Regarding a chat: yes and no... it drives away communication from a forum and thus can make it appear dead, but I guess that is a general trend.
But if you implement a chat please no walled garden. XMPP or Matrix both federate and can be set up to link with Drupal accounts. XMPP is a bit lighter on server resources and also more mature, but Matrix is a bit easier to bridge to other networks such as Discord or IRC.
Early preview and all, but it seems to me that it hits the worst possible combination of an overall convoluted and chaotic look, while the same time offering very little content with the huge pictures.
But maybe this is just the impression you get on a smaller laptop screen ;)
Back on the topic of technical things: Drupal in general has the major issue of the Version 7 to Version 8 chism that created a lot of issues and incompatibilities. It also really shows its age in many regards.
More OGA specific, I think an issue is the monolithic nature of the software infrastructure (also a sign of the aging base). These days a set of interoperable micro-services is really the way to go. For example the comments and the general discussion forum could be realatively easily replaced by an embeddable Discourse* or NodeBB forum with a user SSO mechanism**. That would also significanltly reduce the complexity of the Drupal core site maintenence. Discourse or NodeBB (or maybe Flarum) are also *much* nicer forum softwares than the current very limited and aging Drupal plugin this website uses.
Haha, I seriously don't hate you at all. But with your argumentative bad attitude we had no choice but to ban you on FGD. Just spend less time trolling (intentional or not, that is what you are doing here as well) and you and everyone who interacts with you will live a happier life :D
Anyways... my argument is that by cutting simultanious(!) traffic you also cut all other server system requirements except for hard-drive space (and even hard-drive speed is less relevant then).
Also if you are just externalising the drive-by traffic for comfort features such as audio-streaming there is really very little reduction in the quality of service except that users of these comfort services will of course "pay" with their traffic metadata due to being redirected to such data-mining sites.
I guess it is worth looking into options to reduce drive-by traffic. For example there used to be a Drupal plugin to automatically sync audio files with Soundcloud. That way you can host the files for download, but all the traffic for people just listening to audio-files is redirected to Soundcloud or a similar service. And you don't need to fix the click to play sound button either ;)
In general I am also a bit surprised about the high hosting costs.Via netcup.de you can for example get a 14 core Xeon, 64gb ram, 2TB SAS, 1GBit/s root server for less than 50€ a month right now.
But I am also guessing there is a huge amount of wannabe game developer kids with fast internet connections that just vaccum the downloads ;)
Regardless of that, maybe it makes sense to split off for example the music files into a seperate site that federates with the main page (which remains with the main focus on game-ready pixel art). That way hosting costs and traffic load could also be balanced better and Funkwhale might be an interesting platform for that. Or maybe Peertube could be interesting as it has build in webtorrent that results in the people listening / watching audio or video files actually seeding the data via their own upload and thus the load isn't only on the main server.
Regarding a chat: yes and no... it drives away communication from a forum and thus can make it appear dead, but I guess that is a general trend.
But if you implement a chat please no walled garden. XMPP or Matrix both federate and can be set up to link with Drupal accounts. XMPP is a bit lighter on server resources and also more mature, but Matrix is a bit easier to bridge to other networks such as Discord or IRC.
Maybe it's just me, but I think currently Samuncle's layout looks very generic, almost like one of those domain squatting pages :p
And I agree, it needs more direct access to the community features.
Not sure why you are all trying to start something from scratch... there are excellent themes available for Drupal that could be forked.
Just have a look at some image gid heavy themes like these:
https://www.drupal.org/project/yg_news
https://www.drupal.org/project/premier_league
Or a searchable catalog like theme:
https://www.drupal.org/project/used_cars
Please have a look at this new Drupal8 plugin that claims to turn it into a DAM (Digital Asset Management) software:
https://www.drupal.org/project/dam
Maybe there is also a theme/skin that goes well with it.
Early preview and all, but it seems to me that it hits the worst possible combination of an overall convoluted and chaotic look, while the same time offering very little content with the huge pictures.
But maybe this is just the impression you get on a smaller laptop screen ;)
Back on the topic of technical things: Drupal in general has the major issue of the Version 7 to Version 8 chism that created a lot of issues and incompatibilities. It also really shows its age in many regards.
More OGA specific, I think an issue is the monolithic nature of the software infrastructure (also a sign of the aging base). These days a set of interoperable micro-services is really the way to go. For example the comments and the general discussion forum could be realatively easily replaced by an embeddable Discourse* or NodeBB forum with a user SSO mechanism**. That would also significanltly reduce the complexity of the Drupal core site maintenence. Discourse or NodeBB (or maybe Flarum) are also *much* nicer forum softwares than the current very limited and aging Drupal plugin this website uses.
*https://meta.discourse.org/t/discourse-working-as-comment-engine-replace...
**https://www.drupal.org/project/discourse_sso
That's cool. Thanks for letting me know :)
Haha, I seriously don't hate you at all. But with your argumentative bad attitude we had no choice but to ban you on FGD. Just spend less time trolling (intentional or not, that is what you are doing here as well) and you and everyone who interacts with you will live a happier life :D
Anyways... my argument is that by cutting simultanious(!) traffic you also cut all other server system requirements except for hard-drive space (and even hard-drive speed is less relevant then).
Also if you are just externalising the drive-by traffic for comfort features such as audio-streaming there is really very little reduction in the quality of service except that users of these comfort services will of course "pay" with their traffic metadata due to being redirected to such data-mining sites.
I guess it is worth looking into options to reduce drive-by traffic. For example there used to be a Drupal plugin to automatically sync audio files with Soundcloud. That way you can host the files for download, but all the traffic for people just listening to audio-files is redirected to Soundcloud or a similar service. And you don't need to fix the click to play sound button either ;)
In general I am also a bit surprised about the high hosting costs.Via netcup.de you can for example get a 14 core Xeon, 64gb ram, 2TB SAS, 1GBit/s root server for less than 50€ a month right now.
But I am also guessing there is a huge amount of wannabe game developer kids with fast internet connections that just vaccum the downloads ;)
Regardless of that, maybe it makes sense to split off for example the music files into a seperate site that federates with the main page (which remains with the main focus on game-ready pixel art). That way hosting costs and traffic load could also be balanced better and Funkwhale might be an interesting platform for that. Or maybe Peertube could be interesting as it has build in webtorrent that results in the people listening / watching audio or video files actually seeding the data via their own upload and thus the load isn't only on the main server.
Yeah, aging infrastructure is also plaguing us over at FreeGameDev.net
However I would strongly suggest you look into a Fediverse (Mastodon, Funkwhale, Peertube, Hubzilla etc.) enabled platform.
With Drupal 8 it seems like you could use this:
https://github.com/swentel/indieweb
together with this:
https://fed.brid.gy/
to get everything bridged to federated platforms.
I am happy to help, but I really need to find the time to update our various services at FGD first.
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