News

The Website is Live!

Kris Takahashi News 1 Comment

I’m still in the process of editing the site, and the first thing I’ve decided to change is the width of the posts. This is something I’ve been considering since the alpha because of how narrow the forums are. The problem is the old theme had a fixed size of 545px. Every picture, video, and the like was assigned this specific width, which would be fine if the text and tables were fixed also.

Basically what this means is that I’m going to have to go to every single post and remove the “545” width and “310” height tags, as well as go to every youtube video and embed them with a specific width of 670 x 376 (just adding the link doesn’t seem to make them full size). Still it’s worth it not to have narrow-ass forums.

Authors and Subscribers
Originally, the plan was to turn all subscribers into authors. Unfortunately, about half an hour after this was posted, one of the bot subscribers, “TatianaDallas” posted some article about maggots. Just bizarre.

I’m going to have to leave people as subscribers until I can confirm with absolute certainty that you’re human. Then I’ll give you the keys to kingdom. Trolls and vandals are fine and just part of the deal, but robots I cannot abide.

Casting Call
I decided the best place to put the new scripts are up in the corner as opposed to the left sidebar. It was getting a little too cluttered on the left and the right sidebar is awful for anything save media. You’ll notice there’s open roles, long term roles, as well as an option to create user scripts of your own and collaborate.

Advertising
The last thing I’ve been testing is the new advertising. I decided to stick with the same placement to try and get an apples to apples comparison. Of course, with WordAds, not only do you get paid per impression, there’s some entertaining commercials and the host itself is free.

While it’s apparent that Google Adsense has a wider variety of ads, and some even gaming related, there aren’t as many videos and the revenue appears to be dependent on clicks. It seems this website will be much more expensive when you account for both cost and revenue.

Au revoir, sweet, sweet cash, I hardly knew ye. Still, if the choice is between some extra beer money for me and a better experience for the mod users, then I’ll take the latter every time. In the meantime, I’ll still be running the Google Ads in an attempt to break even. Hopefully they’re not completely hopeless.

You hear me Google, step it up you dorks.

Hello World!

Kris Takahashi News 18 Comments

Hello world indeed. Here is the Alpha version of the new website. The domain name is temporary, I’ll be switching it out to 3DNPC.com soon enough.

FORUMS
To enter, click on the FORUMS button in the top right corner or the recent bulletin posts on the left. This is where discussions, comments, and things of that nature should take place. If you want to start a discussion regarding an NPC or quest, do it here. The Q&A is for bug reports and troubleshooting, the wiki is for information. General chat and the like goes to the forum, just click on the button in the top right corner.

Q&A
In the upper right hand corner, you’ll notice links to the forums as well as a place to ask, answer and browse user questions. Try it out, ask a question, any question, and I’ll do my best to answer it.

The one disadvantage to the Q&A section is that anonymous posters can’t ask questions. Why? I have no idea. The creators say it has to do with spam. It’s bizarre because they could’ve just gave me the option and let me decide for myself. Hopefully they’ll change that in a future update.

A FULL WIKI
The wiki is indexed more or less like it was previously, with one major change. If I’m not mistaken, it can be edited by any subscriber. Unfortunately, it can’t be edited by anonymous users, however, unless I pay $19 a month which is crazy given the information will be mostly static. The linkable text also makes a huge difference.

HTML5 AUDIO PLAYER
The audio player has a pop-out feature that will let you play music while you browse the site. This isn’t as ideal as having it run regardless of what page you’re on, but the only player I found that does that (Background Music Player) doesn’t list the tracks and titles, let alone have a playlist feature. You’ll also notice a DOWNLOAD button. Not a hallucination. You can download right off the player.

WEBM
As evidenced by the top, you’ll notice the site supports the WEBM format, which is better than uploading to Youtube because reasons. Well, mostly due to the fact that the videos load in full quality. I prefer WEBMs to GIFs because they don’t run in perpetuity and cause me motion sickness. Here are some I stole off 4chan earlier this week: 

The last thing you should check out is the comment system. Youtube videos will automatically embed. Still working on images like GIFs and whatnot.

LINKABLE KEYWORDS
There’s a plug-in that will allow every instance of a keyword to link to that respective page in the Wiki. So if I type the words Fontaine it will link to his page automatically. This should work anywhere on the site, whether it’s the comments, the forum, ANYWHERE.