When guilds advertise for new members one of the things they invariably mention they have, other than a tabard, is forums. Such forums are usually run on phpbb, free php-based message board software, and while the formation of a hub through which a community might be built seems like a good idea there are realities which clash with such attempts.
First and foremost, message boards are inherently weak when it comes to presenting content. They are structured in such a way that you must navigate to sub-forums to access any content and even then only the subject/title of the content is provided without any preview or short blurb from the content to assist the user in assessing it’s value (everyone knows that forum subjects are notoriously useless when it comes to assessing the value of any post). So the content is buried inside the forums with no indication of its value available without direct evaluation.
Secondly, most people are content consumers (readers), not content creators (writers). Ever hear/see guildies being encouraged to visit the forums? Many guilds struggle to get members to create an account on their forums, let alone visit or even write anything on them.
If you examine any forums you will see a pattern where a select group of people create threads and a seperate group of people respond/comment to them, this being true of any message boards, so using this knowledge the ideal situation would be to allow only people who create content to do so, and everyone else access to comment on existing content.
Obviously working backwards from a system where everyone already has access to create content isn’t ideal and I wouldn’t recommend it unless you enjoy creating drama, because people don’t tend to take losing something well (even if it was something they never used or intended to use). What I’m actually suggesting is that these things be considered in the beginning when setting everything up; that users be given appropriate permissions from the outset.
While message boards may seem the best option for such a system, WordPress, Drupal, or another CMS would be better, especially in their ability to present content at the top level in a manner in which content value can be more readily assessed.
There are sites that do a lot of work to give guilds the tools they need to operate as they’d like, but these third-party sites can only do so much with what has been made available. Blizzard are unprecedented in the amount of information they have exposed to third parties for WoW, but even then they can only go so far before hitting a brick wall. Third-party sites such as Guild Launch are left to cobble together functionality leaving their users with quite a bit of manual work.
I’ve always thought it would be great if Blizzard extended their support of guilds to a web interface that included CMS features like I’ve described. One that could integrate with the game, the armory, the calendar, everything. They say they will be doing ‘something’ for guild in the upcoming expansion and I dream that such a thing will occur but I’m not holding my breath.
Whatever Blizzard do – it will either be in-game or banned by my work’s Websense so I’m happy for our guild forums to be done externally for now.
I think it’s quite possible they’ll have a go at it.
Once upon a time there were any number of mods and sites dedicated to capturing and presenting profile data. Blizzard didn’t try to do it for quite a while, but eventually they created the Armory, and now no one would think of using anything else.
Blizzard have attempted to provide other funtionality even when they know it will only be used by a subset of players. Most guilds continue to use Vent or something similar, but that didn’t stop them putting in voice chat. While it’s not wildly popular, I imagine there are some people – maybe small groups of friends – who continue to use it, even if it’s not suitable for raids.
I think guild management is an area they’ve been happy to leave aside until now, but it’s an area they could greatly assist their customers with. In a similar vein to voice, the functionailty may only be good enough for fairly simple guilds, but it would still benefit a large proportion of the player base.
We look back now and think how quaint it was to upload profile info. I can’t help thinking we’ll feel the same way about guild forums and management later on.
I really feel for you Darren, that you don’t have control over what can and cannot be accessed…
My greatest fear should Blizzard do something similar to what I’ve described above is that they’ll do their usual half-arsed effort that results in something few find useful, like the in-game voice chat.