Originally Posted by Chruser

The new portal is to be instantiated soon.

D3V mentioned an idea which has been considered from time to time during the past three years. The basic premise is to allow clans, guilds and project owners (e.g. RPGMaker game authors) to get a sub-forum hosted by us for free, preferably via an application form. Dragoon Elite is an example of a clan hosted by Zelaron.

Over the course of our years in existence, we have hosted six different clans and projects that I can remember. This number would likely be much greater if it was actually possible for our members to find out how to, and why they should get hosted by us.



What can we offer prospective, hosted communities?

• An out-of-the-box working forum, for free. There will be no need for the owners of our hosted forums to know anything about Apache, PHP or MySQL to get it to work. We'll take care of maintenance (e.g. backups), so all they need to care about is their own community organization. They get to choose their own default forum style, too.
  
  
• Instant access to our member pool. Some of our members will be inclined to find out more about the new sub-forum, and may provide useful content. Anyone who attempts to troll amongst, or offend the newcomers will be banned, perhaps indefinitely.
  
  
• High ranking in Google. Zelaron has a great Google ranking. Tens of thousands of our threads are indexed. Think about the RPGMaker forum. It has never been officially advertised by Zelaron, but Google has brought in a considerable number of new members based solely upon its thread content. Any hosted forum will attract a lot of guests based on the content of its public threads.
  
  
• A Zelaron sub-domain, e.g. communityname.zelaron.com?
  
  
• Custom styles created by the hosted community author?

What can hosted communities offer us?

• An expanded member pool. Because we will share the same user database, members of forums hosted by Zelaron will be likely to venture into unknown territory at some point. Whether they will be frightened by the Flame Forum or stay around until the end of time is unknown, but the prospect of getting new members from an additional source is a positive one.
  
  
• Activity. Seeing twice as many new threads upon clicking the New Posts button, and four times as many members logged on at any given point sounds pretty good to me.
  
  
• An even better ranking in Google. Alike a chain reaction of dominoes, once you push the first domino, there's no going back.

Ideally, the process of applying for your own hosted forum would be similar to applying for group membership, in which you write a short text explaining the reason why we should host you. Perhaps we should even have a "Get Hosted" button in the forum header.

Something like this should be worth advertising on other websites, such as Something Awful. Thoughts?

Originally Posted by Randuin

Eh, a generic forum for just everything without a targetted audience seems kind of futile these days