Thanks for accepting the invite winter, I've made you an admin with full access. That gave us a 'team' of sorts to present, so I sent our dev group info to feillyne and as promised he has transferred control to us! YES we have full control over the FreeCol IndieDB page now. This is awesome news as I really didn't think this could happen, but perseverance has prevailed haha! The old FreeCol IndieDB Page (I get started on updating its info and header image soon):https://www.indiedb.com/games/freecol
Our Dev Team page (Mike & Dave I hope you guys still join as purely backup control if I go AWOL lol):https://www.indiedb.com/company/freecol-dev-team Also feillyne said something else interest that's beyond my skill set but some of you guys might find it interesting. However much like our SF frontpage I think the default design is fine enough, no need for any custom fancy stuff unless Winter's feeling bored or something haha. Infact custom ModDB/IndieDB front pages annoy me as I often get lost trying to find the things I can normally find in seconds with the default frontpages haha. feillyne - Staff - Subscriber54mins ago says:Nice. Oh, by the way, I completely forgot about it, but you can also fully customise the CSS code of your game/devteam profile by sending me a PM with e.g. a pastebin link, well, and before that, checking this tutorial: Moddb.com Just need to remember that ModDB and IndieDB use two different stylesheets, stylesheet changes can only be done manually by an admin, and to put style tags at the start and end of the custom CSS (not to mention the custom theme version number inside comments so the stylesheet is easier to keep track of and update).And yes, that can be done for your other game profile, Starflight, too. Regards! I notice he's a staff member there so maybe he wasn't part of the old FreeCol team and all the files and images simply defaulted to his account after the old team member deleted their accounts. I'll ask him and if he was an old team member then invite him to have look at the project now days and check out some of our cool features and 3rd party mods. Anyway I think I've said this before but posting articles/news/dev diaries on ModDB/IndieDB is REALLY good for bringing attention to fan projects. Whenever I post one for my other projects they go on the both ModDB & IndieDB's front homepages resulting in hundreds of people viewing and interacting. In the coming months I'll definitely look at creating some new cool news items for both IndieDB and the freecol website. Now that I have control I can see the history stats and its pretty dismal viewing due to the page being unloved for so long. Interestingly a few months ago when I uploaded new pictures and downloads (thankfully didn't need admin access for that part) 150 people dropped by to check them out smashing any previous record lol. They only started recording stats in 2020 though so who knows what sort of hits it got in the 2000s though. Either way once I start posting articles with info, pics and vids we'll get way bigger spikes! :)Screenshot:https://sourceforge.net/p/freecol/discussion/719661/thread/42b0844f/2ac2/attachment/Stats.png That's enough from me for a while. Just wanted to share the good news! Oh and Mike if you arrive to see a bunch of emails take note that the email before the email before this one in this conversation has a whole bunch of NEW replies to our big convo a few weeks back. :) Regards Blake On Monday, 1 June 2020, 01:40:47 am ACST, D Blakeley <d_blake...@yahoo.com> wrote: Hey quick update with some good news guys! I have managed to get in contact with one of the original people who controlled the FreeCol IndieDB page named Feillyne (is that name familiar to anyone here?). He's replied to me with this: "Hi, that dev group, Various Devs, was supposed to be generic and temporary and is a relic of the past that hasn't been properly cleaned up yet. If you create a Freecol dev team (so you can invite other members) using this link HERE ownership of that page will be transferred over to you. Regards!" Problem is I don't have a team there without at least one or 2 of you guys haha. I'll send Mike, Winter and David email invites to a indiedb Freecol dev team that I'll make up asap. Then I'll let Feillyne know that we've got a dev team and are ready for the page control handover! :) Don't guys you won't have to do anything I'll take care of the page myself, I just need you to join the team haha. And should I get hit by a bus and you wanna do stuff with the page being a member of this team will give you FULL control (as I'll set you as admins). Regards Blake On Sunday, 31 May 2020, 10:28:08 pm ACST, D Blakeley <d_blake...@yahoo.com> wrote: Hi Mike, Thanks for getting back to me on these things, sorry for the delay, been super busy myself too. 3. Thanks for your feedback on which maps to include and not include. Sadly no one else came forward so I've pushed ahead and finalised the list (removing duplicates, European maps & inappropriate ones like GTA). I had to come up with another new size classification system due to all the crazy sizes in play! But here's my forum post with all the details: https://sourceforge.net/p/freecol/discussion/141200/thread/9eb4fbdf/?page=2&limit=25#b431 I've submitted the pull request and its ready for when you're next putting some time into the project here: https://github.com/FreeCol/freecol/pull/65 I've made a number posts about the maps across forums and social media to generate some interest and new visitors too! 4. "if I see messages here from at least two regulars saying that <url> is ready to go as a replacement for {SF front page, screenshot, whatever} I will make time to work out what has to be done. Time is the issue, I never used to do anything with SF admin, and it always takes me a while to work out what does what." Oh no, I didn't mean anything like that!! I've seen fancy custom SourceForge front pages and they're cool but who has time to make one of those? No one lol! What I'm talking about is simply pushing some buttons in the admin screen and pasting some text into some boxes that's fast and dead easy, no programming required (otherwise I wouldn't be able to do it haha), real basic stuff. Unfortunately I doubt anyone else will come forward and say "yeah the front page needs updating" as things are pretty quiet these days and I don't think anyone else cares as the front page changes aren't for existing members, they're for attracting new members! Oh well either way I've written up some guides in the forum on how to do what I'm talking about so if you ever do have a few spare mins for it then they'll be there ready and waiting to help make it as quick and painless as possible lol. Guide 1: Updating the Features section:https://sourceforge.net/p/freecol/discussion/719661/thread/42b0844f/?page=1&limit=25#4619 Guide 2: Updating the screenshots section: (I've selected 6 nice shots and attached them to the post) https://sourceforge.net/p/freecol/discussion/719661/thread/42b0844f/?page=1&limit=25#05c9 5. I'll look at making some of those freecol.org website updates in the coming months adding screenshot updates there and some videos. 6. "No idea who originally created it. If it needs an "official" owner, you are it Blake."Hahahaha no worries, I thought you might say that. Yup I'll take care of the modDB page. :) Wish I had admin access to it though. It looks like a number of people had control over it however I can't see who they are as their 'company' dev group page was removed. Which possibly means even they have lost control of it if they logged in. I dunno... I might try messaging some site admins to see if I can take control over it, but god knows how much red tape there is to prevent hijacking. 7. Social media. All good mate, most game devs I speak to don't go near fb so I'm not surprised haha. I was just keeping you up to date on my efforts to grow these groups into Col communities that we can promote your project to. Even since my last email about them the groups have grown quite a bit more so things are going really well! :)https://www.facebook.com/groups/ColonizationGame/ was 50 when I last msg'd you, it's now 75 meaning its increased by a full half lol!https://www.reddit.com/r/ColonizationGame/ was 24 members in last msg, now its 50 meaning its more than doubled!https://discord.gg/CHcH75s has gone from 11 to 18 but that's still in very early days haha.. Even without me promoting several others have posted about their Freecol games in them which is a great sign for the future. Anyway I'll keep at it with them. Whenever something cool happens I post it in the groups and then share that group post with various retro gaming groups which A advertises FreeCol and B advertises the groups to capture people for future project announcements. Regards Blake On Tuesday, 28 April 2020, 08:08:58 pm ACST, Michael T. Pope <mp...@computer.org> wrote: OK, bit more time to go through the mail. > 2. As for Rafael's changes and storing Author and description in the map > file... The issue here is that we can not store the description in the map iteself because it needs to be translated. The author is fine. Currently we effectively do neither. Rafaels patch does both. If we can get the author into the map, a bunch of the stuff you have been wrangling in the strings file can go from: map.Africa=Large Africa by J.Bloggs to map.Africa=Large Africa by %author% which does not help your work much now, but is more maintainable. There would have to be code support of course to pull in the %author%, but that is straightforward. I have a note on the todo list to think more about the whole translation setup, but that is post-release. We already have extra standalone FreeColMessages.properties files in the mods, which are currently not getting translated AFAICT. If we can fix that, we can probably handle having similar files in the .fsm map bundles. That would probably be a better design than having the above map.<foo> entries in the master strings file. The major concern with any change to how we do translations is to not mess with the volunteer translators. Keeping things easy for them is mandatory. > 4. Regarding Sourceforge improvements... Yeah, I suspect front page hackery may be locked to the main project admins, which means I probably have to do it. The offer is: if I see messages here from at least two regulars saying that <url> is ready to go as a replacement for {SF front page, screenshot, whatever} I will make time to work out what has to be done. Time is the issue, I never used to do anything with SF admin, and it always takes me a while to work out what does what. > 6. As discussed in past emails I overhauled your old FreeCol ModDB page ...another thing I had never sighted. No idea who originally created it. If it needs an "official" owner, you are it Blake. > 7. [Social] Please do not interpret my absence from the facebook bit as disapproval. I just do not use it, deliberately. Getting time to work on FreeCol is hard enough lately, I do not need more time sinks. Perhaps I will look at the discord channel... eventually. Nevertheless, thanks for pushing this stuff forward. Cheers, Mike Pope
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