THE NEW ZELARON PORTAL! (No, it's not launched yet, but we need YOUR ideas! Now!)
 

The planned, new Zelaron portal is 100% vBulletin compatible. This means that you will be able to search the forums, browse the latest threads, see which users are online, switch between synthesis/ocean theme colors and so on directly on the portal itself. But, having a portal for these purposes alone would be stupid as all of these things can be accomplished on the forum anyway. This is the reason why our old portal failed. It didn't offer any new features aside from pointless eye candy.

So, what kind of features do you want to see on the new Zelaron portal? What would make YOU want to use it as your start page? A pre-selected Google search field? Your own customizable calendar which lets you add personal notes? Local weather and news reports? Post your ideas, anything goes! Even if they're completely insane!

Note that Zelaron members will be able to vote on portal pages ("modules") to determine their usefulness. Considering that portal pages can just as easily be removed as new ones can be added, a trial and error approach to finding the perfect modules and content is definitely a possibility.

Able to choose games on the arcade and play them in the same window through flash.

A small little bar that shows if you've done your 5 daily posts of the day.

A shoutbox.

A part of the window should show the new posts page and refresh itself every 1 minutes.

I want more smilies.

We definately need more smilies.

I'm talking a DB of like 2-300 more.

All of the same style? Or a mish-mash of different styles?

Animated? Static?

There's something - we could get members to design some.

Animated of course, ones that hold signs up etc, There's alot of pre-made ones out there on other forums, and we're stuck with the same 20-30..

Local news/weather would be cool.

Maybe links to funny videos and such...

I think putting something as simple as like a google search would give it some use. Instead of putting google as my homepage I could put the Zelaron portal, and get a google search along with other things.

Yep, like vista has it built in on the bottom bar.

Customizable stock ticker that enables you to pick which ones you want to monitor on top of the market as a whole.

Sports ticker with updated scores on all or any games you choose.

A shoutbox sounds good. I'm not sure about an arcade game selector, governing how easy it would be to visit the arcade anyway. Maybe a pull-down menu with all available games would be useful.

Funny videos? I guess some kind of YouTube integration could work. E.g., we could have the pre-selected Google search field come with three radio buttons, "Google Search" being the default one. The other two would be options to search YouTube, and of course, Zelaron threads.

Maybe a "featured videos selected by Zelaron members" page of some sort could work.

More ideas:

• Customizable member profile pages (e.g. username.zelaron.com)
• User-definable RSS feeds
• Software downloads
• Torrents
• Gmail login, or gmail-powered @zelaron.com e-mail (Google has already approved my request for the latter; I just didn't add the feature as it felt out of place on the forum itself)
• Wallpapers
• Shipment tracking
• Birthday tracking (Yes, part of the personal calendar feature, but having a separate page for adding new birthdays would likely make me use this feature more often)
• Share lists and graphs (Not sure if anyone here is into this)

List more!

That all sounds good to me. A new calendar wouldn't hurt anything, since our calendar has been broken since like december. It doesn't go past march of 2007 and even then you've gotta mess around with it to get to that.

Member profiles sound badass. That would def. spruce this place up.

Chruser's book of the month club =P.

Since when do I read books?

Shoutbox would take activity away from the forums instead of adding it.

As for smilies, we have 65, not 20. If you need some obscure smilie, you can post it as a picture. I see no reason to add 200 smilies.

Well, you're into art at least. Try and get some people here from deviant?

WW, you see no reason to do anything as long as the forums are functional.

We need front page articles. And we need me and grav to write them.