DISCLAIMER: First, let me apologize for the length of this post. I have had quite a few ideas come to me recently, and wanted to bounce them off of anyone who is concerned. If you don't want to read everything, skip to the end past the line at the bottom, for a summary of a few ideas I think would make this guild totally awesome.
OK, on to the new ideas. I'm fairly experienced at GW, but stopped playing for a few months and just started again. I have been playing my new character literally 2 days, so I'm on level 7 right now (or maybe 8, I forget). I think some sort of "seniority system" would be a good idea, but obviously the idea of the senior members would be to lead and help out the newer players. Bossing folks around, abusing guild resources, etc., is out of the question. For example, if I am the top guy (the one who started the Guild) and I tell another guild member to do something they don't want to do (such as give me a certain item of theirs, or go on a quest or guild battle), they have no obligation whatsoever to do it, and there should be no penalty for them not submitting to my request. The guys/gals who get established as "leaders" should be here to help out and serve as mentors to the newer players.
In other words, the senior members should not have more power, but rather more responsibility. This is in reference to playing the game, obviously. As far as setting up missions, guild battles, hoarding items, etc., we should have some guys willing to step up, but nobody should feel forced to do anything they don't want to.
Another issue we should decide on is the guild name, and the website URL. For the guild name, "Anand Tech Guild" or "AnandTech Trader's Guild", for example, would put 'ATG' on the ends of our character's names. Obviously, the guild name can be anything, but I propose something dealing with "AnandTech" since it is the online forum of choice for most of us, like our own little community. It would also bring attention to the site, assuming our guild is any good, and it would give us a sense of pride in the sense that we are all connected through Anandtech. Suggestions are highly encouraged, and I'm going to put "AnandTech Trader's Guild" (ATG) as my vote. For the website, I like "www.anandtechguild.com" and plan on registering that as our site URL, unless there are any major objections (accompanied with an alternative URL that we can democratically vote on instead of AnandTechGuild.com).
I keep getting these ideas, it's like a gift I can't control. OK, maybe I can controlling it, through :wine: "special" methods :beer:. Anyways, if you'd like to create a site or page specifically for your character, with screenshots, bio, stats, requests, items for trade/sale/free, or just whatever you feel like putting on it, I think you should create a page elsewhere and we can link to it from the main guild site, so we don't use the main site's bandwidth because you want to show your mom screenshots of your Warrior humping a Grawl or whatever. By the way, anyone can get a free ".be" domain name at EuroDNS.com, although it has a price listed, when you apply for a domain name ending in .be it will show a charge of zero Euro's. This is only the domain registration, not the webhosting. Free webhosting is available, although usually it has banner ads or lacks MySQL, PHP, or has various other limitations. I've seen free hosts offering anywhere from 50 MB to 1 GB of storage, which should be enough for most personal sites. There are also plenty of free webhosts that give you subdomains (geocities.com/whatever, for example) that you can use. The only purpose here is to give everyone an equal opportunity to put whatever they want and have their own little "section" of the site, without eating up our bandwidth.
Back to the guild site, the AT Guild site will be hosted on by Dreamhost, and I will handle the registration. The cost for one year will be $9.24 for one year, and this is what we will get:
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20 GB Storage space - to host our site, forums, WIKI, downloads, graphics, etc. This should be more than enough[/i]
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1 TB Transfer - gives us 1 TB (1,000 GB) of bandwidth per month, with 1$ for each GB we go over. We shouldn't have any problems with exceeding bandwidth, as we can set the site to throttle down (become intermittently unavailable) when a certain amount of bandwidth, say 95%, is reached. As long as we design the site efficiently, we shouldn't waste much bandwidth at all. In the unlikely event that we exceed the bandwidth, donations should be able to take care of the extra cost. However, I SERIOUSLY doubt that we will use more than 1 TB per month.
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3000 Mailboxes - If you want a
myname@anandtechguild.com email address, then you can have one. Keep in mind that this uses our bandwidth (both reading and sending mail from this address), and it uses Squirrelmail, a webmail client that is FAR inferior to GMail, Yahoo, etc. You can set up an account with Outlook/Eudora/Thunderbird/etc., but it's really more trouble than it's worth. Most likely we won't use this feature except for something like
webmaster@anandtechguild.com,
requests@anandtechguild.com, etc. - in other words, generic addresses that the Guild Leaders will have access to and members can write to if the forums are down (which inevitably happens, as anyone who has ever used a MySQL database can tell you). Think of it in the same way as having a way to PM a moderator. Speaking of moderators, the Guild Leaders/Founder will most likely have the opportunity to be moderators on the forums, although moderator status will not be limited to Guild Leaders or higher-level characters. Ideally, the whole thing will "iron itself out" and we will have some good, active, reliable members moderating our forums regardless of their in-game status.
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CGI, FrontPage Extensions, PHP4, perl, python, C, C++, Unlimited MySQL Databases - Most of these are various scripting languages, which are used to code forums, menus, and so on. IPB (which I plan on using, unless there is an overwhelming preferrence for phpBB) allows various "levels" of forums, where some members can be allowed to only view certain forums or upload files of certain sizes, or even become banned (although I don't anticipate having any of our upstanding members banned....hehe, I said "upstanding members). Both forums (IPB and phpBB) use PHP and MySQL.
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75 Shell Users - Shell access, which shouldn't be necessary for anyone.
For anyone who wishes to donate monetarily to the guild site, I have set up a PayPal account (and email address) at "anandtech.guild@gmail.com" that donations of any amount can be sent to. Those who donate will be publicly listed on the site along with the amount they donated, unless they don't want to be listed. Still, if you make a donation, be sure to let us know who it's from and how to contact you (email, Anandtech name, etc.) so we can keep a record which will not be publicly displayed. I'll get to the reason for recording who donates what a little further down the paragraph. Besides the reasons I'm going to give, donating would be a great way to gain favor with the other guild members, and might make them more receptive to selling you a rare item for cheap or some other sort of favor. Donations will NOT be used as a means to gain Guild Leader or moderator status, although leaders and moderators are free to donate as much or as little as they wish. Now, here's where it gets interesting. The site will only cost $9.24 for 1 year, so I anticipate that there will be extra money left in the account. I have two ideas, in no particular order of priority, for what to do with the extra money, depending on how much it is. Ideally, we could do both. The use for the excess money (if there is any), will be voted on by those who donate. Access to the donation fund will be given to several guild members, based on their donation status and, more importantly, Heatware. Would you trust somebody with 3 positive Heat with the group's money? I think not. No offense to anyone, but it's just a safety precaution so no one is likely to take the money and run with it. The only other option would be for me (or another member) to have sole access to the account, but I think most of us would feel more comfortable if there is a council of established traders with good Heatware watching over the fund. Like most of our guild's important issues, this will be decided democratically, except if you don't donate, you don't vote, the reason being that you have no financial stake whatsoever in the fund and as such should have no authority over what is done with it. Anyways, on to my ideas:
1) The first idea is splitting the money evenly among everyone who helps develop the site, and perhaps refunding a percentage to the donors. Those who work on the site will not receive an exorbitant amount of money, but just a little "thank you" for their time and effort so that we all can enjoy having a site for our Guild. As far as returning excess donations, it would be done on a percentage basis. If you donate 5% for the total amount in the fund, you would receive 5% of the remaining amount after the $9.24 is taken out. This method is actually somewhat of a hassle because it encourages low donation amounts - why donate $20 if you're just going to get $18.62 back? Besides, that's nowhere near as fun as the next idea.
2) The second idea, which I like a little better personally, is to pool all of the money and/or have members donate prizes (computer hardware being the most desired, probably, but anything that you think somebody might want - maybe some of the nicer stuff we put in the "freebies" thread could be prizes for our guild donors). The extra money can either be used to buy more prizes, depending on how much we have, or we can have cash prize(s) as well. The idea here is that everyone who donated is put into a raffle for the cash/prizes, or perhaps we could have some sort of in-game contest. Most likely, though, a raffle would be easier for us to pull off. The specifics can be figured out later, but this would be a nice show of appreciation for those who are generous enough to help fund and develop our site. I don't expect any major winners here (sorry, no $1,000 winners or anything), but perhaps we could get enough cash/hardware/etc. donations so that everyone involved would get a little something in return for supporting the guild.
Obviously, these are just ideas, and I don't expect anything major to come out of it, nor is anybody obligated to donate anything in any way. If necessary, I will cover the cost of the site myself, but if we have 10 members, then a $1 donation pays for our website for 1 year right there, and anything over that becomes bonus loot for some (or ideally, all) of us. For those concerned about the fairness of having a raffle, it would be done in the same style as Cryo-Labs, where each person gets a number, a random number generator is run, and you get your winner. No favoritism, just an equal chance for everybody who throws their hat into the ring. Maybe we can even have levels of raffles; say, if you donate $1, you are entered into the "lower-level" raffle with lesser prizes, and if you donate above a certain amount, you have a chance of winning either more cash or better items. Of course, all of this depends on how much money and gear we end up with after paying for the site. I suspect that most of the prizes will be donated computer hardware, and perhaps if the community fund contains very little money, it could just be used to pay shipping costs for the prizes, so the donors don't have to pay out of their own pockets for donating to our raffle. None of this is set in stone, of course, so we can decide all of this later on down the line. These are just ideas I am bouncing off of those interested in the guild. Feedback would be nice, just so we can determine if there is enough interest to bother setting up a poll or something on the site to vote on this stuff later.
PLEASE DO NOT QUOTE THIS POST IF YOU OFFER FEEDBACK ON ANY OF THESE IDEAS, lol
So basically, we're looking for a guild name, monetary donations of any amount to fund the $9.24 for the site, and opinions on whether we should have a poll to decide if those who develop the site should receive a small stipend and have the excess money refunded to the donors, if the excess money should be refunded to the all of the donors equally by percentage, or if we should hold a lottery-style raffle for those who donate. These are all just ideas right now, but I think if we can agree on some of these issues and follow through and act on our ideas, we can have a lot of fun and maybe even get some cool gear or cash in the process. We don't HAVE to do any of this, but I think it would be awesome if we could get a nice guild and site together (it's SO cheap with the "777" coupon!) and then reward those who contribute in some way. For example, if everyone donated $15, the price of a month of World of Warcraft (not counting the software, even), and people donated extra hardware or whatever they have laying around they don't need but somebody else might want, then we could all end up with some pretty cool stuff or cash. Let me know what you guys think.
Doug