Set it up like a game- use Vitilize. You create a character, and move it around the screen. There would be doors like 'Downloads', 'Articles', and more.
It would just be a cool change.
Fine Garbage since 2003.
CURRENT PROJECT:
-Paying off a massive amount of debt in college loans.
-Working in television.
TDC has a great simple design and loads faster than the other klik sites. I think more customizable options for users would be cool. Also the ability to give points to other users, kind of like Xanga's eprop system. And a constant chatbar on the side of the page so no matter where you are on the site you are logged in to the chat.
Although TDC is near perfect.
Steve Zissou: Anne-Marie, do all the interns get Glocks?
I think TDC could be improved on a lot. No offence to clubsoft, but the whole thing seems to lack elegance, it feels like it was patched up with seperate additions over time, which it was. Anyways he ws talking about TDC3 at some point so... any more details Clubby?
TDC is showing its age because its community is getting stronger, but only with newbies joining the force, ClickIsland would be the second best in my oppinion, but thats just me.
ClickIsland is friendly and has a good system that removes games without review, but it feels kinda scrappy to me.
An online arcade is almost a must nowadays, it's just that much better to have one.
In-site chat would be a godsend and probably more popular than forums, although not an IRC based chat because nobody talks on there anyway and some of the less tech-inclined people find it hard to operate.
Collections are pretty popular. Natomic and Acoders' sites are brilliant because of their inclusion of collections. Interactivity is something a game-related site needs.
A word minimum for reviews, download descriptions, previews, articles, etc.
Have forum post points actually do something, like be able to buy a custom title, Klik Union style, or for collections as mentioned above.
Hardly anyone reviews on CI, so just about everything gets deleted though. And it's horribly immature.
I'm not really a fan of gimmicks. Collections and stuff are fine for a little diversion for established members, but a site really needs something to set it apart.
Dunno, I'll ask Club/Rikus what's going on with the redesign. Of course Shadowcaster has his redesign he's working on, so who knows what's gonna happen.
I think KU is great, but unfortunately it isn't as active as TDC.
Actually, I think TDC is by far the most active, especially against Klik Me, that has a new forum post about every month.
KU has nice people and nice staff and all, but I don't like nuked sites. The front page is a list of forum posts. The poll is a forum post. News comments are forum posts. Downloads are forum posts. You get the idea. Custom coded sites are much nicer to use, but unfortunately require a lot of time and expertese to get running. For example on TDC, a custom coded site, when submitting a download you can type things like the file size, genre, utilise a neat screenshots script, give ratings, view reviews of this download etc. etc. So you can do stuff like go to the downloads section, sort by genre, and look for the best rated file. A forum based site gives you none of that. I've never nuked a site, but all the ones I've used have a samey feel about them in that you can't tailor each section to have features useful and specific to the area. Example: Articles should be able to be split in to seperate pages so you don't get inundated with text for long articles. Downloads should be sortable by genre. Can you do that in a nuke? Maybe there's an extension for it, but nukes must have nightmarisly complicated code behind them because they're so abstract, and it would be no easy task.
Anyway, this doesn't mean TDC is perfect either. If you custom code a site, you get a lot of scope to be creative. "The Daily Click" - it sounds like a newspaper. Any newspaperish features or looks? Not really, the news is a normal list for example.
Things I would suggest myself:
- Consistency: Same rating system for all sections. (5 stars is best IMHO)
- Go the full way with all features: I can't edit my comments. The search system is very basic. User admin looks hacked, it's quite badly laid out because it automatically lists all my submissions which happens to be quite a lot. Many of the forums offer minimum functionality, such as the modify profile form, which doesnt tell you what was wrong with your submission if it's invalid, and they have basic designs (modify profile is all spread out horizontally because of one long line, and it might look better centered).
- Use features which make sense: e.g. in this reply box here, I can see the forum thread I'm replying to. iframes aren't the best things in the world though, it's quite a small view window. Most forums have the reply box at the bottom of the view thread page, and there's a reason: it's handy and easy to use. Plus this reply review doesn't use the same theme as the rest of the site
Other features which 'make sense' are pages for articles (as mentioned), force valid screenshots for previews, and let me just type in the damn name of the user I want to PM, instead of downloading a bloody 2mb list of every inactive user who ever signed up, ever, then having to sift through it carefully. Plus having a rating cutoff so you don't have to wade through piles of rubbish in the downloads screen. Screenshots are done very well by TDC but the only improvement could be to auto thumbnail the images so I don't have to download 5mb of PNGs.
- Dedicated admin team. OK, controversial. But seriously, an annual poll isn't much good. A week without news posts is suicide for most news sites, new users would stop coming. Admins who disappear without trace and then leave moderators unable to deal with problem users isn't great either. Useless previews going straight on to the site without checking. Moderators who check the content is worthwhile, not "check the links are valid" then approve. A new moderation system is needed really: problem users could be awarded a black mark or something for being troublesome once. If you get to three, you get tempbanned. Four and perm banned. This way people get warnings and a chance to stop being idiots, but if they get banned they certainly had it coming.
Anyways, as you can see I have outlined a pretty ambitious site, or a pretty ambitious upgrade to TDC. If clubsoft doesn't have the time, that is totally understandable, people have lives and other things to do. But seeing as the smallest change would make such a difference, since there are so many users, it would make sense to have it a community development with many developers all contributing. Semi-open-source like. Upgrades when we need them and stuff.
Quite a lot to think about there... long post!
KU is pretty decent but its like my homeplace of Klikforever. its really just a bunch of mates making games and chatting. which is something i like, but probably most people dont. but KF is pretty active for the most time even with its 30 or so members.
my only gripe with KU is the fact is it wasnt home made. same goes for CI, a place i really like but dont visit anymore.
I was annoyed because I expected TDC to be like a newspaper. That's why I'd love a community site that looked like that ;P
(Also a community site with consistency, because consistency is a step towards communism - perfect now I have no stocks! HAR HAR HAR!)
They had a sort of "klik news" site, if anyone remembers it. It got shut down or something
"Say you're hanging from a huge cliff at the top of mt. everest and a guy comes along and says he'll save you, and proceeds to throw religious pamphlets at you while simultaniously giving a sermon." - Dustin G
Actually, maybe some people forgot, but me and club have been working on dc3 for a while now, clubsoft has been busy but last time i talked to him he was still working on the new design and all the new code, have a bit more patient, i saw a preview and its going to rock
Be sure to follow us on the twitters for the latest and greatest: @dailyclick
I think homebrew sites are always better than your prepackaged ones that everyone uses, otherwise it looks all too generic and boring when you see 50 sites with the exact same color scheme(for that matter, one that doesn't even fit the theme of the site) It doesn't even require that much knowledge to create your own portal that has custom features you want. But I think it should look shiny, like OS X
As a boy, I wanted to be a train. I didn’t realize this was unusual—that other kids played with trains, not as them.
I think there were two versions of Klik News. The latest one was ran by PeterG, Jimbob, Ruffles, and me. It shut down because Jimbob and I decided to go to Klik-Me instead (I'm surprsied nobody brought it up yet), PeterG quit the community, and Ruffles just left.
Also, Klik News is still up, it's just not supported/updated anymore.
And I definitely agree with Tigerworks' points.
Yeah, it looks 'aged'. Same thing around for years. I've always wanted to see more on teamwork in the community rather than competitiveness... it'll do everyone a world of good. Seems like I've been trying for years, but every time it gets even close... every time someone does a site for it.. it ends up being lost and forgotten somewhere. Just plain boring, run by admins with almost no motivation.
Everyone has their own ideas on how it's supposed to be run, but it seems that unless you've got something really special, it just stays that way. So far, you've got 3 community styles:
TDC - Plenty of old 'veterans' who just like to sit together and ramble about crap
Klik Me - The other group of 'non-conformist veterans'
Click Academy - The newbies and oldbies who like to share and learn knowledge
Now all you need is a site for people who actually make games to join. Good luck with that.
Disclaimer: Any sarcasm in my posts will not be mentioned as that would ruin the purpose. It is assumed that the reader is intelligent enough to tell the difference between what is sarcasm and what is not.
f$$k yaŽll, Total Klik is still the best ever click site ever. God, remember how pathetic this place was when it started? A new click site would be GRAND! GRAND! GRAND I SAY THEE!
TK sucks. Old one - best klik site ever. New one - filled with non-comformist retards who just happen to know the true geniuses.
Edited by the Author.
Disclaimer: Any sarcasm in my posts will not be mentioned as that would ruin the purpose. It is assumed that the reader is intelligent enough to tell the difference between what is sarcasm and what is not.
Deleted User
11th January, 2005 at 08:38:15 -
I'm fine with TDC, the only problem is that it gets out of date sometimes.
TDC3? Cool, can I see?
I wouldn't mind contributing to the code if I could try it out, e.g. coding some of my ambitious suggestions mentioned previously.
Better yet just open source it. I'm not saying that because I'm some crazy open source advocate who's gone nuts, but because we all use this site a lot, and we would all benefit from being able to contribute and continually improve on the site. TDC only really gets updates when clubsoft gets round to it, which is fair enough, but if anyone (or at least a larger group of trusted developers) could add to it we could see a site improving at a much faster rate.
Well I wouldnt know what to expect in the new DC, the current DC is the only one I've seen because I came, just a little after the new DC was started. So I dont even know what all was added from DC1 to DC2, let alone what to look for in DC3.
"Say you're hanging from a huge cliff at the top of mt. everest and a guy comes along and says he'll save you, and proceeds to throw religious pamphlets at you while simultaniously giving a sermon." - Dustin G
Instead of having points, have a piss-o-meter, and as it rises it schlurszsss your worddssch like thisch, worse and worse until nobody can understand a word you type.
"Say you're hanging from a huge cliff at the top of mt. everest and a guy comes along and says he'll save you, and proceeds to throw religious pamphlets at you while simultaniously giving a sermon." - Dustin G
if Skn3, Jannis and Clubsoft joined up to code a community site......now that would be freaking awesome.
My favourite coded site has got to be Acoders homepage coded by Skn3, the way it did collections was perfect, it made u actually want to collect them which is what most click websites with collections fail to do, it was just a really entertaining well featured and coded site, due to its inactivity turned me off, Klik-Me is also a well coded site and is really simplified and has some cool features like the new forum posts, comments e.t.c and also its the best source for click news but also very inactive, then we have TDC it stands out because of its great activity.
If these 3 joined up then u would have one damn awesome site.
I actually just deleted all the databases for Klik News a few days ago to make way for stuff on my personal website...ahh well. It was alright while it was needed.
We are all eagerly waiting for TDC3 are'nt we? In my opinion TDC is overall the best klik site around, but it could use a little something.
I agree with most of what Tigerworks said (as I often do).
I think I have said this before (but of course no one remembers). I think it is great that a community has multiple websites ... I just dont think it is a good idea to have 10 identical community sites. That will only split the community in 10 smaller communities which benefits noone. But of course it would be impossible for a community with such a young average user to be without troubles. I mean ... even communities consisting of "old" people often have problems.
1. NO VITALIZE GAMES. This just trivialises a decent board. Just link people to the V-cade if they wanna play V! games.
2. A devlog system which ties together the basic features of previews, downloads and reviews, and adds the ability to frequently update on the progress of projects. You'd still have previews, reviews and downloads as separate links just as they are on the DC - but also the ability to see all reviews, previews, devlog entries and other stuff relating to that project. Makes stuff more organised and things like this will actually encourage game *developers* to use the site, not just the people who wanna chat all day.
3. A much more comprehensive search system, to search devlog, news, previews, reviews, downloads, forum posts, etc. It would be nice to be able to specify a few more details when searching, like search scope. Search scope just lets you choose 'sentence', 'paragraph', or 'article'. For example, if we looked up 'plenty of grapes' using 'article' scope, we'd get all posts with all those words anywhere in the entire post. If we do sentence scope, then it will only return those posts where all those words come in the same sentence. Handy for narrowing stuff down.
4. NOT BASED ON AN EXISTING ENGINE. No php-nuke, no phpbb, no, no, no, no, NO.
5. Designed specifically to allow users to integrate applications with it. In other words, use XML (or have the code generate html comments that can be used to parse the data). This provides an added development value because suddenly users can develop their own software to alert people of updates, tell them what those updates are, or even browse the site entirely in a customised app window. Even if this isn't a useful feature, it'll get people excited, and it'll get people developing stuff. An example of what I mean:
<newspost author="Circy's Daughter" timestamp="12/12/05" comments="2" id="5">
Hey all! I'm Circy's daughter!
<comment author="perv" timestamp="12/12/05" id="1">
Hello Barbie! Let's go party!
</comment>
<comment author="Circy's Daughter" timestamp="13/12/05" id="2">
OH I LOVE YOU KEN!!
</comment>
</newspost>
Pointless paraphenalia that people can code and script for is actually quite popular.
I think the idea of having a section on DC where you can add your games just like you would a normal download only for V-Games would be a nice idea. Rather then having it show up in the DOWNLOADs area, just have it show up in a section made so that you can see the game just like a normal download, but once you click it, it takes you to a page on DC that plays the game you selected. That way we know that when we click on a download, its a download, & if we click on a v-download its a v-game.
Problem with doing that is that the V! files are a security risk. They need to be checked out/virus-scanned before you know it's safe to upload them.
Some of these could be done easily enough with a serverside script. Get a script to load the file as a string. Then use the ord() function (that's PHP; in ASP you'd need some function that returns the ascii value of a character) to tell you the binary value of each byte. You can build your own function to tie bytes together into words, dwords, etc.
Then you get it to scan the uploaded file, checking a few basic facts about the file format. I don't know much about CCN file format though, I only ever worked with .gam, but presumably there are various checks you can do.
Or just get a human admin to check all Vitalize games before authorising them. Only authorised V! games would show up for regular users.
The XML thing would actually be simpler than blending ASP or PHP into HTML directly. It means the whole code of the page could be made up of just 10 or 11 different tags.
Regular downloads are much more of a security risk than V! files, I don't understand where you're coming from? They're data files, not executables. Vitalize doesn't even let you access the hard disk, anyway.
Re: XML thing. Sites should do that anyway, but using the id or class attributes together with CSS.
Yeah, this community sucks. You've got the most flexible instant game making software in the world, and almost every game is a variant of all the other games around here. Why can't people just think of something new? Damn, I've got dozens of ideas for new games, and the main reason they're not done is because I want to work on all of them at once.
But noo... all you see around here is a bunch of guys who've mastered the art of platforming, top-view shooters, and side-view shooters and would strike at someone who gives a poor description or don't make engines as good as the 'pros' do. What ever happened to making other TYPES of games?
The Click Community must be razed down to the infinite depths of the internet, and another, better community must be risen from its ashes!
Disclaimer: Any sarcasm in my posts will not be mentioned as that would ruin the purpose. It is assumed that the reader is intelligent enough to tell the difference between what is sarcasm and what is not.
TDC is great, almost everyone agrees...
A "Game Of the Year" would be a nice add-on feature;
Klik Forever started it already.
GOTW i believe that it must be deleted and in its
place a new monthly-based award should be created.
Additional to this a mini-website for the Game Of The Month
should be created that will include every single game
that has been posted the previous month and NOT some
games that the admins selected!!! In this page every member
could elect the game he likes better.
In my opinion that kind of polls are more democratic and
equal.
n/a
DaVince This fool just HAD to have a custom rating
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