[12-12-17] Roy's Progression Update

[Roy 10,832 / 0]

Hello, this is a progression update from my point of view. I’m going to try to do these threads weekly or bi-weekly. Obviously, there are a lot of things going on in GFL and a lot to discuss. The major topics will be posted as individual threads.

 

Big Back End Update

New Users Given Access

As many of you have saw, I made a thread named “Some Core Changes” that detailed us giving full access to directors. I’ve made the choice of giving Rick along with two others access to the back end whom I trust. The individuals who were given access include:

●     @RickGrimesTM

●     @Xy_

●     @Nick

 

@RickGrimesTM is a director, obviously warranting him access. He is very trustworthy and although he isn’t experienced with Linux, we will be teaching him the basic troubleshooting techniques if the web machine or game servers do experience any issues. From there, he will be learning a lot himself.

 

@Xy_ is somebody who I talk to daily about GFL and has done an outstanding job. He has been helping me expand into other games and with some back end things in general. He has successfully been managing Breach and his attitude and mindset in GFL is near perfect in my opinion. Most would agree that he’s director worthy. However, due to the amount of responsibility and such, we felt it would be best for him to stay as a technical administrator for now and this is completely understandable. He is also very experienced with the technical side of things and we are learning more and more everyday.

 

@Nick is somebody who is very experienced with Linux and coding in general. Furthermore, he has been in GFL for a very long time and has always stayed by our side. He is quickly learning the IPS 4 API and doing a lot of work to the beta website already. He is very trustworthy from my view and I feel he will help us a lot with the back end.

 

What Access Were They Given?

These three individuals were given complete access to the web and game server’s back end. This includes SSH access and so on. The only access @Xy_ and @Nick do not have yet is with the NFO game servers; I still need to give them this.

 

With that said, here’s a list of things these individuals cannot do at the moment:

●     Create emails under the gflclan.com domain for users (I will look into how to give them access without giving them the main account information).

●     Handle paid services at a control point level (i.e. they cannot restart the OVH web machine from the OVH control panel since that would require the main account information, which I will not give out).

●     Give users access via NFO (requires information to the main account which I will not give out).

●     Access game server’s command line through NFO.

 

Here’s a list of common issues that these individuals CAN do but I still need to train them on how:

●     MySQL (e.g. create a global database for a server, change a server user’s IP address to work again, and so on).

●     Fix website-related issues (e.g. NGINX/Apache problems, SSL, configuration, and so on).

●     Fix common/advanced game server issues.

 

Why Give Them Access?

As I said in the “Some Core Changes” thread, I need to start trusting users with access to the back end. We are so far behind with some things related to the back end and without giving them access, I would be the only one in charge. I NEED help and in order for this community to get back on its feet; this is required.

 

Balon Helping Out More

As a few of you know, @balon has access to our back end as well. Although he has been very inactive recently, I had a talk with him the other day and he said his school semester is ending soon. This means he’ll be able to dedicate a lot more time into the back end. I’m looking forward to this and I believe he can help with our back end a lot!

 

What’s Next?

We have a lot to do, but I’ll list the next projects here:

 

Automatic Backups

@balon said he was setting up a backup server for his community this past weekend, and if it went well, he would do it for GFL. This is our main priority before we do anything further. I want automatic backups of MySQL (hourly), website files (daily), and core files for virtual machines and so on (daily/weekly).

 

We will most likely be using cloud storage such as B2 Backblaze or something similar.

 

Website Move

After automatic backups are implemented, I want to work on moving the main website to our new VM we have set up for it. There should be a big performance gain from moving to the new VM.
 

IPS 4.2.x Upgrade

After the website is moved, we will be immediately upgrading to IPS 4.2.x as long as the style is altered/upgraded to work with the IPS 4.2.x software. So far, we have most of the changes made, but there may be some areas on the style we need to upgrade and improve on.

 

After these projects are done, I will list the next set of projects we will work on with the back end.

 

Community Improvements

About GFL Project

I want to go over the About GFL project a bit more and explain why it will benefit us in the long run. This project will include a section that consists of many pages that explains:

●     Who we are.

●     How we operate our community.

●     Why GFL is truly unique and stands out from other gaming communities.

●     Why choose GFL over other gaming communities.

●     And a lot more!

 

The point of this project is to show newcomers what GFL is and get them more interested in the community. With our big advertisement plans, I feel this will be VERY important. If a newcomer comes to GFL, from the home page we should get them hooked into reading the About GFL section.

 

We will also include pages that shows how wonderful community servers are in general and why games should highly support them. We will be making a few pages dedicated to specific games, with the purpose of addressing the lack of support for community servers and giving solutions that should make these gaming companies (e.g. Valve and EA) and the community server owners happy. This will make us look stronger as a community and show that we support community servers in general. That, in turn, will make users confident in joining and helping GFL.

 

I am aware of some users in the community calling the “About GFL” project pointless. However, I don’t believe they understand how much potential the project has and how good it would make us look when done.

 

Website Adjustments

The Home Page

With advertising becoming a priority in the future, I feel we should revamp the home page and add in small bits of information from the About GFL pages along with a link going to the full About GFL page. Our goal is to get the user “hooked” into the community right from the home page with this advertising (we will be advertising “GFLClan.com”, which will lead to the home page). We should be also using attractive GFX images on the home page as well.

 

I will be making a separate thread about this once we start working on the website adjustments.

 

Donation System Adjustments

I think the donation system could use some work. I believe it has a bug; when a user donates for somebody, it won’t give them their secondary group (unless this was fixed recently). On top of that, I feel it could also be organized so that we can link the server perks with the IPS 4 project explained below.

 

We should make an IPS 4 application/plugin that automatically gives awards for the top donors each month/year/overall along with how much they’ve donated on their profile.

 

Additional Activities

I want to consider adding additional activities to the website. This includes an arcade, a gallery for users to post their images, and potentially more from our ideas. While this does have potential downsides, I feel the pros outweigh the cons. As long as the activities don’t:

●     Clutter the most common pages.

●     Use additional resources.

●     Pose a security risk.

 

The only con would be possibly drawing the user’s attention from the main forum. Though, I feel if the user was drawn from the main forum by an arcade or gallery, they would lose interest in the main forum regardless over time. The chance of this happening is also very slim.

 

SourceBans Theme

This was an idea by @Leks. We should remake the SourceBans theme to fit GFL’s current main theme. Though, what we may do in the future is just implement SourceBans into IPS 4 itself. However, this would make it a bigger project overall. We should at least make a dark theme for the current SourceBans installation.

 

HLStatsX Theme

As said with SourceBans, we should also make a new HLStatsX theme which should fit GFL’s current theme. We may try to also implement this into IPS 4. The current theme seems a bit messy in my opinion and I feel it would look nicer if we made changes to it.

 

GameME

Another thing we should consider in the future is moving over to gameME at least for newer servers. GameME is another ranking plugin that outperforms HLStatsX. The only problem with gameME is it isn’t free. The first gameME server is $5.00/m and any additional servers added are $1.00/m. We will discuss this further in the future.

 

GFL Server Hop Plugin Update

I’ve made changes to the GFL Server Hop plugin coded in SourcePawn. More specifically, I made it so it can select ALL servers in every game and adds a game prefix to the advertisement message. I will be adding this to our Fistful of Frags, Pirates, Vikings, & Knights II, and Zombie Panic! Source servers. I feel this will help players from minor divisions discover servers in our main divisions.

 

Distributive Services Announcements

Recently, we’ve been seeing many of our services getting interrupted by maintenance and so on. For example, our NFO services have been impacted by maintenance recently, resulting in the entire service going down for a period of time.

 

Although NFO gives us little time to prepare for these maintenance events (they only gave us a one-day heads up for the latest maintenance event), we should be notifying our users immediately via social media and announcements.

 

This can also include any other type of event that disrupt our services (e.g. (D)DoS attacks, machine updates/restarts, and so on).

 

This is something I want to be improved in the future.

 

IPS 4 Project

For a long time now, we have been wanting to make an IPS 4 application that adds many new features to the website that helps us maintain our game servers. We still plan on making this in the future once we find somebody dedicated and talented enough to do so (keep in mind, this is a very large project).

 

This IPS 4 application will include a server list, dedicated machine list, tracker similar to Trello, server pages that include information about the server, admin/ban appeal/player report forms, and a lot more! It will help server managers maintain their servers easier and make things more organized.

 

Style Adjustments

With the upgrade to IPS 4.2.x coming soon, we’ve been preparing our current theme for the upgrade. With that said, I would like to make additional adjustments to make the theme look better visually to our users. We will be asking for feedback from our users, and if you’re experienced with CSS and HTML, feel free to help us out!

 

Website Adjustments Per Seasons/Common Holidays

I believe we should have website adjustments based on the season. For example, in the winter, we should have a snow effect on the forums—with the option to disable it—or a snowman in the logo. In the summer, we could have a palm tree, or perhaps a sun somewhere in the logo or elsewhere. In the fall, we can have leaves falling in the logo, or perhaps as an animation similar to the snow effect we had last winter (this time, with an option to disable). In the spring, we could have flowers blooming.

 

We could also add some specific imagery or animations for common holidays such as Halloween (pumpkins), Thanksgiving (turkey), Christmas (snowman), and so on. These would be optional, though, and ultimately up to the staff team if we would want to add something. The other thing we have to consider is not everyone celebrates these holidays.

 

In the end, I do believe we should at least have seasonal adjustments to the website.

Supporter/VIP Discounts On Specific Holidays/Events

The next thing I would like to discuss is having discounts on our Supporter, VIP, and other future paid packages. Black Friday just passed and we didn’t have any discounts. If possible, I would like to have these discounts automated so that it doesn’t require manual action. We should have discounts on specific holidays and events. For example:

●     Black Friday/Cyber Monday.

●     Around winter break.

●     Beginning of the summer.

●     Beginning of spring break.

●     Specific GFL events (e.g. if a big perk is added to the Supporter/VIP packages).

●     And so on…

 

The last time we did a discount on the Supporter/VIP packages, we had many purchases from it. I feel this will be very beneficial to us in the long-term.

 

Discord Servers

A big topic that has been brought up in discussions with staff members is the fact that we have multiple Discord servers. It seems some divisions and game servers have their own Discord server. These servers have their own community, and are set up differently from each other and the main public Discord server we own.

 

With us putting focus on the main public Discord server—mentioned in the next topic—I feel all divisions and game servers should be giving the main Discord server their full attention. Another concern is the fact that most of these Discord servers are owned by different individuals including server manager and division leaders. For safety reasons, these Discord servers should be owned by me.

 

This topic will need to be fully discussed with the staff team before going into further details. Once we’ve came up with a solution, we will be posting an announcement; I just wanted to notify everybody about this concern.

 

Discord Project By @Joshawa

A few days ago an announcement was made stating new changes for the public Discord server along with a project being led by @Joshawa. There were a few replies to that thread stating valid points. For example, many users would prefer making their own Discord server to talk to people. However, @Joshawa also linked me a couple Discord servers that had over one hundred users in the voice channels. This Discord server was also a community, not a personal Discord server. This is what we want our public Discord server turning into.

 

Other concerns I saw include too many ways to communicate with people—Discord and TeamSpeak 3 as examples—and waste time and resources. As for the first concern, I definitely understand; it may be difficult focusing on both at the same time. However, there are users who prefer Discord voice and others who prefer TeamSpeak 3. I will admit that, from what I’ve seen, there are still more users supporting TeamSpeak 3 voice over Discord voice. But there is still a great amount of people who prefer Discord voice. @Joshawa will only be focusing on Discord voice as well. As for the second concern, it doesn’t waste that much time and resources. This is what @Joshawa wants to work on. Therefore, I feel we should give him a chance. It takes us five to ten minutes tops to set things up on the Discord server normally. This concern, while valid, is marginal at best.

 

We still start with PlayerUnknown’s Battlegrounds. If that is successful, we will focus on other games including our main divisions with this approach. We aren’t forgetting about TeamSpeak either; we will be making a separate announcement in the near future stating what we’re doing with TeamSpeak 3 and how we’re preparing it.

 

Advertising

With the About GFL and Discord projects, external advertising will be very important for the future. As mentioned above, we will be also revamping the home page and other parts of the website. We will be adding bits from the About GFL project—when finished—to the home page with a link at the bottom to go to the full page. Our goal is to get the user immediately interested in reading more about GFL from the home page (GFLClan.com).

 

We will be externally advertising by purchasing Facebook ads and more! I plan to build a team of individuals who will go around advertising GFL to other websites, YouTubers, game developers, and so on. Again, our main goal is to get them interested in reading the About GFL section.

 

Within a slightly broader scope, we would like to obtain a system in the future that allows users to refer others when registering/applying for member. When a user is referred, it will give them something akin to “referral points”. We will have a leaderboard for users with referral points similar to what we already have for top donors, including weekly, monthly, yearly, and all time statistics. This will also help us determine which users are actually trying to recruit users into the community.

 

Conclusion

I feel a majority of these changes and ideas will greatly improve GFL. We still have bigger changes on the way, but those will be posted as individual announcements. As usual, there are plenty of things we need to work on in GFL and I do feel we are taking big steps.

 

Note - Some links in this update are only available for Server Admins and over. I linked it for the Server Admins and above to look at if they'd like to.

 

Google Doc

 

Thanks for reading!

[Roy 10,832 / 0]

Just a note, I used a different method of converting the Google Doc over to the forums. Before I would paste the entire doc as plain text in the IPS 4 text editor. However, it took a very long time to make the format changes in the text editor.

 

This time I downloaded the doc as a Microsoft Word document (.docx), copied over the contents from Microsoft Word, and only had to make minor changes (e.g. text size, link colors, and so on). The only major difference I see is the bullet point's content have an indent. Though, I still think it looks fine with it

 

Thanks!

[TheLastBee 310 / 6,301]

2 things that interested me the most:

 

1) New home page. Will be nice because the current one is very unnapealing to me. Glad it is being looked at.

 

2) Being against individual server discord’s. I have one for PH and I love it because if a user wants to have a chat for a specific use then I can add one. I actually have done so and made a chat for Strategy Gaming such as Civ V games and such. It is the most used chat we have and has even brought a member into GFL. But I don’t think it would have happened if it weren’t for that need-based addition. I do think you should have some overwatch and will send you the link in a moment.

 

https://discord.gg/H6qkSuF

Edited December 12, 2017 by TheLastBee
Added discord and some numbering

[SwegBuster 879 / 15,308]

I read the whole thing when you were typing this lol. I like the ideas! Keep them going.

[Bae 2,489 / 41,432]

This was too much for me to read and understand but I hope I got the overall idea.

[Joshy 4,315 / 43,131]

I'm not sure if I say some things and they become important, or if we're truly that far behind.

 

It's not to be mean, but you say a lot for so little.  I've lost confidence in a lot of these announcements.  Some of these things sound like a broken record repeating.  Divide and conquer: Focus on one or two topics at a time and approach the problem in stages.  It's good to look at the big picture, but not in detail.  You can do that when you're done and optimizing the results.

 

The "About me" page should be brief.  There's a good chance, given the person is visiting our website, that you've already hooked them.  Does it help with "External advertising?"  Marginally.  If they have to read entirely The Grapes of Wrath to learn about how great we are, then you may want to keep it brief.   Think of it like a book when you look at the back and it's just the summary intriguing you to read it.  Don't water hose the visitors. External advertising needs to be truly external.  GCC was a good idea, but you need to have those external threads and get some of your leadership to explore other communities as visitors while they are committed here.  They'll learn what people like about other communities and they can bring that here (pick and choose), and we can offer to these people what other communities do not have ie. we're (probably) larger and offer so many games and modes.

 

Good luck!

Edited December 13, 2017 by Joshy

[Zero 447 / 10,862]

I was wondering why I thought this seemed so familiar and then I realized you literally just sent me that a few days ago lmao I just wasted like 10 minutes rereading this

Edited December 12, 2017 by Zer0

[Joshawa 49 / 2,687]

@Roy thank you for the shout-out here! Discord has been mostly revamped with new channels etc. My keyboard has been down (had to RMA) but I've been trying to promote our discord in any way I can! I still need your guys' help. Even just hanging out in the discord can help others stay after they join. The new pubg map will give us an opportunity to try and bring more members in, I can't wait to push this growth with the community together to make GFL a more well rounded community!

 

So stop by the discord sometime! Thanks again @Roy

[balon 41 / 2,192]

@Roy

 

School is over in 2 days dad

[Roy 10,832 / 0]

3 hours ago, balon said:

@Roy

 

School is over in 2 days dad

Sounds good @balon 

 

Thanks!