A Land Far Away

We have had some contacts with IGN.

They have proposed to host our website (and forums) as a part of the NWN vault.
The details are here:
http://nwvault.ign.com/hosting.php

Basically we would need to display some ads on the website and we would be hosted for free. Therefore we would save $93.24 each year (of course we will still need to pay for the vault computer - about $90 every 3 months - and the Infrastructure donations will be used for that).
The additional advantage being that being part of the NWN vault might bring us a better visibility.

What do you all think about this ?

Also can you check some vault hosted websites and see if your bandwidth to there is good ? For me it's very good but I'd like to know about others (mainly non Europeans as IGN is in UK IIRC).

You can check http://www.falloffaerun.nwvault.ign.com/ for example to see the bandwidth and the kind of ads we would have.

Seems to be expedient enough with loading the pages. The banners make the page look a bit less professional, but that may serve us in a sort of backward way. (after all, when someone says "it's free!" but they show signs of having funding - like ad-free web pages - my reflex is to ask "what's the catch?")

pro: cost, visibility
con: dependancy, ads



conclusion: I approve.

Seemed to load pages fast enough, and ads are all over the internet, they just seem like white noise to me at this stage... capable of being ignored.

Does seem like pretty much the hub of the NWN community as well, the Vault is the #1 resource out there. Hitching ourselves up there sounds pretty good to me.

I'm not a huge fan of this proposal, but then I'm not footing the bill for hosting, either. In my experience, NWN Vault has very annoying ads, although it is possible to work around them with a properly configured browser. Whether this will still be possible if the forums move there is another story.

I'm not convinced being hosted there will improve our visibility above the spotlight features they already have, unless they intend to shill for their hosted sites more heavily. Since I assume you could defray the cost by hosting ads on this site, visibility seems to be the only potential advantage of going with IGN.

Never really had a problem with NWNvault. Add that to the "saves money" bit and I'd say its all good. If it ends up being a terrible idea I suppose we could go back to teh current setup, no?

Yes of course we can come back to what we have if it becomes a problem.

What is even nicer is that if I resign the current website hosting contract I can create a cheaper one (the first year being cheaper).

The only bad thing is that I'll spend about 3 hours transferring the database and the files from one place to the other.

Honestly, I'm not thrilled with the thought of ads and would like to keep them to a minimum. However, the benefits outweigh that negative, imo. The money that's going to pay the current host could be better assigned elsewhere, if it's ALFA money. If it's Hialmar's money, it's not fair to keep asking him to pay $100 a year. Add that to any benefits achieved by joining the IGN community and the fact that if it doesn't work out we can come back to the current set-up and I'd support the move.

The only problem I see is that my forum account is currently banned over at IGN for advertising ALFA on one of their forums.

Being a member in good standing with IGN and NWVault I like the idea. I don't mind cruising the vault, the adds are easily avoidable, and they are not like other fan sites where you have to watch a game add, everything you click on something. Besides that, NWN vault loads much quicker on my crappy connection then the alfa home page does. And can (derail) someone tell me why every time I post in these forums its asks me for my name and password??? I have cookies enabled.

Wynna wrote:The only problem I see is that my forum account is currently banned over at IGN for advertising ALFA on one of their forums.

Time for an election.

Electryc wrote:And can (derail) someone tell me why every time I post in these forums its asks me for my name and password??? I have cookies enabled.

This one always left me boggled. At home it works fine, but when I use the computers in the uni it always heppens when I'm using firefox. The only difference afaik is that I don't let that computer memorize my password. IE works fine there though.

So will we have to change our domain name? Or can we stay at www.alandfaraway.org?

We will still use www.alandfaraway.org which will point to the IGN hosted account.

I use Adblocker anyway so i won't be seeing any ads.

So long as we can keep the color schemes we have. Most of the IGN forums are absolutely awful to look at.

Edit: Wynnas account being unbanned is somewhat critical to the move. It is fair to say if our Lead Admin can't post on our forums, it is a drastically less attractive proposal

Yes sure, we only have to add their ads somewhere on our pages.

An IGN's account is different from our forums account.
We will continue to manage our forum and website completely so that's no problem at all.