I started a new thread for this since none of it pertains to whether we should go live for not.
First, overall, it looks great. You guys have done an amazing job. My suggestions are mostly little things, and shouldn't hold up the show if other more pressing things are needed. It would be nice if:
-- the "new forum posts" on the right site should show the 10 most recent *discussions*, not the 10 most recent *posts*. It should work like the current scheme does
-- It would be absolutely great if we could add a calendar application to facilitate scheduling in the GDW, one that anyone could edit to sign up for a slot. In practice, we can probably work around that by using the Wiki format, but mainly, I am looking for a system where people don't need to go through me to sign up for GDW slots. (but of course, we'll still need to supervise the GDW to make sure people aren't abusing it, etc).
-- The big one: there needs to be some structure imposed on the Blogs (ugh, absolutely positively hate that word; is there any possible way we can call it something else?) and image galleries. As it stands now, they are going to be a complete mess, kind of like the current journals system is. There has to be some way for a searcher to extract useful information from them.
Here's a simple suggestion: separate the Blogs into subcategories by topic; eg, rulebooks, lists of games in development, descriptions of game progress, etc, so that when people create a Blog, they assign it to one of these categories.
Perhaps in addition, when a player is posting info about one of his games, he would also have to enter a couple of "keywords" about the game, possibly indicating its theme, mechanic, etc. I'm thinking here of these blogs being somewhat analogous to the BGG database, which is tremendously useful for learning about games without knowing specific titles or authors. I'd like something like that here, where if you have a new bidding game about the Spanish Inquisition, you can find out quickly who is working on something similar.
Also, it should be possible to output the blogs by author rather than date entered, since, if I want to find out what zaiga is working on, I shouldn't have to scroll through 10 pages of people who posted more recently than him.
I think the blogs could be useful but also potentially very hard to utilize, and it's important to impose structure from the outset rather than retroactively.
Other than that, everything looks great. I'll see if I can't write some content for the game mechanics section as Dave requests. I don't see that as being crucial to the launch, though; the "design encyclopedia", being somewhat static, should be done carefully and authoritatively; it's ok if it's not ready to go from day 1. That's a long term project, in my opinion.
Great job!
-Jeff
Third. As for keywords... I'm not sure it's necessary.
Let me make my suggestion more precise. What I think would be really great is if we had a database of "games in development" that was analogous to the BGG database, so that you could go and look by category, by theme, or by author, and see what others are working on. The search is fine, if you know what you're looking for; sometimes you just want to browse.
I don't think this is something that needs to be in place before we go live; I just think that in the long run, it would increase the usefulness of the blogs if there's a way like this to group them.
Here's perhaps a simple way to start: create a wiki page that lists all of the "games in development", and encourage users to add links to their game blogs onto this page. They could be sorted by username or game title, alphabetically.
Ideally, as I mentioned, we could also have theme and mechanics keywords and you could sort the list by those. If BGG can do it, then it's clearly possible to do that. But it might also be difficult to impose a database-like structure on wiki-like content. You guys would know more than me about that.
Just trying to think of some way to make the journals/blogs a little more useful than they are in the old site.
-J