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Firlefanz
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August 2006 Board of the Month
The Board of the Month for August 2006 is...
Star Wars Design Alliance
Congratulations, Lucas P!
Of course, I've sent Lucas P the usual questions. As his board took quite a while to grow into this impressive state, his answers offer great advice.
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~~1. What made you decide to start a board?~~
A couple of years ago when I became associated with Frank Bonura who was designing deck plans of Star Wars ships, he had a guestbook on his site where people could make comments and things on the stuff on the site, but it was not secure and fell vistim to spam bots and he was getting inundated with massive amounts of emails every day (about 250 apparently) for advice and offers of assistance.
In an effort to reduce that, I suggested creating a forum to alleviate the pressure of all that email to sift through. In September 2005, I started shopping around for adequate tools and systems that might suit our needs.
~~2. What made you choose Runboard?~~
At first, I was thinking of getting a domain name and starting off really big and with all the bells and whistles, and quickly found the task daunting, and potentially expensive...mostly expensive. So I started searching the net for free message boards. I searched for several days, until I found runboards. The primary criteria that made me choose runboards was that it is FREE, it has NO POPUPS and has a relatively large community. As a bonus I have also found that the owners of runboards and their administrators and mods are really helpful and friendly.
'Runboard Extra!' is a prime example of this.
~~3. What's your target audience?~~
We are a Star Wars design site, we primarily cater to the Star Wars Role Playing Gamers who need maps, deck plans and designs of ships and locations within the Star Wars universe. However, we have found, due to our intent of extreme accuracy and heavy research, that our designs are also useful for the general community at large. They can be used as blueprints for modelling 3d computer models or even plastic models. We also have an extensive discussion section of other topics, discussing technology, art style, jokes and many other things. The average age of the people who come to the board is about late 20's, but our members' ages range widely.
~~4. How did you get people to join? How did you advertise your board?~~
A very good question. At first, advertising was not necessary, we already had a very well established gallery site that a lot of people already knew about, and was getting about 200 to 250 unique visitors per day. Unfortunately, we went through a schism of sorts back in May and things changed. We had to change our name and the design of the board, as well as launch a new gallery. Needless to say that without the automatic advertisement of the original gallery, traffic was on a steep decline. We worked very hard to add completed projects to our gallery and I was posting messages about it in several other community message boards. The result has been very encouraging, and for the month of July our traffic is back to over 10,500 unique visitors (average of about 350 visitors per day).
~~5. What's the central theme of your board?~~
Star Wars. 
~~6. What are the board rules and how important are they?~~
For general discussion, the rules are pretty simple. I don't like to bog down the board with oppressive regulations, so my philosophy is to allow people to express themselves. Of course there are limits to this, so basically the tone is a general level of respect and community understanding. Most of the members we have are adults and they generally don't need reminding how to behave - besides, I am not really a benchmark for 'good behaviour'.
For art contribution, the rules are far more stringent. We are attempting to make the most accurate blueprints and schematics available anywhere, so a lot of research is involved and we have a set base of rules on how this is done, before a single line is drawn. This can be very intimidating, but we have a great many people that are helpful and very eager to help out with any obscure piece of material that you might think never would be found otherwise.
~~7. How important are the look and feel of the board? Or, are content and member involvement more important?~~
Personally, I think that it is the content and the contributing members that are more important than the design, but the design must be easy to see and easy to navigate, otherwise it makes finding content more difficult.
~~8. How do you keep interest up?~~
We update our designs quite frequently, and we find new material all the time. Star Wars is a fascinating universe and there is always something new and interesting to find within it to speculate about or design.
~~9. What's the best feature of your board?~~
Others may disagree with me, but I think it is the 'Featured Projects' portion which is a series of thumbnails of current Works In Progress that have shown great promise in their development. I thought it would be a good idea to show the artists that their work is appreciated and to show their name in lights on the 'Header' of the board.
~~10. What are your plans for the future, boardwise?~~
I am not sure about this one, adding forums to discuss other topics may enter into it, refinement of the code and hopefully new features. Nothing has been set in stone at this stage, we have been in operation for 10 months now and a lot of the bugs have been worked out. We are always open to suggestions though.
~~11. What would be your advice to a new Board owner? ~~
Don't be afraid to play with the code - but create a dummy board to test new ideas before you impliment them on an established board. The runboards system is deceptively powerful, and remarkably easy to use. Runboards Extra and the Support forums are a fantastic resource, USE THEM.
Don't clutter your board with too much off theme material. I started very small, with only art centred forums, then eventually people wanted general discussions and the board expanded...this is the natural evolution of a forum anyway, and it is a gradual process.
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Thanks, Lucas P.
I believe that your board is the first narrowly "themed" board that won the award. Personally, I think a themed board is more difficult to bring up to a large membership than one with a more general approach. You have done very well with yours.
--- - Firlefanz
Reading: "Unser Kosmos" by Carl Sagan
Writing: Rewrite of the Unicorn Girl YA novel
Mystical Adventures |
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8/1/2006, 2:26 pm
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Sertab
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Re: August 2006 Board of the Month
Congratulations,well deserved win
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8/1/2006, 3:22 pm
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Vegas Guy
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Registered: 04-2006
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Re: August 2006 Board of the Month
Congrats, Lucas P, an excellent board!
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8/1/2006, 5:45 pm
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Lucas P
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Registered: 09-2005
Location: Vancouver, Canada
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Re: August 2006 Board of the Month
I am really thrilled about for the honour! thank you so much!
To think that I had really no idea that such a themed board would have difficulty really finding a broad market, it makes me even happier.
thanks for the kind words and support!
best regards,
Lucas
--- Only 2 things are infinite; The Universe, and human stupidity and I'm not sure about the former. - Albert Einstein
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8/1/2006, 5:54 pm
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kenposan
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Re: August 2006 Board of the Month
You deserve it Lucas, you have done a great job at building (and rebuilding) our community.
--- The Universe speaks in many languages, but only one voice.
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8/2/2006, 2:16 am
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Lucas P
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Re: August 2006 Board of the Month
thanks everyone.
Merkin, do you mean the link back to here?
--- Only 2 things are infinite; The Universe, and human stupidity and I'm not sure about the former. - Albert Einstein
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8/2/2006, 12:55 pm
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skullguy
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Registered: 03-2006
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Re: August 2006 Board of the Month
 Congrats.
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8/2/2006, 1:14 pm
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