Uniform Bots-United and its bots

[stefanhendriks]

Hi,

Perhaps i am not making friends with this, but i think it should be brought up anyway:

I have noticed most bots ( yes, i did it as well) are old; and are not bing updated; OR they are moved to different websites (ie, epodbot has www.epodbot.com ).

Although i am not against any other websites or hosting; or anything like that, it does make it confusing for anyone coming to Bots-United for bots. First they will discover bots who are out-dated, then bots who are on different websites as well.

I want to suggest the following:
- go over all bots and decide wether they are still active or not, if not, put them in a non-active partition (also noticable at the forums)


When thats done, our visitors will be able to distinguish the old and the new.

Besides that i want to promote a bit more uniformity; in some sort of BU banner, or design, or whatever, so people who come to realbot.bots-united.com, know it is also from bots-united (hosted by).

The RealBot site uses a tiny banner indicating it is hosted at bots-united, and it mentions it in the title. Others might have other ways to show they are hosted; but a uniform way would be desirable?

I am not here to get everybody forced to change their website, or throwing old bots out or whatever. But i do encourage that we think about this.

Somehow I think we can get much more traffic here if we take our active partners more serious. More traffic = more life = more community = more fun.

What about HL2 bots? Or Unreal bots? Or ... .. .. you get my drift ;-)

[The Storm]

E[POD]bot is not moved, this host was offered to me by one of the E[POD]bot users because in that time Bots-United was down more than two weeks and nobody knew if is going to be up again, so I used this host as a backup and on the site I was wrote that if BU is active to go in it instead of the backup host, the domain was bought again by this guy but as it seems it's not working anymore.

E[POD]bot is not inactive, I do support it and help the users to install it and also fix crytical problems but yes I don't make new stuff in the code, the real live has catched me and most of the time I don't have time to do my hobby stuff.

Anyway I don't have BU banner on the EPB page but there is nice link to the forums.

[stefanhendriks]

Before continuing; i want to stress out this is not to pick on people and say they did not do anything for a bot. I know how it is to have real life catching up with you , so don't worry i am on your side ;-)

But , lets face it, there is a lot of inactivity and we need to get things sorted out. SOme bots are updated in 2005 at least. Thats not going to motiviate people who come here.

I visited the E[POD]Bot site, but the latest news was from July 29, 2006 . All i am saying is, people will notice and will skip next time because there is no visual activity. Even though there might be activity in the forums.

Perhaps it would even be nicer to make a sort of portal for bots? I am just brainstorming here. Like, at the right you have all bots available (with some nice filtering method) and in the middle you see each bot's site, i-framed or something?

[The Storm]

Yeah at the time when BU was down I forgot to update the news of the site here, the last one were from the end of 2007 but I don't have the site on the other host to move it here huh.

We have the portal, its in the index of www.bots-united.com but I think we must chage it a bit as you pointed.

[stefanhendriks]

Looks like http://www.epodbot.com/ is not up anymore?

Anyhow, you should e-mail Onno he can get you asap some ftp info to update your site.

Perhaps we should rethink how we set up Bots-United.

www.bots-united.com has a nice welcome page, but from user perspective it is a lot of information at once and they don't have a clue what to do.

Ie; lets call our visitor "dude" and he wants to play against a bot for DOD and he heard of bots-united.com. Well if he came to bots-united.com, he would'nt know what each bot is. There is a name, and author. No mod displayed.

Only when you're at the forums you can see the mods displayed. So there has been thoughts about it. Perhaps we can move that to the front page as well?

So, perhaps we can create a portal like thingy where the homepage welcomes the user. And we have to make it easy for our visitors (who are mostly non-programmers i suppose) to find what they are looking for (a cs bot, dm bot, dod bot, rtcw bot, etc).

Also, i am hoping some other people also react to this post (but i am just too active atm so i might ask too much , it aint the old days anymore )

[The Storm]

Seems my english it very wrong or you are reading too fast ?

In the first my post I pointed out that the backup host of EPB is down from some time and I can't contact with the guy to give me access to get my files here, I do have access to the BU ftp but I don't have access to my files on the backup host, I hope now is more clear.

About the main BU page. The changes that will point witch bot for witch mod is, is good idea but we will need some HTML guy sinse I don't know almost a thing of HTML.

[TomTom]

I agree the main page could do with a bit of changes. Say a table of Bot Name, Game types, Main WebPage, and Forum. On the other hand I normally direct people just to the forums (e.g. this poster from my Filefront page) and wiki.

If the main page is to be a portal then it should be written for these 3 audiences;
(a) People just looking for information on what is available
(b) Users looking for Help or Waypoints
(c) Developers wanting to join or learn.

Currently it is geared mostly to (c).

[stefanhendriks]

@The Storm, sorry, i missed that It is clear now.

I am not a front-end guy, but i know some html. A real front-end guy would be better though.

I agree with TomTom here; perhaps even split up B into B1 ) help and B2) Waypoints

But that is a minor detail.

For now Bots-United wants to be a united front for Bots, with the Forums as main tool to achieve that goal. But, on the other hand we are loose sand. Every bot has its own site, not even always referencing back to BU (its origin). And, there is no real 'front door' for BU, all we say now is: Hey welcome, make your selection from the zilion bots and figure it out yourself.

I suggest; try to do some basic html skill, upload it somewhere (or paint some suggestsion) and get it back here. I'lll try to do something myself as well after work hours finished.

Btw, i really love that Bots-United picture you posted there TomTom

[Ancient]

It is hard to appease all people and attract all kinds of people.
But, when a person wants something, they will venture into anything until they become desperate and frustrated. Once they are, they will settle for less, until they find out that there is more. Wither something is more or less is a personal preference by the user.

If you need web space for what ever, just pm me.

I think if you categorize the bots, have some javascript & div stuff so when you click on the bot name, there is a breif description, and 2 links. 1 to their website, the other to their BU Forum. Under thelinks you can put:
Status: active
or
Status: active

Just a thought.
If you want I can make a simple submit news thing. But of course, PHP is just a simple form of C++.

[stefanhendriks]

i imagine the main portal holds news for all bots some how. You can also see in that list the most active bots, because they have updated their news. If we use some sort of uniform news engine we can attach all bot sites that way.

I have made a draft of how the site could be.




As you can see, at the right is the latest news of the bots. At the top you have a title, and you have the 4 major links; filebase; forums; our mission and JOIN. Since we do not support all games, or bots yet, i think we need to expand. But we don't know everything. For now we lean too much on the HL world, but there are so many more bots out there; if we want to be true to our name, we should find the other bots out there and get them interested.

In the middle there is actually a simple devision, one for bot seekers, and one for bot programmers.

Let me know what you think about it ;-)