Big Boards?
 

I'm not currently informed what-so-ever, but would the admin ever consider running some sort of advertisement to bring in more activity? I'm sure a company that specalizes in forum traffic like Big-boards could help out the process a little, I searched on there and Zelaron has no registry yet, any thoughts?

We really need something to advertise before we can advertise. What do we advertise? "Come check out our random conversations and daily drama at Zelaron.com!"

It has been talked about, though. I personally think Zelaron shirts or hoodies or something would make good advertisement, but we have to get a store set up for that. I mean, if you go walk around the mall or something, even if only 1 in 100 people that see the shirt decide to see what zelaron.com is, that's still a good bit of incoming traffic.

We'd have to make some sort of silly YouTube video and become famous before we could really sell anything.

Or Zelaron could actually start offering some form of content. You know, making this a website with a forum for your viewing pleasure, rather than some random board floating in the ether with no real purpose.

But everyone here is boring.

I disagree, I think we have quite a few interesting members.

@D3V- A site like that sounds like it would be a hell hole of unwanted spammers with "advertisements" because the site would be more exposed to the public,,,

Eh, maybe.

Way to contribute.

what ever happened to that TV show idea lmao

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?

We can't offer webspace on Zelaron because it opens up a significant security hole. Also don't see much point of the subdomain.

No, not webspace in the sense of FTP access. What I mentioned is the creation and hosting of sub-forums similar to Dragoon Elite. The point of the sub-domain is to turn something like http://zelaron.com/forum/forumdisplay.php?f=92 into http://flame.zelaron.com to be easier to remember, forward to other people and so on.

I'll post Zelaron videos on You Tube when I get the chance. In the future.

And not in the past? You dissapoint me. D:

Hosting communities is a good idea in my opinion. While I would prefer to buy my own domain name and not have my site tied to this forum, you can't deny those are some great benefits to anyone with anything to have a forum for.

It would be sweet if we could do this! Google made it so on April first. Wait..... April first..... hmmmmmm

Chruser, I think your idea is wonderful.

Anything that brings new activity is great in my book, and that certainly sounds like it could not only bring more activity, but also bring some interesting content to Zelaron. For instance, if some group of people want to host a clan forum on Zelaron for some random game, I'd possibly be interested in trying that game out and potentially joining that clan.

I've also always tended to believe in the philosophy that once we get more activity, it will be easier to bring more activity. The more active we are, and the more we have to offer, the faster activity will rise. We kinda just have to get it started, and then watch it happen.

Anyway, regarding your idea, perhaps we could have it where if a guild of 50 people want to have a guild hosted on Zelaron, they have some special features that perhaps a guild of 5 people wouldn't get. This would encourage people to bring more people to their forum on Zelaron. Basically, the bigger they can make their subforum, the more they can have.

Well, I'm not sure what the videos would even entail. You'd have to come up with some fresh content and then do a sort of "See more, but in text at Zelaron!"

If you're going to make a Zelaron video, I'd say you should definitely include some RPGmaker. RPGmaker seems to bring the most members to Zelaron. That's pretty much all we have to offer at the moment.

More 'n likely would. Just need to think of a cool way to make the video. Do something that's a bit of a documentary, minus some of the things that go on here. =x

Thanks. I try my best.

Not like it's not true.