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

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?

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

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.

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.

Why hasn't anyone mentioned reviews yet? (Aside from my hypothetical book club.) Game reviews, movie reviews, book reviews. Definitely with unique elements that separate us from other, more established review sites. 20-word reviews? Image-only reviews?

If this works out, we could attract a lot of attention. If it goes exceptionally well, publishers may in turn contact us and give us pre-release games, possibly invite Zelaron reviewers to screenings and such. Either way, we don't have anything to lose. The forum will still be around.

As for front page articles and news; they will definitely be there.

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.

Weird, you posted that while I wrote my list of ideas with the stock monitoring element. Stock and sport tickers/marquees do sound better than separate pages. The fewer clicks required, the better.

Anyway, I know you have more ideas! What are they?

For the reviews, we have them already, and there's only like two members that can actually sit down and write good material..

Well, no. I think the case is that there's only two members who will take the time to sit down and write good material.

If all of us put aside time to do it, then we'd have 30 or so members sitting down and writing good material.

I'll write reviews. I can't promise the topics will be current or consistent, but I watch enough movies and read books often enough to provide something at least. Not sure how this would help a revamped portal, but I'll see if I can get to work on something soon. (Halfway through Ender's Shadow right now).

I remember when we had a Review forum. I contributed a bit to that.

I like the game reveiws idea! The ability to look at what people think of games without bothering to search for it would be nice. Maybe also some by zelaron members. That could be the reward for 3 rep bars!

Having Zelaron members do the reviews is the idea...

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

I really agree with this one. Except we need to ALL be able to write articles. (Not really like a post. Find some way to distinguish it) but, we should be able to review books, movies, games, events and such.

EDIT: LOL, didn't read all the way through before posting my thoughts. Still a GREAT idea though.

Okay, the portal is almost done. All we need to do now is to decide on what content should be put on it. So far, the main ideas are:

• Reviews (games, books, movies) written by Zelaron members.
• Interesting news (mostly pertaining to gaming and technology).
• RPGMaker resources.
• Game hacking resources.

We could, of course, turn Zelaron into a RPGMaker or game development community, largely because it is better to break into markets with low supply and high demand, but it depends on what we're capable of, and interested in providing.

So, three questions for those of you who read this.

• 1: Why do you come to Zelaron?
• 2: What do you perceive Zelaron as? (A gaming forum? A place to hang out with online friends?)
• 3: What "unique" needs should we cover, to make others come here?

So, four questions for those of you who read this. 1: Why do you come to Zelaron? 2: What do you perceive Zelaron as? (A gaming forum? A place to hang out with online friends?) 3: What "unique" needs should we cover, to make others come here?

1. I come to Zelaron for the community, and occasionally to talk about Gaming.

2. I percieve Zelaron as a place to hang out with a touch of Gaming discussion.

3. We should focus on RPGMaker, Gaming, Art (literature, modeling, what have you,) and current events (such as science, debate, and all that jazz,) in my opinion. Whatever it is we do, I think we need to focus more on these things rather than the "community" aspect.

4. Where's the fourth question?

1.) I come for the community, to discuss current events (science mostly), and to share my knowledge on what games I play.

2.) Mostly, I perceive Zelaron as an online chatboard. There really isn't a whole lot of gaming discussion these days.

3.) I mainly think that more discussion on the gaming aspects would draw more members in, as the aspect of "community" doesn't do much to draw in new people. Whatever we discuss should be something that a lot of our people are interested in, and hopefully a popular subject (I doubt we're going to find something bigger than D2 was in its heyday unless Diablo 3 is announced).