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That's fine, I hope jesses website goes gold and improves upon the invaluable service it's been providing to the community as a whole. I suspect my advantage over Jess is the fact that I am disabled, unable to work, and always looking for an interesting new project. Currently Jess's website has a much more complete set of general commands listed, but mine has the ODE or Multiplayer Plus commands listed, on the other hand it does cover all the other commands yet. I've setup under links, on my website a link to jess's website, so please feel free to use mine as a conviniant go between. As I have said many times before, my only main problem in regaurds to jess's website is that I can never remember the domain name. I just received news that mine has come though. [href]www.darkbasichelp.co.uk[/href] and is owned by me for at least the next two years. I would have prefered a dot com, but never mind, this one sticks in the mind as well I hope.

The other advantage of my website is that it's database driven, php with the ability to assign permissions to users, moderators and authors so this can really be a community website, rather then run solely by me. I learned along time ago that running something by yourself isn't much fun, it soon gets old, but working with a team, as I do on the open MMORPG project is much more fun, and fullfilling. I hope to expand the site beyond simple help listings, into a true support portal for DarkBASIC Pro, Classic, for omega basic, and all associated products. It's a tall order and will take many months, if not a year or two to get up-to-date with everything.

you know what I think is interesting - how you decided to open a competing product for the same goal... You could have offered your services to Jess in developing his new site.

Dont take this the wrong way - but I'm getting this "Look at me prove myself" vibe from you. Do you like to do things yourself rather than aid others?

Again - dont take this offensively... I'm genuinely curious why you chose such a competing route - and on top of that - used the .co.uk version of Jess's site...

I am disabled, unable to go out into public, or even leave my own home, this coupled with a distinct feeling of being an outsider in any given situation, may well have given me a desire to prove myself, though it's not a particually prominat thought in my mind. As a child I was always awkward without many friends, and people say this time of your life shapes your behavoir as an adult. So in short, yes you are most likely correct. But again, it's not something I'm actively aware of most of the time.

But, I honestly don't see myself as competing, I am happy to help jess's site and list any other support site out there, but my main problem in the past has been in finding them. All too breif posts appear then get burried in the forum, all I'd really like the website to be is a jumping off point for every tutorial, support site, and free resource availible to the community, while providing a website that the community truely has a say in, and can participate in. So far most people have been content to have websites with names like memberservices.x.com or dbp.tgc.com or whatever, these are not easy to remember and the TGC website, beyond this forum doesn't make any effort to list them. I deeply hope by having an easy to remember domain name, and by listing as many of the other websites as I can find, that [href]www.darkbasichelp.co.uk[/href] will provide an extremely useful link consolidating as many resources as possible, thus removing as much of the frustation at creating software with DBP as possible.

Oh, and yes, I know I'm long winded.

I still think that, imho, there would have been a more profitable partnership in you and Jess clubbing together to create an all singing and dancing site as he has already had experience in organising the help files, hence V1 being set to read only and him considering how best to do V2. You have also had experience in creating online portals where the content is member-created.

I am a webmaster and (imho) pretty skilled when it comes to HTML/CSS/Javascript/PHP/MySQL, etc... I've offered my services to Jess and if you need help - you know where to find me and my email, however I still think that many hands make light works. With everyone's experience clubbed together, a decent and effective help site should be a doddle - thats why this forum works so well.

I'm not 100% convinced that you've entirely thought this whole project through and get a bad feeling you're going to install an open sourced Wiki and hope it works. The reason Jess shut V1 down was precisely due to this - he kind of played it by ear. There was no real scheme or plan to the project.

For example (a simple one) - how do you moderate code content? What makes one snippet good and another not? Who decides? Do you? Does the public? Dictatorship is often easier than Democracy in this situation - however is it going to make you a popular site? You've seen how the Mods get treated here when they do something that doesn't please the masses - hell, you've even done it yourself here to TGC!! TGC produced help that doesn't appease the masses and instead of trying to help a previously existing project, you've simply said "Right - I'm doing it myself..."
I know that last bit isn't an exact quote - but if you read over your posts and try to take a 3rd person point of view - it does kind of come across as though have a little but of a comandeering attitude here.

Also - on a side not, Wiki-experience aside, what skills in website development do you have? Whats your strengths and weaknesses? We have a leader but know nothing about him/her (not even gender!!)... hehe..

PS: Please dont take what I say as offensive - I tend to just write and hit send. I am not taking pot shots at you, I speak my mind (rather, as it seems, you do too).

PPS: One thought I have had as a feature... If you and Jess do produce "competing" sites. Maybe you shold both look into making your databased conform to a standard to make sharing content easier. For example, Jess's might end up being easier to search for a quick help (like syntax reminder) whereas your's might be more comprehensive and usefull for the "How on earth do I do this?" type issues...

EDIT:

Welcome to the club

In reguards to wiki, the reason I set that up was so that anyone can add their own information to the site.

In reguards to previous website experiance, this lays mainly in establishing game clans, organizing online games and online servers for Star Trek Bridge Commander, CnC Red Alert 2, and more recently Unreal Torn 2004 and some limited gaming with SWAT 4. I turned control of these clans over to other members, and I've slowly watched each and every one fold without my input. My most recent project, of which I share power and decision making in all matters with two other people, is the Open MMORPG Project, which has been active on www.openmmo.co.uk for the last five months. That site has the same services I am offering for www.darkbasichelp.co.uk

Yes, I am the first to admit that my attitude can come across as comadeering, but as you have said, what does the community really know about me? What does Jess or anyone else know? Why do I have the right to come along and interfer with their project? The awnser is that I don't. The only way anyone can prove they can deliver what they say they can is to get off their bum and do it. If it fails, that's fine, I've tried my very best. I am heartend however because 3 users have joined the website and I've had additional hits to various pages.

In reguards to protecting the existing work produced on the wiki, for now I've created two help sections, one is called DarkBASIC Help, and the other DarkBASIC Help Wiki. In addition to this users can be set up with permissions to submit articles, tutorials and help items directly to the website, see the image below:

[img]www.gamersol.co.uk/TGCImages/DBH_Editor.png[/img]

This of cause I have direct control because I can disable user accounts, and have to assign status to new users.

In reguards to who's the leader, it's my full intention to establish, as we did with the Open MMORPG project, a core of three, this is because running everything by yourself is great for about five minutes. If you are interested in helping out Nicholas, I am more then happy to grant you moderator access to the forum, and manager level access to the main website itself. You don't need any PHP or HTML coding knowledge, everything is run via a backend GUI built directly into the website, this allows the managing of users, the accepting and publishing of new weblinks, and help items. It also allows via the front end, the editing of existing articles.

[img]www.gamersol.co.uk/TGCImages/DBH_Backend.png[/img]

Ahh Mambo! This is interesting - I'm trial running this software for one of my Managers... I'd be interested to see how this site roles out... The other CMS I have tried is called Drupal and, currently, I feel like Drupal has more control over the content than Mambo - but then again - I may me using mambo incorrectly.

I thought that as well when I first tried it, while developing the Open MMORPG website I went though NukePHP, Drupal, eZ publish, Website Baker, ezContent, Particle Wiki and a few others.

In the end I stuck with Mambo for four reasons.

1) A Wide GPL community base producing templates, componants and modules.
2) Easy to install, and setup.
3) I can write templates for the website using NVU.
4) Is intergratable with other PHP technologies such as SMF Forums, and MeidaWiki.

I am also in the process of evaluating Joomla 1.0.7 for a privet buisness website I am in the process of designing.

I've definately found in the past that mambo is the most flexible system in many respects, the only drawback to it that I have found is that I am unable to produce user premission groups as I can with some of the others, but the generally produced groups that already exist do the job perfectly well.

Joomla is basically Mambo and a bit more... I've used it for about 60 seconds - so not long enough to figure it out...