Future of Flash-DB

[Andresss]

hello guys, there is a long time, since the last time i wrote, but i completely agree with Govinda, yeah, flash db needs more movement, i know that only words make a page easier to download, but doing things more dinamically (videos, animations etc) would get more users and of course users would think this is a really professional flash developers page and not an amateurs page. Just to try, tell jorge to do a video in the main page welcoming users and offering to check every section, specially the tutorials, u will see the reaction, i think this is going to be a good one....
Andres

[Gil V.]

I am sorry but I am going to have to dissagree with David on the "realtionship with Macromedia" idea. That, I feel, would be the kiss of death to the excellent service FLASH-DB provides. As soon as you establish a formal relationship with a giant like MM guess what follows? Yes rules, limits, and the same lack of careing for the customer that they have.

I support the idea of this being a subscription based forum. How the moneys are used is entirey up to the board of directors (they called business decisions) and I don't care if all the money is used to buy Jorge a yacht. I hope you don't go to a "per-tutorial fee" (like other boards have) but to a simple "it costs $annual fee goes here to have access to our forums were our experts like Jorge, Music, Syed and other participate". I think a free forum should also be available for the free exchange of ideas between subscribers and potential subscribers but where the "experts" do not participate.

Just my $0.02

This is an excellent place to get answers I would like to see it continue being that and I do not mind paying for this service. Keep up the excllent work.

Gil V.

[bpat1434]

Not to spread off topic...

I'm Alivee!!

Me personally, I see Flash-DB moving great leaps.  I think that with the user base we have (13200) we could make $25,000 easy.  

Not to post off topic links and such here, but if we set up a system for $2 annual fee, we could generate $26,400 per year or more.  This money could be used to do site updates, allow moderators & admins to post more material, pay for extra bandwith, add another server to store flash tuts and such.

I know of a site that requires a $2/6month subscription.  And users that are active and get bumped to mods (like myself) are then waived the fee and become mods or sponsors.  They use phpBB, but I'm sure the module for yaBB is out there somewhere.  http://www.wareznet.net

That link is a reference.

Personally, I work in flash in my free time, and learn from new things daily in other boards.  New ties need to be made to Macromedia.  I know UltraShock has that over us.  MM coders frequent their boards, and give interesting tutorials.  Plus, their site is fairly flash intensive.

As for moving the board to the SMF (previous yaBBSE) would be crucial.  YaBBSE is no longer supported, and SMF urges all YaBBers to upgrade.  I have used SMF and it is ingenious.  I still fancy phpBB, but SMF would be easier to port to.

As for Flash-DB website, I think it is ok the way it is.  It disseminates information.  That's what the site is for.  I have pointed lots of people to Jorge or Musicman's tutorials on this site.  It's hard to find tutorials elsewhere.

The only gripe i have about the site, is it's old.  I know that after being here for a while, the front page is kinda boring.  Too much blue.  Great design though, but everyone needs a change every once in a while.

Other than that, I think the site is great, and can't wait to get back to helpin flashers.

~Brett

[..:: Mazhar Hasan ::..]

Hey everyone!
      I agree to brett's opinion that blue is cool but not if it is this much quantity, The site layout is ok, but i think, the color scheme should be changed & the style of scroll bar, if some one will ask me how the next appearance of the site should be, then i will say without any pause, like the Exchange of Macromedia, it rocks!, i also want the no of sections should also increase, means, it is mainly PHP centered site, & in the begining when i joined the board in 2003, i was very upset to find the same thing with that much of quality in ASP which is availablehere in php. but finally i realised, OK it is not an ASP or PHP site, it is mainly devoted to Flash & they are giving their cent percent to it, from that day, i m one of the greatest fan of this site & forum. Now if some day, i dont browse this forum or i dont have any question to answer on the boards, i feel very lonely, you can say, i m adicted to this site.

      As far as paid contents is concerned, i think it depands on master minds & owners of this site whether they want it or not. but i know one thing for sure that there would only 1-3% people who will mind this step if they switched to paid forum because the quality of response & response time of this forum is more then awsome. So it depands on business minds of the owners as even 5-10$ will be easily acceptble.

      I think, their should be another forum for JSFL coverage as it is a thing which has dramtically started to come into play in different ways. so what you guys think of this.

  Regards!
  Syed Mazhar Hasan Qadri

[Ronald Wernecke]

Hi Syed,
I am allways voting for a wider offer, if we can service it.

If you are expert in JSFL, and you can service a section, why not.
The same with ASP. The demand for ASP is quite low, and some of us, me included, have basic experience with this area.

You are right, we have a very good response time now, and the question is, what does a user get, when he pays us.

One thing could be life presentation an discussions with the staff and mods.
But, after we are very international, we would propably never meet

We could offer things like "primary support" - but where does this begin, and where does it end.

Sometimes we ar doing much more than just giving a hint

[bpat1434]

I don't disagree with anything that has been said previous to this, but the future really is in the hands of those who AREN'T a part of this board yet.  What is it they want to see come of this board?  What is it they need help with that we don't offer?

I think those questions need to be answered.  Once answered, we can actually focus on where the site will go, what look it will evolve, what strengths and weaknesses we have, and where we will be.  To set long-term goals is good, but we can't even get to the long term without the short.

Adding a subscription based service would be neat, but I PMed Ronald last night with an addition to my previous post.  I am not active, but once was on Experts-Exchange.  What they do is once you sign up, you get a value of points (100).  You can then post questions or answers to questions.  You give the quesiton a value of your points.  When someone correctly answers your question, or helps you answer your question, you award the entire value of split value of the points to those members that help you.  Once your "trial" points are used up, then you can still browse the boards but have to pay to post.  Now if we modified this to our needs, it would be good.  We could use something like a karma scale to see who helps out, what good people are to ask questions and other such things.

A pay site would be nice to have.  For $2 I would pay every year to keep this site running.  There is no reason we can't ASK people for $2 to donate through paypal to us.  Why not?  What is $2 for most of us?  1/4 of a minutes pay?  But think how much those $2 from all our members could get us?  We could expand our site, upgrade our software, become "affilliates" of MM or somehow get MM presence (not influence) in our boards.  Maybe even set up a place that we can offer our users a discounted fee for MM software.

There are a ton of things that can be done with money we get off the site.  I think a measly $2 is worth it to keep it running.  But we are who we are, and we will go where we need to go.  I don't know what exactly we all are looking for but things need to change, and eventually they will, and hopefully for the better.

Just some thoughts.

~Brett

[..:: Mazhar Hasan ::..]

If you are expert in JSFL, and you can service a section, why not.
You are right, we have a very good response time now, and the question is, what does a user get, when he pays us.

One thing could be life presentation an discussions with the staff and mods.
But, after we are very international, we would propably never meet

We could offer things like "primary support" - but where does this begin, and where does it end.

Sometimes we ar doing much more than just giving a hint

Hi Ron! As far as JSFL is concerned, i m just started to learn that & finding it a very nice addon. so if there are enough peoples who can moderate the board then please, else wait until one of us gets champ in that.

    as far as ASP is concerned, i was talking about that time back in 2003, now i have swtiched myself to ASP.NET & in some situations, on MySQL-PHP depanding on client's requirement.

You are right, we have a very good response time now, and the question is, what does a user get, when he pays us.
We could offer things like "primary support" - but where does this begin, and where does it end.

Sometimes we ar doing much more than just giving a hint

more then often, the user gets more then what he asked for, because, when i joined this board, i was completely newbie to AS & even _root was something annoying for me, but thanx to jorge, vesa, u & other peaples who help me to improve my AS, now i m one of Mods of not one but two boards. So this is what users recieves from here.
Another thing, i m completely agrre to u that sometimes, we r doing much more than jut giving hints, as a very recent example is in the flash comm server section's topic by Kofi Addaquy which has reached to 36 posts up to now, in that post, first jorge givin his outstanding solutions & then  i sent two replies & explained entire architecture of that application, would it be my client, then i can easily charge 100s of $s from him.
  So this is what users get from here. But i will say one thing again, the site layout needs a change. A good one.

[Ronald Wernecke]

I think, the future of flash-db shall not be exhausted by design questions.

Yes, sure, the design is outaged. Redesign is, as everybody knows, an awfull lot of work.
Therefor we should think about service anhancements, which we may have to include into the new design.

In the meantime we have so many users, that we cannot start from the scratch.

We hav to do the redesign with all the data in it - users, posts, tutorials, lists etc.

[..:: Mazhar Hasan ::..]

As far as design is concerned, we have some ready to use forums, or we can give this task to our users as well by starting a contest for making a new design of the forum, all they have to do is to make a layout & publish that to their domain or any free account & the better one would beused & the designer of that layout will be credited.

 As far as joint dicussion is concerned, we should have something like dev chat which is a central application made to provide support for central & related issues, that is a good one.

[Ronald Wernecke]

As you may have realized, we are running on YabbsE, which is not supported anymore.
If we move to another board, I prefer phpBB, we have to transfer all the data to the different structure.
Design itself is only a fraction of the work
But we will have to do it anyway.

You are right, we can give it to our users, what we actualy do with this thread. It is public, what we are talking here , and everybody is invited to give his thoughts ind impressions.

[bpat1434]

To be honest, porting to SMF (YaBB's successor) is easy as they have the upgrade files to do it.  Also, phpBB has the upgrades also.  So structure of the databases shouldn't be that hard.  Hardest part would be the graphics.

~Brett

[..:: Mazhar Hasan ::..]

Hello dear!
i would like to share my style of work, if i have to do something by modifying someone else's code, then i will prefare to make my own instead of modifying-n-mistaking several times. although i have readu made forum of WEB WIZ Guide(of ASP), but i prefered to make my own when i need one. so as you know, we have our database ready, so i dont think we need to play with that until unless it is need to normalize. all we need to do is to decide the layout, & then write the php codes for all the logics, i will be free in next week, so i will try to provide one.

[vesa kortelainen]

Hello,

Here's what I collect this far for this conversation:

* Design need change. PM/Email (vesa [theSign] flash-db.com) me if you got ideas.

* Board need to UPDATE. That's will happen ASAP (as soon as possible), you got my word.
About $$$, Time is money.. Brett's idea for year-fee sounds pretty good. When looking this from Staff-side, I don't count 100% that every 13 000+ member is willing to pay that (let's say $2) fee , but those who will pay, they will ACCESS for another level service of Flash-Db. What the services will be , that's the Question.

By the way, I opened new Flash-Db blog under MX Developer Journal, see my first post about The Infamous Flash-Db -- little bit history of Flash-Db.com

 

[Mohsin Sumar]

Hi all,
The access level idea is good. Paid members move towards some sort of dedicated level.

If we manage to move towards phpBB - I've seen there are levels of users you can set there. May be this one has too - haven't gone inside YaBBSe.

We could also have some sort of advertising side if required. Something like - subscription - this much for a months advert on our website. This will attract most of the businesses and I'm sure they'll pay for advertising on a large community like this.

One more thing regarding restructuring - if we're going to use non-flash. I see that hte front page is full flash - rest is non-flash. example, tutorials and other pages. I suggest we have a look into Smarty Template Engine - I've worked with it. Its useful for separating the design and codes. So whenever we want to change a design, we modify the template files and not the codes. Something like that.

Its the best I've come across - http://smarty.php.net

[..:: Mazhar Hasan ::..]

About $$$, Time is money.. Brett's idea for year-fee sounds pretty good. When looking this from Staff-side, I don't count 100% that every 13 000+ member is willing to pay that (let's say $2) fee , but those who will pay, they will ACCESS for another level service of Flash-Db. What the services will be , that's the Question.

hi every one!
 as far as levels r concerned, i have an idea. we should give everyone free support but this would be limited to one reply. means, a user posted his question, some champ relies him but just once for free, the second or more replies will be givin to only paid users. means only paid users will be able to get more then one replies else every one would be limited to one reply.