Promoting a New World!

Alright so this idea has been floating around in my head now for roughly a week.

The saying goes "Together we stand, divided we fall." I feel that if we made a new message board for our community of RIP, GTSC, USS, and the couple of non team players that still hang out with us, we could have a much more active and entertaining community. A place that we all go to find the same news and information about what is going on in our community. Right now both RIP and GTSC have their own boards, and USS has nothing.

I feel like more GTSC players would show up to your Tuesday night races if it was more convenient for them to see the details.

I don't know how attached you guys are to your message board. I'm not going to say scrap it, that's not required. But if this idea draws discussion and comes to fruition, me personally, I would scrap our team board just to make sure activity is forced on the new board. I would drag any important info from the old board to the new one before I did scrap it though.

I think EVERYBODY on the teams gets along very well and the three teams have good chemistry. Now if we can all just stay in touch in some common way, then we could really improve our GT5 playing time. I hope to see some discussion and hope folks throw some possible ideas out there for making my simple dream come true!

Interesting thought Weido.

We're bouncing around ideas in one of our back rooms. It would be nice to have all the old teams in one place.

I am not what one would call technically astute. Is it possible to link a single calander or message board between the sites?

Sort of a common link that would express what you described? Or is an entirely new site required?

There are links on both sites, but they're not used too much. Our Tuesday team races are posted on the calendar, which is public. I think Weido is thinking more of a forum merge.

Or I could be wrong...lol.

BlackJack is right, a forum merge for our two teams, and we include USS because I know we all race with them when they are around. I usually take a lot of y'alls races and post them over on our message board so we can keep up with you guys. And as you all see I would come over and post our stuff on your board so you knew what we were doing.

As far as doing the dirty work of getting things set up. I will take responsibility for setting up the board and fit the bill for the .net/.com ect URL. From there the discussion moves on to topic titles and overall appearance of the board. Then moving anything important from our old boards to the new one. Only thing I would have to move is the tunes we got posted.

The process of making the board is easy.

The process of moving the people will take more time. But I value the final product as more rewarding than what we are doing now separately.

This is a hard idea to pitch, but I just look at the end result as a good thing when we can increase our community size.

BTW I thought of a dumb acronym for the board. R.U.G. , RIP, USS, GTSC. Just for craps and giggles.

There has been countless hours put into this forum and many things that we don't have the final say on. I believe that if we have a multi-team forum, this one should still stay active. I can visit two forums.

Weido,

The only problem we have is scrapping this site. We have too much work and history to let it go.

However, we do have a lot of room here. If you'd like to merge GTSC onto this forum, we could build a GTSC area and make some cosmetic changes to the site to represent both teams. RIP would also offer you an administrative position so you would have admin access to the site.

I have not contacted any USS members, so I'm not sure of their interest. RIP would be happy to extend the same offer to them.

Please talk it over with your team. If you have any questions or concerns, please send me a PM.

It would be cool to have the "old school" teams all in one place.

BJ

You guys seem to have it all covered. I'm lucky to even know any of this stuff.

I talked to Bless on the subject briefly, but still have yet to get a hold of SouperShip.

I'm too much of a control freak to join this site. That's why I promote a fresh start all together. Nothing old, only something new to move on to.

But that's okay, I had the answer that was given in my head awhile ago. It's never easy moving on when what ya got going is not exactly broke.

OK Weido, if you do wind up with a new site for combined posts, let us know. A clearing house of multi-team events would be neat. Each team could have a person responsable for keeping the new site current with new events.

This could be an amicable solution to the 'scrap or hold' question for current sites.

Totally understand Weido.

The offer still stands. I also agree with 3D. A multi-team site might work.

3D, let's build on your idea, because it sounds like your going the actual website route instead of message board route. Which is doable, just more upkeep required. So explain your vision a little bit more so I can see where your coming from.

Well, as I see it, you would like to have all the teams in on one shared site. I do not have a clue as to what would be involved with that. I am not very well versed in computer literacy.

If it were possible, could a new site (name to be determined) be created with the goal of establishing a calander of sorts? Something that would be a single place to go for the regular events schedualed by each team. That way, we would all know what each other are up to on any given day. Then we can post more easily inter-team events and have discussions on format ruels etc. It would be all out in the open, and each team would be aware of upcoming events that we would all enjoy. As it is now, we are dependent on someone like you or Black Jack to spot something on each others forum and post it on our own.

If we agreed to have events posted both in our own AND the Inter-Team Site, then we maximize our chances of exposure for the events posted. As time goes on, maybe other teams would want in on this 'clearing house' of events organized by the organized teams.

I hope that helps define what I believed you were thinking of Weido. Keeping our own sites to socialise amongst our teams is a key element of teams. Being friendly to the other teams by sharing plans and thoughts is just plain smart.

Well said 3D

Thanks BJ, 3D, Poke and Weido.

Weido, let us know what you need from us Ripsters to make your goal as smooth as possible. I have been busy but will try to squeeze out some times to give you a hand on building the website if needed.

Alright, so I believe I have some new ideas now with what feedback that has been presented.

Using a webpage as a main hub that is more the most part a "static" entity, I will make it but not update it very often. On the webpage I would have links to both message boards for our teams, as well as a public calendar. I googled to see who supports what I was looking for and found a couple options, I'm yet decided on one. And the public calendar info can be given out to a couple select people to modify it when needed for events. I will post some of the ones I found once we move on from this discussion.

Now earlier Poker mentioned he is not indifferent to visiting multiple message boards. I am for one, not against it either, it does not bug me. But the webpage concept still got me thinking of adding one more message board that would be "public." I thought about making our board private and keeping it team only and directing folks to the public one when I plug the URL. But that's just a fun dorky thought I had.

I also thought with a webpage it gives me a place to better set up a table for my Nurburgring Time Trials stuff I do with the others. I could certainly present it a lot better via webpage rather than an excel sheet!

Sounds good Weido.

Let us know how we can help.

Does anybody have a clue how FTP works, and once you get your files uploaded? I'm having issues, been years since I have done this stuff.

Clubs is our resident computer expert. Hopefully he can clarify it for you.

I have no idea what FTP is....never heard of it..lol.

scratch that, i finally figured out the problem i was having after 4 hours between last night and today, and if clubs is the computer expert then he will probably have to the rep for yall and share duties with me on this if both teams agree to go through with this.

@Club: how is your HTML?

http://weido8.byethost15.com/home/Home.html

instead of just talk i can show yall some concepts, makes it easier to work through things if we can all see

nothing is concrete, colors, layout, ect ect, this is all skeleton stuff and just thoughts i put down for GTSC content on there.

If your wondering what the black book is, that's an idea joker had for keeping track of the hot garbage & dirty racers of the world.

Feedback as always please, now that we have something to look at im expecting more ideas thrown out for what content we want up there.

One thing that anybody can help with is photos, I will need lots of them going this route. All the places you see GTSC's current message board logo, imagine those with random ones create by the teams.

OK I am in favor of a consolidated board, but the example site I cannot get to. I can help with the techie stuff as I have done this in the past. I do get scared when you ask about HTML. I think we need to focus on content and not creating a site from scratch.

Te HTML bit was a joke. I'm using iWeb to make the site. I just have not used the program since I made the GTSC webpage a couple years back. So I'm back on the learning curve.

And yeah your right about the web page. I tried accessing it from my lap top and it won't loads on the computer I got the files stored on.

I had a lot of issues yesterday working the files on the site where I upload to.

Well, this is where I get off the ride. I just do not know anything about that which you are talking. The other guys are far more tech savy then I am.

I would be happy to offer my opinion on things that you think I can wrap my head around. You know, red or blue? Does this font look nicer than that one? Basic stuff.

The idea of a Black Book to list the head cases sounds like a good idea. A site like this should be GT community orientated, as such things that are set up and displayed should be done so with that in mind. We would still have our own sites for the fun, silliy, private team stuff. The public site should have a fun, business feel too it. Friendly and informitave, it should offer everyone visitng the site a good idea to what team racing is all about.

This is still a really good idea, and I hope to be able to help with whatever my meager intellect can provide. Just don't ask me what any of the tech stuff is for, or what it does. You'll get a better answer from the neighbors kid. All I can give is a blank stare.

Well right now 3D you can tell me if that link to the webpage works, I finally got it working on a computer besides my desktop.

edit: Rayza pulled up the URL and it's working finally.

Now we are to the point we can start discussing what information is going up there.

Ok, I tried it and it took me there. I like the main points, home, WRE, Nurburgring, and Black Book listings. I see that you were able to put in key points for each thread. That was good. After we disscuss what is to be on the pages, as far as the content is concerened, we can flush out the look as we go.

I would think that things should be sorted for each page. Home would be the obvious place for topics that don't fit in the catagories listed (no use putting talks on the weekend event on the Nurburgring thread) but all that is fairly obvious.

Let's see what other people would like to see go into the site before we whittle it down to which features are included.