RPGWW

A lot of roleplaying sites keep lists of affiliates for the purposes of cross-advertising and promoting each other.

A lot of you know that I've been ranging about in other forums for a while trying to forge Ye Olde Diplomatique Ties, and having affiliate sites seems like the next logical step.

Is this something you guys would be interested in doing? For most sites it just entails including buttons to one another's forums, so it wouldn't require any work on your part. I just wanted to see if they'd get used here, and failing that if you think it would draw new members.

Discuss!

I think we had some links to other boards on the oldsite, but I dunno if anyone ever used 'em other than justbrowingfor curiosity's sake.

I think most of the sites linked to from the old board were dead towards the end. So long as somebody keeps track of whether the boards are active from time to time, I see no problem with this.

Sure!

Kai wrote:For most sites it just entails including buttons to one another's forums, so it wouldn't require any work on your part.

Says you. >:


Seriously, though, this sounds like a good idea, yeah. I'm certainly open to trying it; not like it'd hurt anything even if it didn't end up working, after all.

Update!

A friend of mine over at HiddenRealms was looking to affiliate with some RP forums today, and I suggested RPGWW.

Now, uh... the only thing I have to figure out is how in the heck to make RPGWorldWorld's format all nice and affiliate-friendly. We could just put links at the bottom of each page, but honestly I think we've got too much random crap down there as it is, and no one will see it there, mainly due to the usual presence of totally random crap.

Now, some forums have a little bar across the very top of the screen with drop-down menus. For example. Look at the top here. I think this might be a nice format to use for that, since it would also be a good way to declutter the bottom of the page, possibly even removing some of the links and things from the top.

Of course, Idran is the board-wizard, so this would depend on his willingness to do all my work for me while I make arbitrary requests, which he may or may not be thrilled about.

At any rate, does anyone have any ideas?

There's also the similar possibility of putting it up there with the "main functions" of FAQ, Search, Usergroups, et cetera. Presuming those are mutable.

I've also seen a number of boards do it with the buttons on the left side of the page, sacrificing 80 pixels' worth of board width in favor of affiliate image links. Or, we could also put it where the "RPG(W) World" images are at the top of the page as it exists now. I'm not actually even sure why we have a link to RPG World anymore, really; taking some of that large amount of horizontal space would be productive.

How about next to the RPGWW Wiki link at the top? It's pretty much unused space.

I liked the idea of a drop-down menu because we can put things like a link to the wiki up there, too. That way the people who need a shortcut on forum pages still have it but the forum itself isn't covered in buttons and links.

A link to yalogank, the Choark Shrine, the wiki, a separate drop-down button for our affiliates, etc. I don't think the answer is slap any more buttons on the forum itself. It'll look a little cleaner if we just link everything we want from a drop-down at the top of the page. That way it's still there for convenience without filling the page up with everything.

Thinking about it, I'd say we can remove the banner entirely by this point; there really isn't much of a reason anymore to link to RPGW except historically. I wouldn't want a drop-down link to mix our links with offsite links, though. That'd just be confusing from a UI standpoint.

Having a pair of dropdown links, one for our stuff and one for affiliates, would be my optimum choice, but I'm not sure about positioning for that. The upper left corner is the obvious choice, but pretty much everything else above the board is centered, and that might make things look off-balance. I'll have to try it out to see how it looks.

Well, you can still center them. Just put it under the rpgww.org and wiki links, with another separator to mark 'em. I think one line's worth (okay, two, with the separator) of extra space isn't that much of a loss.

Hmm. Yeah, that'd work well. We wouldn't get the drop-down menu that way, but with just a single affiliate to start, I think that'd work fine. We'd still gain space overall after removing the banner. It probably should end up with an additional line above the links labeling them as affiliates, so it'd be three lines overall, but that's about the size of the banner as it is anyway.

Yeah, thinking on it more, I like going that route for now. Maybe if we get more links at some point (local or affiliate), a drop down menu'd be worth it, but for now I think that'd be the best route.