 | In Response To: marathon.bungie.org (Godot)
I'm considering taking on this project (I'm a web developer now. Web developers are cool</drwho>), but whether or not I do, I think it would be productive to have a discussion about what we want the new site to be, out here in public for the whole community to voice their input.
My ideas:
- Should be HTML5/CSS3 for forward compatibility; we want to look awesome and professional and continue to do so into the foreseeable future.
- Should be lightweight and degrade gracefully for backward compatibility; we have a lot of legacy users in the community, what with being centered around an old game.
- Should be modular for easy updating (unlike the current imagemap design), and take advantage of crowd-sourced content wherever possible to avoid stagnation.
- From the front page, you should be able to quickly and easily:
- Find out what the hell Marathon is if you're new around here
- Get the latest version of Aleph One and all the original three scenarios
- See what's new in the community
- Get to any other community sites and resources, especially
- Discussion forums and chat servers
- And then this big one:
I think we could make large headway toward integrating the bulk of the important static content (MSP, MSG, etc) into one coherent system by implementing it all in a wiki, and letting the community help move everything over (keeping them in their legacy versions as-is) and then keep them up-to-date after that. We already have Traxus running on there, and could use that as our base platform.
The front page would include What Is Marathon, Get Marathon, and a news feed, and be editable only be a certain class of admin (e.g. Hamish, poena.dare, myself, the other MSF admins if they're still around, Treellama and other important AO devs). Move all the terminals into their own category of articles, protected so that only a certain admin class (maintained by Hamish) can update them; move the story discussion pages ("Facts and puzzling things about...") into their own category of articles, maybe with the same sort of admin protection or maybe not; move the spoiler guide articles into their own category editable by any registered user, integrate the vidmaster tips and tricks article into there.
The actual vidmaster films should be archived in whatever file archival system we end up using (see below). The PM Archive and the Orphanage should go in with that too. Recruits is dead. Orbital Arm is dead. MotM is dead and should be a combination of news and archives anyway. ScenarioNews is dead and should be integrated with the main news feed anyway. The Big House is still hosting some sites but doesn't need its own page; scenarios site can just be listed from a wiki list of scenarios, whether they are B.org-hosted or not. Likewise, Resurrection and Arena are just hosted sites which can be linked to from the articles about their respective projects.
If we went down this road, the final site would consist of essentially three components: a wiki, a forum, and an archive, all of which we have already, they would just need to be at a minimum rethemed for consistency, and populated with the content from all of the other sites. However, our forum and archive are not really as active as the other major forum and archive out there: the Pfhorums, and Simplici7y. I'm pretty close with AppleSwitch, who maintains the both of those, and if people in general like the idea, I could talk with him about the possibility of rolling them under the Bungie.org name and having them replace our ABO and MSF, completely unifying the entire Marathon community under one umbrella.
If that was the eventual end-goal, I would pursue it in stages, like so:
- Stage 1:
Redesign mostly-static Marathon.Bungie.Org home page, using existing news feed, with top-level links consisting of:
- What Is Marathon? (internal page for newcomers)
- Get Marathon (link to existing SBO)
- Story (internal link to existing MSP)
- Spoiler (internal link to existing MSG)
- Wiki (link to existing Traxus)
- Forum (link to existing MSF)
- Files (link to existing ABO)
- Links (link to existing Page2401, which should contain links to everywhere else).
- Stage 2:
Retheme Traxus to the new design, make it the first thing you see immediately at Marathon.Bungie.Org. Use the wiki (with restricted access) for the front/news page. "Wiki" top level link goes away, for obvious reasons. "What is Marathon" becomes a simple wiki page. "Story", "Spoiler", and "Links" become wiki pages containing links to the old (existing) pages as well as indexes of the new (wikified) content, and encouragement for community members to help wikify the old content (if we're really getting thousands of hits a day from Bungie, this could be more productive than you might imagine). "Get Marathon", "Forum", and "Files" remain as they are for now (links to SBO, Pfhorums, Simplici7y).
- Stage 3:
- Option A
If Treellama and AppleSwitch are not willing to integrate their sites (SBO, Pfhorums, Simplici7y) together under the B.org banner, then we make Get Marathon its own internal wiki page (linking to SBO's content, and SBO itself for further reading), begin moving content from the Orphanage, PM Archives, and Vidmaster archives into ABO, rename the MSF (now more than just a Story forum), and begin retheming ABO and the MSF to match the new design.
- Option B
If Treellama and AppleSwitch are willing to integrate their sites, then begin doing that: integrating the content of SBO into the main wiki, moving content from ABO, Orphanage, PM Archives, and Vidmaster archives into Simplici7y, retheming Simplici7y and the Pfhorums to match the new design, work out who is to host what where, pointing the right domain names where they go, and then updating the top-level links to the appropriate places.
Ambitious, I know; I imagine right now we're just aiming at something like Stage 1, and if we get there and momentum peters out then that should be an acceptable stopping point. But I'd like to know everyone's thoughts on this as a long-term community goal. I think wikifying everything like this would help keep out community hub much more alive and less stagnant as the years wear on, as when fresh blood comes in it can take over as the old timers fade away, without having to wrest the keys from the cold, dead hands.
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