Rainbow

Re: [REVIEW] - TopRankinGames All Ratings are out of 10... Number of Listings - 6 Number of Active Voters - 7 Originality - 3 Quality of Categories - 8 Layout - 9 Appearance - 9   The layout is very basic, which in your case; is a good thing. Simplicity is key in my opinion with these websites, important not to over do it. The topic your layout is based around isn't one that can be expanded without some repercussions, and generally, sites with compact layouts are far more appealing and less tedious to navigate through than those with messy navigation and layout trying to incoprate flash so it looks good. The layout and implementation of style is very well done. Although not exactly out of your style bound, which I was hoping to see, it is still an improvement over the previous two installments and excites the member base nevertheless. I am impressed by the fact that you've successfully managed to the layout work together graphically and structurally. I do not like the members part on the top and would love it if you move that down the column and made the header as in one big long banner, slightly shorter than it is now but wider. I dont like the banner either to be honest. Otherwise, I've always been impressed with layout. It is organized in a logical manner that manner are well adapted to, compact, and it's easy to navigate through in comparison to a few topsites I have seen. I say you have taken quite a risk with the subject you've chosen to base your concept around, which was well worth it, and now with the right management I think you can do well. While originality isn't exactly a high key, afterall there are many alike topsites there, I have you will do fairly well, aslong as you dont expect too much too early. What you have been doing has worked ok for you - keep striving for better. And you need to come up with something original that the other sites do not offer - If I had an idea I would not tell you anyway, but I dont so Meh... :-D The biggest downfall of the website is probably your community. In the time the website has been open, activity has generally been lagging and the user base is not growing at a very constant rate, well from what I see. Of course, that's to be expected, and compared to other sites you grew at a hgiher rate. You've actually done very well recruitment wise considering the competitiveness of this niche - I mean must be hard to get new games to join the listing, or at least that was always my assumption. Perhaps you should consider providing more opportunities to get involved with the community - I think you should develop relationships with the game owners which will help you eventually. The banner you should change in the next few days, and I think the members part needs to be dragged down thus allowing space for the banner to become wider and less stretched. I personally like short and wide banners. Also I think you need to relocate the advertisement under the navigation to somewhere else, it doesnt look too good. I like the fact the forum matches a skin, or atleast follows a similar colour scheme however if it is not active, I dont think it should be there. Your main priority should be getting more listings and expanding, whilst improving relations with current owners of the current listed games. I hoped I helped hehe... :-) Focus on the content now rather than appearance. :wink: - Rainbow -

Re: Review my Top site I've watched the services niche of topsites of the network develop over the years, so I hope that I can impart you with advice cultured over those years observing. The first thing I would like to do is pose the question. What is it that distinguishes your top site from any other service alike? It looks to me as though you have bitten off more than you can chew. It is extremely important to establish the site as excellent in one area and then expand as your memberbase allows. So I think you need more listings, which will be hard to get as the big dogs wont be willing to put their voting link due to the lack of visitors you get. Iits good that people can presume from the name "Topfreemmorpg" that voting and topsites is the main focus of the service. The layout itself seems to be the big punchline of the site, especially the header which is quite good, but you haven't executed it wel in overall. The other part to the layout is bad, the lower you go the worse it gets. It's messy and rather ineffective as a method of advertising. I would recommend either editing it yourself or seeking someone who can utilize HTML and CSS to create something improved. Sort out the tables so all the votings appear in one column and also replace that advertisement somewhere else. I dont think you need it, as I doubt you make money from it right now. Unlike many other topsites, I do not have to chastise you for your name. It is relatively normal, and would be used. Decide what services you can handle, which you should focus on, and do precisely that. I do not think free ads should be part of those right now. If you don't minimize and draw users in with the excitement to use those specific services, you will not find success easily. This genre is difficult to survive in, so you have to distinguish yourself from every other. The carbon copy that you are now is only going to prolong what looks like a failing topsite from my examination of it. However if you sort out the layout, get more listings and ofcourse invest some time in it, it will pay its dividends and hopefully Topfreemmorpg has a bright future ahead of it :-) - Rainbow - PS: I would be glad to answer any questions you may for me about your site. If there are areas I've not focused on, let me know. I've highlighted what I think is a good starting place. If you need help and tips on how to improve further let me know.

Re: How do you make money from your game? I think you should steady before trying to make money consider some questions like; Is your content and updates in place? Do you have traffic and a promotion plan? How many page views do you have per month? Who uses your site, what are they looking for and what might they respond to in an ad or affiliate program? Are they the audience that would buy? Not all ways are legitimate for some, but they are for others, so it depends on the community of the game you administrate. If you are ready to be making money and considered all the factors then ofcourse by all means do so, there are three ways to make money as far as I am aware of in the php gaming industry; Sell product for more, Sell product more frequently, Get more members - which will result in more sales eventually.   I realise that you want to make money, but surely the community is important to you. Dont you feel that if someone buys alot of donator packs they will have an unfair advantage and it will have a negative impact which will lead to people loosing motivation and eventually leaving the game which gradually will reduce the income. I like rewards that have less of an impact on the game - something just for the fun of it, not so your players loose motivation. - Rainbow -

Re: What's your motivation? Well I think in general developers are often motivated by the challenge associated with developing a fun game, not necessarily the financial success it could lead to. However on here I think alot of the people do it to make quick cash, which I do not approve of, as it seems people actually earning some cash for their efforts. Although the work around here doesnt require much of it. If your motivation is that then eventually you will need a solid plan so that you can afford servers to provide greater bandwidth to satisfy more players. This of course translates to more money. I think the community here as a whole have originated from popular php games, torncity etc... That is why they are motivated by them. They saw the oppertunity of owning one themself and it is a challenge, and it seems noone gives into it and they all want to try. I think there are like 20,000,000 domains using php extensions. So it shows how popular this is, although if you want the right question I doubt you will find it here, as alot of the people originate from the same community. Personally at some point I would like to move onto 3D programming however I think it is like linguistics, the more you learn the easier it gets as you know how the conventional rules work, and I am sure it would help at some point. Even if the two languages arent alike you will be used to figuring it out - and how. I think PHP was relatively easy consider I knew HTML already and it seemed like a good choice to move onto PHP. I think I just do it as a hobby rather than a 'proffesional' which a few seem to have the wrong conception of, but overall the motivation posibilities are pretty endless and everyone would have a difference answer anyway :) - Rainbow -

Well sometimes when hype can be very affective and can help games/websites greatly. However I think the balance is not there between the two, some people are either relying to much on hyping up there opening, and lets say they do get a good opening because of hype, the thing is they focused so much on hyping the game or board they didn't put much content into the game so after the first week the game is pretty much dead. Or they do not bother to hype at all and just open, and then due to the lack of advertisement, nothing happens. Also another point for failure is that people do not advertise enough, I mean all they do is submit to 3-4 topsites and advertise here, this community can be poisinous, lets say your game is the talk of the whole network and everyone is waiting for it to open. Other members that envy you or feel jelous will try bringing you down, and also even if they do join, the game will hardly be a massive success as you are limiting yourself to around thrirty CE members and ten members generated from top sites. Don't concentrate so much on hyping your game up but more on the content and what is inside the game so when members actually do join they want to stay. However remember there isn't anything wrong with hype. And it is just a form of advertisement, just because a game fails, and it had hype, doesn't mean you should associate the hype with the failure and death of games. Sometimes it still is affective, when there is a balance. In a sense you could say it was not the hypes fault in the least bit for the owner not doing the content side of things. The hype is not to blame for that I guess. The hype did not cause the owner to neglect the content. That is the owner's fault for not getting good content. I know I am contradicting myself, but I am pretty much on the fence and anxious to hear everyones sides to the argument/debate. I think its simple, you have to strike a balance between the two. Don't hype a game as the best thing ever, if it isn't the best thing ever. That is called over-hyping. But that is not the fault of the hype either. As if you hype appropriately to what you have, then hype as much as you want. Stick to promises you can keep - then you cannot dissapoint. What are your views on pre-hype and advertisement before opening, surely it wastes times and causes the administrator to neglect the game and its content and focus on advertisement? Or do you feel that hype is what succesful sites use and the owner should do both? Or maybe content doesnt matter when you advertise enough? Share your thoughts... :wink: - Rainbow -

Re: BOE Engine There are many actions you could take. Forming a list of peple who cannot be trusted, and simply ignoring them. At the end of the day it serves them right for past offences. Or you could buy a private server which you own and host it on there, for a leased license ( unless there is an alternative .) Or possibally leave a bug/exploit or somekind of backdoor so if they breach the conditions you can just exploit them. Ofcourse make sure to use a PHP encoder Zend, Source Guardian and Ion Cube... I realise it doesnt encourage people purchasing the script but its better to be safe than sorry. Afterall you spent alot of time on the engine - Well knowing you, maybe not :-P Also surely you should be considering taking legal action, after all you are at the age where you are entitled to it, unlike like the others. So surely that is the best option you have?

Re: Rain and Sunshine = Rainbow Firstly I would like to start by thanking you guys for the warm welcome. It is much apprieciated. As I stated before I hope I will be going around adding value to the community and build a solid foundation for myself as someone who is a benefit to the forum, and again I hope you guys value my presence at CE. I surely will have a blast, I hope you enjoy having me here too. Thank you. Well I always have my doubts about fitting in into new communities as the conventional idea of established communities are that people do not get a chance to get noticed. I will not be rude at all nor will I tolerate rudeness from others, I believe I have common courtesy and politeness when talking to people and respect those who have the same, to get my respect you have to show respect. Thank you. I will be seeing you around :wink: 1+1=1 1+1=2 Two you mean :lol: Hhmmm, well in my opinion in development of websites ajax can be really useful and pretty much does magic, but that is only if you hande ajax the right way...Without handling a magic trick the right way, it wont be magic, same goes for the ajax. In my time coding I realised that ajax programmers need to handle certain issues so that you can get same results on all the browsers - mainly Ie and FF. One of the ways is ofcourse XML parsing. Alot of XML parsers are written in java script, however when you are into building custom application that don't make use of any ajax library. I am not very good at this stage in my life, however I have programmed a few simple set of functions to do login. Mostly just simple authentication codes at the server side, and ofcourse I managed to learn abit about the but the response. I know how to mine and parse XML data for Ajax and Javascript, although I am not at the advanced level some people are on here. As for jQuery, I really like its performance,its functions, the features, the elegant design, and for me its one of the JavaScript frameworks I use mostly. I mostly use jQuery for cross-browser models for accessing and manipulating web page elements... As then I dont have to deal with the DOMs or whatever. I guess I am no newbie, nor am I a genius on the specific language. I just have a general interest and worked with it abit; again as I mentioned it is a hobbie and I am improving every day, and hope to improve by working at it. Clearly some people around here know less and clearly some know more, it will be an interesting experience overall both for learning and teaching. The act or process I did when making an entire script that process' secure online payments and transfers funds from the buyers credit/bank card to the sellers Internet account. Again thank you for the warm reception, I feel abit better and less apprehensive than I was before. Again I hope that I benefit the community, and people like having me here. As for Lacey's comment of Envy and Respect, I do not think people will Envy me, if I do not give them a reason, and for the respect part I am sure I will build a good foundation. Overall I know trashing your reputation rather than building it is much easier and would take process much faster, but that is not an option. :wink: See you around guys, - Rainbow -

The Rain is here, and the sunshine is here... Its time for the Rainbow to appear. :) Hello guys, Well MDshare invited me to join this forum; and here I am. I do have a few worries in a sense that I will not be able to fit in due to the lack of graphic and coding talent I have, however I will try learning and settling into the community. I hope I will be going around adding value to the forum aswell as many people as possible. So I will try my best to build a solid foundation for myself as someone who is a benefit to the forum and I hope you guys value my presence at CE. Right now I am developing my PHP knowledge, but mainly focusing on the graphical and design aspect of 'Web Design' am also trying to learn how to code themes for forums, I have a few friends that will be giving me some tutorials on the coding side of things and I decided that this community will be the best for the Graphical side aswell as coding if needs be. I tried joining a forum of similar calibre before that followed the Graphical genre however I struggled to fit in and did not seem like I could get accepted into the community and I could not get my voice across; Then I went on to loose passion and enthusiasm and eventually gave it up. I am relatively new to SEO, even though I have owned a few websites I havent had MAJOR success, but have been into webpage creation, PHP anyway for over three years now. I joined this forum to learn as much as I can and hope to meet some others that can offer me advice and help... I hope to learn about website promotion as well as techniques to optimize my exposure. Following are my skills that I used in different projects: - Online Payment Integration with Paypal - Google Maps API to display a location with pop-up info - XML parsing to database and creating XML from DB data. - CSV parsing to database and creating CSV from DB data. - Handling File uploads and file downloads. - Installing CAPTCHA security codes - CMS - Dynamic PDF File generation from the database information using FPDF libraries - Online Diary for keeping reminders and events. - Online DB Backup system - Email Broadcasting - Pre-Register System - Working with complex queries in Mysql - Calender Reminder/Appointment System - Building application with SEO friendly URLs - Installing PHP, MySQL, Apache & software apps in linux boxes. Other skills than PHP: - ASP - SQL Server - Cold Fusion - HTML - CSS - JavaScript - AJAX A few I am better in than others, however I have a passion for doing this, and if you have any tutorials ( Advances Tutorials that is ) Then it would be much apprieciated. I know a little bit in everything rather than alot in one specific area, however sometimes that can be an advantage. Abit about me; Well I enjoy reading and having indepth discussions and debates, as you may of figured I thrive on content. I like to think that I have relatively good spelling and grammar, although sometimes I am quite sloppy and make a few mistakes. I believe I have common courtesy and politeness when talking to people and respect those who have the same. I am interested in Sports, Music and trying to take an interest in Graphics; In a sense that I am very interested, but right now I simply pretty much suck, compared to the likes of Scarlet. As some of you may of seen the announcement, I have been hired to do reviews for the network. So if anyone is intrested in a little bit of publicity then contact me, mdshare or post in the adequate topic that was provided. I will do all my best to help you, if you help me, help you ofcourse. Confusing I know :-D See you around, -Rainbow - The Kewl Guy