Welcome everybody to the first official post of the Notice Board. The Notice Board is our portal to the community – a place to explain what we are working on, how we are progressing on certain improvements/changes to the site, as well as addressing concerns or question from the community. The idea is that every week – and maybe more often – we will have a post about some of what we are doing to make the site better, or things we have been trying to do and that aren’t working the way we thought.

So the big question – what are we doing right now?

Site Optimization

It’s important to understand that we are just a bunch of people doing this in our free time. We built a site because we had some ideas of what would be a cool experience, but boy did we not know what we were doing. It is only in the past few months that people smarter than us have started pointing out what is wrong – which is what we are trying to fix now. In another post, I’ll go more in-depth into what this actually means and how it has been a struggle, but it is something we are focused heavily on right now because a slow site is a shitty site.

Community

From day one, we wanted to have cool community stuff. We wanted cool user pages, cool activities, ways of linking your account – all stuff that appealed to us as gamers. That has all been more difficult than we thought. It’s a work in progress though, but possibly an expensive one. Right now we are trying to prioritize optimizing the site first and we are worrying about how to do community after. We also aren’t sure what users want more – stuff to do on their accounts or content to look at on the site. Feel free to tell us which you want.

Esports

Esports have always been a big part of what we wanted to do. We get that some people don’t care about them, which is why we’re trying to make an experience that doesn’t shove them down users throat. We also think a lot of gamers would enjoy them if they just gave them a shot. So we want it to be easy to engage with or learn about esports in a fun way. We are also always trying to get more coverage, but Dota 2 and CS:GO could really go a long way towards improving how they report on matches. Thanks for that, Valve.

Multimedia

You know how Ninja is basically the biggest thing in the world right now? Yeah, well we noticed too. Also, we all like streams and Youtubers that make gaming content (don’t tell Vaati Vidya that I have a man-crush on him). We’ve been playing around with cool things to do to pull in gamers who want to get started streaming or making Youtube videos, but also to make those things more accessible to people who don’t watch them. It is a process. Step 1 – we want to be able to help gamers. Whether that is getting them into streaming or watching, that’s our goal. We are still working on the best way to do that.

That does it for this first post, but keep in mind this was just an introduction. We will go into the actual specifics of stuff in other posts. That will include super exciting details like – Database errors! Indexing pages properly! Monetization! And much more!

Until next time,
KingTon