Contacts with IGN and moving our website over there

indio · Post by **indio** » Mon Jan 14, 2008 9:17 am

Well I'm a huge fan of the vault and Maximus is a genuinely hard-working and decent bloke. And it's cheaper. So sounds good.

Thangorn · Post by **Thangorn** » Mon Jan 14, 2008 12:02 pm

I heartily endorse this proposal..

anything thats going to save alfa (and especially Hialmar) money sounds great to me. Ads, meh.. like they arent a rash everywhere already.

I can see how it can bring new blood in too.. Some more Moonsea builders would be nice *crosses fingers*

..

darrenhfx · Post by **darrenhfx** » Mon Jan 14, 2008 1:14 pm

I'm for this idea with similar reasons to everyone who has posted above.

(naughty Wynna)

HATEFACE · Post by **HATEFACE** » Mon Jan 14, 2008 7:00 pm

New members is just what we need. You play a few public games and you come to understand that we're not very well known among the community. So, this is a good thing to spread exactly what we are among the community. It's time we get good advertising because we're just not hated widely enough for our bureaucratic bullshit.

Senor T · Post by **Senor T** » Mon Jan 14, 2008 10:51 pm

Gut reaction time!

I do not like the idea of showing ads on our landing page. We already have a hard enough time getting people to our site, and once they're there, we want them to focus entirely on us. We're a free, volunteer-based community. Showing us as relying on ads and as part of some larger network would likely muddy the waters for someone who is unsure about us from the get-go.

More importantly, it is not fair to keep asking anyone to shoulder a $100 burden for the rest of us. In which case, it becomes a no-brainer, we go with IGN, imho.

However, my primary concern is with the main ALFA landing page. I don't really mind the idea of ads on the forums, since there's a lot of scroll-space there. I just think that when potential applicants see ads for unrelated things, it calls into question our perception as a free, volunteer community. I see ads on a site, I start to think, someone's making money off of me looking at this site.

Now, this could easily be offset by a higher number of page-views if this provides us with a way to drive traffic to the site. Significantly more traffic to the site trumps everything else. However, this seems to be a big gray area.

All in all this is a great opportunity that deserves healthy consideration. My only question (aside from Wynna's issue) would be 'How would it affect site traffic?'

hollyfant · Post by **hollyfant** » Mon Jan 14, 2008 11:02 pm

Senor T wrote:However, my primary concern is with the main ALFA landing page.

We could keep a copy of our IGN homepage elsewhere too, and make alandfaraway.org point at that. It could be small, near static and the links would simply lead to the real pages - with the ads. We'd have a "clean" entry point then, at little more than the cost of the domain registry.

Senor T · Post by **Senor T** » Mon Jan 14, 2008 11:11 pm

If we can keep the landing page ad free (and as many new-member oriented information pages as possible) then I would certainly be much more in favor of this.

psycho_leo · Post by **psycho_leo** » Mon Jan 14, 2008 11:17 pm

If this turns out like NWvault you don't really get swarmed with adds.

Hialmar · Post by **Hialmar** » Tue Jan 15, 2008 8:09 am

Vincent van 't Hof wrote:
Senor T wrote:However, my primary concern is with the main ALFA landing page.
We could keep a copy of our IGN homepage elsewhere too, and make alandfaraway.org point at that. It could be small, near static and the links would simply lead to the real pages - with the ads. We'd have a "clean" entry point then, at little more than the cost of the domain registry.

Unfortunately this is not a real option.
If we have the landing page on a free website, for example, alandfaraway.org could point there (and www.alandfaraway.org as well) but it could quickly become a bottleneck. Free websites having small bandwidth.
If we have it on the vault computer then I'm afraid it would attract hackers and we do not want that.

Then the IGN contract asks that there are ads on each and every page that they host.
I know that some hosted sites don't have the ads everywhere but they are not following the contract they signed so they could be removed.

The only other solution I can think about would be to keep this website (and keep paying the $90/year - which are covered by the donations we have so far) and move some things to the IGN hosted website (we could put there the pwc, the haks and maybe the mods on password protected pages) as well as an ALFA static ad page.
This way we would benefit from the visibility and for the high bandwidth for important downloads and still keep our independence.

If at one time our donation level goes too low to support the website then we would move everything to IGN.

Personally I'm more for this for about the same reasons SenorT stated and because I'm a bit lazy of transferring everything to IGN (the last time it took me about 3 hours of very repeating things).
Well more for the last reason in fact

Hialmar · Post by **Hialmar** » Tue Jan 15, 2008 8:16 am

Some more food for thought taken from a message from the IGN representative:
- we have to have ads on every hosted pages even the forum (I had asked about that).
- they tell that they can make a ad contract with us and they claim that we could earn $200 a month on average from that.

If this is true it would cover all our expenses and we could think again about central hosting.
Personally I have never understood how you can gain so much money for ads that most people don't even look but that's only me I suppose.

HEEGZ · Post by **HEEGZ** » Tue Jan 15, 2008 9:41 pm

That's very interesting news. I can't say I'm inclined one way or the other really since it's your money and time.

Hialmar · Post by **Hialmar** » Tue Jan 15, 2008 9:49 pm

Not exactly, it's ALFA's money (the donations) and if we have to click through some ads it's our time

Therefore I'm interested in every member's opinion.

AcadiusLost · Post by **AcadiusLost** » Tue Jan 15, 2008 10:03 pm

Don't have time to respond to this in detail, but I'd like to weigh in on the minority (it seems) side here- I like that we have our own site, our own space, without advertisements. We have control of our image, and it looks a lot more professional to me than the IGN style.

We can host our PWCs and haks as public submissions to nwvault without any kind of special memberhip, AFAIK- this gives "publicity" without seeming to be a subsidiary of IGN.

I personally find the ads on the Vault quite annoying and distasteful. Would we have to worry about access to our materials / forums being restricted by IGN? If they're so quick to ban over simple misunderstandings, we might find a good number of our "free spirit" community members banned pretty quickly.

I certainly don't think it's fair for Infra to pay out of pocket for hosting- I was shocked when I first heard about it (several infra admins ago), and I'm glad we have a mechanism in place to take care of that now. I think it's a good use of central donation money, and would only like to see us go to an IGN solution if absolutely necessary.

That they are suggesting we may make advertising revenue out of the deal only increases my distaste for the arrangement, honestly. Call me an idealist, but I'm proud of what ALFA is, and this sort of arrangement seems to undermine us on some level.

Maybe I'm old-fashioned on this stuff, I like the arrangement we've got.

danielmn · Post by **danielmn** » Tue Jan 15, 2008 11:49 pm

I second Tom on this. Though I would like for our exposure to be more within the community itself, I do like the fact that we are independant. I as well get a bitter taste from getting paid by ads....I would rather our community be held up by its members...

And trust me, there will never be a day when we are so strapped for coin that we HAVE to go with free hosting. You can count on that.

fluffmonster · Post by **fluffmonster** » Wed Jan 16, 2008 12:20 am

I have faith you will make a good decision Hialmar.