:

Ruerl Khan wrote:*scratches neck*

Just so that I am certain I get you, you are giving ideas for a 10th anniversary in 2014, for a site that has been around in its earliest incarnations since 1999?

Now, my math might be off, but I am fairly certain i've been in this community for more than a decade...

Well if you've been using that account the entire time, you joined in June of 04

Well, this isn't the original site. We lost a domain name, had numerous server crashes, and multiple "life boat" sites before we finally settled here. I've been here since at least 2001 (but with a different user name, I picked this one either with the launch of this site, or maybe on one of the "lifeboats".

Even though we're well over 10 years old, personally I think a decade of stability is worth celebrating.

The site has been around longer than that, someone explained it ages ago, a website update, or major change, the archives show some of the people's real join dates.

Eirik wrote:

Ruerl Khan wrote:*scratches neck*

Just so that I am certain I get you, you are giving ideas for a 10th anniversary in 2014, for a site that has been around in its earliest incarnations since 1999?

Now, my math might be off, but I am fairly certain i've been in this community for more than a decade...

Well if you've been using that account the entire time, you joined in June of 04

Thats because we got hacked and changed the forum type, our address also changed once when it got hijacked, originally it was ulthuan.com, but as the site was very succesful a small accident happened. Specifically Taavati (our original host) was delayed with payment for a single day due to technical reasons and in that moment a firm that specializes in hijacking high traffick domains snatched it and offered to allow us to keep it for, I think it was more than 100 USD per month. Needless to say that offer was declined.

If you look at a page like this: http://www.ulthuan.net/members/ancients.html then you'll see a bit more. I'm not pulling this out of my rear you know. - I joined in 1999 myself and became a loremaster in 2000 and was so till 2004, I became a lore again for a year or so later again but haven't been doing any moderation since then.

If you look at the "members" page you'll see an unreasonable number of people joined in the first few days. That's because we were all already part of the site, we just didn't have a site. Some of the people I remember best have only a very few posts (or even 0 in a couple cases). I think that's due to remembering them more from previous versions, and the fact that OT doesn't add of post count.

It doesn't matter now, it was years ago
Let's focus on 10th anniversary.