What do you want The Orange Belt to be?
Like the title says.
I'm interested in seeing how everyone feels about the current state of The Orange Belt. It's no secret that our little forum isn't as active as it used to be, but I wonder if anyone else feels as I do and wishes we had a little more frequent posting.
Initially, most of our activity was based on our hosted sites posting updates. A corresponding thread would be created, and we would all comment on it. Plus SCIENCE! and pie. Now that many of the sites have disappeared, and most of the remaining hosted pages are my own, and I've been letting most of my projects quietly fade into the night, activity has dwindled.
I've had some thoughts as to how we could rejuvenate our little community, but before I explore any of them I'd want to check with anyone interested to see what they think. Anyone that still remembers how we branched off from Inksandwich knows that the goal of The Orange Belt has always been to maintain community over commercialism, and I would absolutely want to retain that with whatever happens in a future incarnation.
By far, the most important part of a future 'Belt is that its community members be involved with its creation and execution. So I'm opening up this discussion to anyone interested.
-What do you want to see happen with The Orange Belt going forward?
-Should we go back to a hosted model and become a home for new and upcoming webcomics?
-Should we change focus to other aspects of the the webcomic community at large, such as news and editorials?
-Should we move away from webcomics entirely? What sort of topic do you think would better represent us as a community? (I know Takeru has had good success with retro video game review videos, as an example)
There's another question I find harder to ask, but I would be remiss to exclude it. Do we want to continue The Orange Belt at all? I feel that this community, across all its incarnations, has given me some of my best Internet friendships, and I would not trade that for anything in the world, but these friendships endure through modern social networks. Is the solution for The Orange Belt to become a Twitter hashtag, or Facebook group? What does this forum bring to the table for you?
Rest assured, this is not a call to close the site. It's a completely open discussion on what future you see — or would like to see — with The Orange Belt.
I'll give my own opinions on each of these questions in turn, but I'd love to hear what you think first.
I'm interested in seeing how everyone feels about the current state of The Orange Belt. It's no secret that our little forum isn't as active as it used to be, but I wonder if anyone else feels as I do and wishes we had a little more frequent posting.
Initially, most of our activity was based on our hosted sites posting updates. A corresponding thread would be created, and we would all comment on it. Plus SCIENCE! and pie. Now that many of the sites have disappeared, and most of the remaining hosted pages are my own, and I've been letting most of my projects quietly fade into the night, activity has dwindled.
I've had some thoughts as to how we could rejuvenate our little community, but before I explore any of them I'd want to check with anyone interested to see what they think. Anyone that still remembers how we branched off from Inksandwich knows that the goal of The Orange Belt has always been to maintain community over commercialism, and I would absolutely want to retain that with whatever happens in a future incarnation.
By far, the most important part of a future 'Belt is that its community members be involved with its creation and execution. So I'm opening up this discussion to anyone interested.
-What do you want to see happen with The Orange Belt going forward?
-Should we go back to a hosted model and become a home for new and upcoming webcomics?
-Should we change focus to other aspects of the the webcomic community at large, such as news and editorials?
-Should we move away from webcomics entirely? What sort of topic do you think would better represent us as a community? (I know Takeru has had good success with retro video game review videos, as an example)
There's another question I find harder to ask, but I would be remiss to exclude it. Do we want to continue The Orange Belt at all? I feel that this community, across all its incarnations, has given me some of my best Internet friendships, and I would not trade that for anything in the world, but these friendships endure through modern social networks. Is the solution for The Orange Belt to become a Twitter hashtag, or Facebook group? What does this forum bring to the table for you?
Rest assured, this is not a call to close the site. It's a completely open discussion on what future you see — or would like to see — with The Orange Belt.
I'll give my own opinions on each of these questions in turn, but I'd love to hear what you think first.
Comments
In the assumption that this is staying, I think a change away from webcomics might be refreshing. I don't keep up with very many of them anymore, and the ones I do check I usually only check once a week or so. I like Tak's idea of focusing the forums on different topics... Might I also suggest making special events like video chatting ((whilst drinking??)) or maybe reviewing particular games/movies/tv shows as a scheduled thing for anyone interested to partake in.
Just throwing ideas out there.
... How many people here aren't 21 yet? I felt like I was the 'baby' of the group for a long time and I'm 23 now, can't remember how much younger the 2nd-gen 'babies' are.
I really like the idea of video chats. I could make an Orange Belt YouTube channel and host Google+ Hangouts with anyone interested. We had talked in the past about watching videos together online and G+ has become a good application to accomplish this. Especially with booze. ^__^
There's actually a good model of this in action in Felicia Day's Vaginal Fantasy book club. We could pick books to read or shows/movies to watch (when they couldn't be watched together live), then discuss them in Hangouts as a group.
For the record: unless there's a major push to not have The Orange Belt anymore, I'm inclined to keep it around.
Also Azrodal's gaming buddy Creon [somewhat] recently set up a Mumble voice chat server. It could be pretty cool to get one (perhaps pool what little money it requires as a community to make it a negligible cost) and be able to pop on anytime and talk with an OBer you don't know as well in a more casual and direct way.
Poorly organized thoughts here, but relating to game events, I've noticed Steam groups send out notifications shortly before and directly prior to group gaming events, this seems like a really great way to schedule them. plus it would just be nice to get everyones Steam ID's anyway.
Anyway, as long as the forum's here I'll keep visiting it. I tend to avoid social media for the most part.
For the forum...well I'm lacking in social media accounts. This makes a lack of OB forum roughly equivalent to a lack of me, so big vote on keep the forum here.
I stand in favor of G+ hangouts. I will note that I am strongly disinclined to initiate conversations, but generally willing to chat if anyone catches me.
Steam group or something as a possible thing to do or something along those lines? I don't play much on steam and don't know what others like to play though.
What I always thought was cool about our community was that we had multiple forums, run by different people, focused on different topics, but because it's all one vBulletin install with shared user accounts, we're free to move between sections as the topic dictates. This has been an element of our community since back in the Top Web Comics days and through Inksandwich. Even if webcomics aren't the main divider between forums, they're still deeply embedded in our DNA, and if people still have things to say about them such conversation will always be welcome here.
NoLonger: Site redesign would be a given with the sorts of changes we're talking about. I could even see us moving away from vBulletin to some other content management software, but what we moved to would all depend on what content we end up focusing on.
If we ended up moving toward an official content creation system (writing news posts, reviews, blogs, webcomics, organized gaming events, etc.), would any of you be interested in taking on content creation roles? As it currently stands most of the front page linked content is my own websites, but The Orange Belt has always appealed to me most as a product of all of our work, so I'd want to find something we could all get involved in.
EDIT: And yeah, I could be a content creator aside from my current stuff if need be.
I'm feeling really inspired by the structure of sites like SBNation or Geek & Sundry. SBNation is centered around a blog-style posts/comments structure, whereas Geek & Sundry uses Vanilla for its forum software, which feels like a much fresher, more modern tool than vBulletin. They've integrated it in such a way that their main page doesn't even look like a forum at all, summarizing recent posts in a clean blog-style layout (but the forums still exist in a more recognizable form).
So when I initially think of content creation, I mainly think of article-writing, but it all depends on the direction we decide to go.
I'm in a similar boat as X'o'Lore in that I dislike websites like Facebook and Twitter and thus don't have accounts there. So you should definitely keep the forum up if that's possible.
I'm likely to be up for content creation, as it's a thing I feel I should be doing anyways. Though I've never been very good at keeping up with said creation...
As a side note, standard prices for that Mumble Server if you were interested in it, range from $6 a month for 15 simultaneous users (likely much too small a number for this site, but great for personal servers) to 100 simultaneous users at $32/month, or even up to $110/month for 400 users. So maybe not, "Negligible Prices" but certainly not that expensive I think, especially considering you can separate the room into as many sub rooms as you need so people in say... a movie steaming event aren't interrupting people in the gaming event, or the regular chat. Though steam does it's own voice chat, but multi-user is a bit more fiddle-y and the call quality is lower. It is free however.
I'd like to start threads for the print-comic readers amongst us (if there are any), and a lot more 'general' movie discussion.
I would say that the 'let's all watch movies together' thing has barely gotten beyond the conceptual stage before now, but there is definitely a lot of room for 'have you checked 'X' out yet? What were your thoughts?' threads.
Also anybody that hasn't seen Sharknado yet, needs to check that out. Because SHARKNADO.
I like the idea of expanding to general comic discussion and including print comics in the mix. I feel like enough of us still have some interest in webcomics, but widening the focus will give us a lot more to talk about.
Also I'm down with the MST3K concept, oh yes.
RE: Movie watching, it wasn't always a case of cross-platform it was more a case of time/scheduling. So if anything it'd be a bi-weekly-monthly thing. Rather than the once-a-week we were trying to do.
Although, seriously, you should all have seen Sharknado by now.
Not sure if creating themes is as easy as it is in vBulletin, as I've never tried making a theme (or doing anything else due to the moneycostness) in vBulletin.
As for content...really the thing I could most reliably provide is some chit-chat about tech stuffs? I dunno.
Besides that, I dunno. I'm connected to a lot of people here now by Facebook, Steam, or MSN. But I'd like for us to get together online for something every once in a while.
Although I will admit to enjoying Casper Van Dien's attempts at acting.
That sums it up really.
http://theorangebelt.org/tokyodrift
All users, forums and threads have been copied over, with the same login names and passwords. It appears to also retain user registration dates. The export tool was getting errors when attempting to copy private messages, so I've left those out for now, but this is still a testing stage, so I'm not too concerned about those for the moment. That said, if we are not able to copy PMs in this migration, I'll give you a heads-up so you can back up whatever you want to keep ahead of time.
Please head over there and try the Vanilla version of The Orange Belt on for size. Let me know (here preferably) how everything worked, what did and didn't copy, and any issues you run into.
If all goes well (or if I can find fixes for whatever didn't), I'll start making plans for the official for reals move. There are still some decisions to be made on how to get ourselves transitioned to the new space, but overall I think Vanilla is going to work very well for our needs.
Also any pictures "Attached" to a post instead of embedded in the post appear to be broken; which is probably fine, especially where there isn't any broken code or anything, they're just not there. There's also the occasional random broken embedded picture.
Avatars appear to have not gone over with the accounts either, which is sorta annoying, but it's not that hard to just have people reset them on their own.
Any thread that was moved somewhere else is still in it's original location, with no indication that it was moved. Though while the moved ones work fine, the originals are just blank pages.
Maybe it's just me, or the time I tried it out, but everything seems to load just a LITTLE bit slower; Still entirely useable though.
Everything seems a bit white for my tastes, though I assume you'll worry about themes later. Also, is there a way to open a thread to the most recent entries? I'd like to not have to scroll all the way down and tell it to go to the last page manually every time.
Edit: Never mind that last question. It appears to bring you to the earliest page with posts you haven't read on it, and being a new forum, just counted me as not having read anything yet.
New posts can be found by clicking Discussions up top. It will display all posts in all categories, with Announcements (Vanilla version of stuck threads) appearing on top followed by posts, newest to oldest.
I haven't looked into changing forum appearance but I don't expect it to be too difficult, just need to devote some time to it. I don't know if it supports category-specific theme designs (but I assume not). Expect it to stay white for now, we can all discuss how we'd like it to look once other bugs are sorted out.
This does bring up another question: do we want to keep The Orange Belt as a name? Stef and I came up with it while driving around Moon Township PA and I do have a fondness for it, but I like the idea of inaugurating a new forum with a new identity and would like to know what you all think. I don't have anything in mind at the moment, but the floor is open to discussion.