Say for example you forgot where the Stormwind reagent vendor is and so you go to the inn and run upstairs looking for the elusive vendor, don’t go charging into the bedrooms without knocking first. Nightelf roleplaying is everywhere.
Since I’ve been occupied with fixing up my guild’s web presence — y’know, front page, forums, extra doodads — let’s talk about guild websites.
My opinion is that a guild’s website has two audiences: guildmembers and the gaming public which includes potential applicants, rival guilds and nosey outsiders. Remembering our audiences, here’s five considerations for your guild’s web presence:
1. Where. There are hosted guild resources available nowadays (read: mostly free) — GuildPortal, for example, and the newly funded GuildCafe (you’re welcome, Tweety), and some games offer guild resources for their players like Sony’s Station Players. Alternatively, your guild can buy its own domain name through a registrar and purchase private hosting.
There are pros and cons to hosted and private solutions beyond the costs, but remember that whoever has admin rights or is paying the bills owns your guild’s public persona. If he or she is a flake, they can nuke your site in a matter of minutes and your guild’s history, messages, DKP, screenshots are all gone. Don’t think that can’t happen, it does ALL THE TIME.
2. What. At a minimum, your guild will want a message board for persistent guild conversations. More elaborate guild sites also include a front page for news and announcements, DKP (kill points or attendance) software, a roster, a wiki, screenshot galleries, member pages, tradeskill details, a chat room, etc. etc. With a free hosting system, you’re limited to what is offered — with private hosting, you’re limited by what you’re willing to maintain. There is nothing sadder than a guild site that appears abandoned because it’s so poorly maintained.
Me, I like a guild site with a front page + forums. Much more than that and you’ll need a second person on website maintenance, and it’s hard enough to find even ONE guildmate willing to handle htmls, phps and ftps, much less two volunteers.
3. How. Again, free hosting you’re limited to the software they offer. Private hosting, open source is the way to go — free donchaknow. Examples for front page or content management services: WordPress, Drupal, Movable Type (open source as of June 2007). Message board/forum software examples: phpBB, Vanilla, bbPress.
Download, install, check for updates regularly.
4. Why. Remember I said that a guild website has two audiences, guildmates and the gaming public? Primarily, you’ll use your website to communicate with and motivate your guildmates. Y’know, like … we killed This last night and Soandso FINALLY got some gear.
Secondly, your sneaky, not-so-obvious agenda is to communicate with potential applicants to your guild. Even before they fill out an application, probably before they inquire of an officer, applicants check out your website. NEVER NEVER NEVER never never never use your public guild areas to discuss how much the guild is sucking lately. Save that shit for your myspace, or your super secret blog, or the private members-only areas of the website.
Ideally, your public areas will be updated regularly and will reflect the happy fun personality of your guild, however, not every guild has a happy fun person to do said updating. Minimally, your public area should be updated with the latest first kill or latest guild accomplishment or event. That might only be once a month. Any less than that and the website starts to look abandoned. No one wants to join (or belong to) an abandoned guild.
Lastly, your rivals will snoop around your website too and be mindful of that. Nowadays, with instances and private zones, allowing your rivals to see what you’re up to isn’t as critical as in the old days when we’d monitor other websites to check their targets for the night. However, using World of Warcraft as an example, as the competition for raiding level 70 characters gets tighter, your rivals will use your weaknesses against you. (read: poaching. For the gaming noobs, poaching is actively recruiting rival guildmembers.)
5. Why else. You’re going to keep your public areas classy — happy fun news and conversations for the gaming public and your members to see. Fun links! (Like AFKGamer? Of course you should!) Humorous video clips! Beautiful screenshots!
And then we have your private, members-only area. (I could have written “private area” there, but this ain’t no porn site.)
I’m a big believer in muzzling your guild. Do you see a lot of constructive, positive posting on your community gaming site? I don’t either. Your members may behave themselves most of the time on the community site, but the one time they’re drunk or angry or lose their temper, all those well behaved posts are forgotten and the trolls gather for an old fashioned forum beatdown because your guild name is now mud.
Even if your guild policy won’t be as strict as my guild’s, guildmates need a members-only area to discuss strats or real life falala. Lock that area up with registration and passwords, test it thoroughly and, for the love of gawd, monitor and update access as guildmates come and go. An ex-guildmate can wreak a lot of havoc with continuing members-only access.
Some other areas you’ll want to lock up behind registration and passwords of varying degrees: the Ventrilo/Team Speak server, the DKP/attendance area, officers-only forums, and maybe the applications area, too.
And I’ll close with a story, because I know some of you are thinking, “why would I lock up DKP/attendance? what do I care if someone sees our raids?”
I’ll tell you why. Because you might have someone like me on your server who knows to check out your attendance. And I do.
So when you announce to the server that you’ve downed Void Reaver, for example, I know that isn’t quite the whole story. I know you only had 6 or 7 of your people there, and you had StrongerGuild03 with you to down the Reaver. I don’t post this, of course, because I’m muzzled. But when I talk to your raiders and ask how things are going and they tell me “great! never been better!”, I know they’re fibbing. And as competition for level 70 raiders is getting pretty damn fierce, I use what I know to craft my cleverly disguised, oh-so-subtle recruiting pitch.
And the competition is only going to get fiercer.
That’s a good point about Rival guilds checking out each other’s sites for signs of drama to start trying to poach each other’s top DPSers, tanks, healers etc.
I’ve gotta get our guild to lock down some of our site, I definitly don’t want our Guildwhohatesyourguild (Yes! We have one too…) trying to snag our precious priestys.
Always fun to use the checking out other boards method to find the culprits using us to gear up for another guild.
Ssssssh, I LOVE when guilds are dumb enough to have their dkp site publically accessible. LOL you gave your only Thunderfury to a hunter? HAHAHAHA.
Watching other guild’s drama is so much fun.
Lols. I woke up with a hangover one day and found a guild member advertised his interest in another guild on their application page. He was guildless within 15 minutes. Im a GM and i keep in touch with other guilds websites and habits…makes sense to.
i love our site. we have a front page, an active message board (with room for the general public to post, as well as a members area), and dkp.
i disagree that you should lock up the recruiting board. not all guilds use a forum to recruit people, but those who do – and leave them out for public consumption – make me happy. i have a list of “rival” guilds’ recruiting boards that i check regularly. i see who is out there looking for a guild (potential recruits!), i see if any of my members are scouting other guilds, and if someone applies to our guild i can see if they have applied elsewhere and gather any extra info that they filled out in other guilds’ app templates.
our dkp isn’t locked up either. sometimes people who aren’t in or are no longer in the guild have earned dkp with us. i don’t want to keep them from being able to see it, nor do i want to employ some complicated pw system where i have to keep track of who has/doesn’t have access.
we never raid with more than one or two non-guildies (if any), so your scenario doesn’t apply. i can’t really think of any reason to hide our dkp from the public. i mean, who really cares?
family loot system solves the dkp issue =P
Don’t forget the possibilities that the Armory opens for poaching…
Hey look, OtherGuild#4 has 7 level 70 mages and only 3 of them have SSC gear…
Don’t we need a mage?
Seriously, is poaching that much of a problem??
Maybe its my guild; a day-one guild with a good number of people that have been raiding for a long time.. Maybe its the environment; most people do get along, and when they don’t the management work hard to smooth out the wrinkles where they can.. Ours (IMO) is a steady guild, not immune to poaching, but fairly resistant to it..
Granted, we’ve had our fair share of drama.. We’ve lost people because we weren’t “hardcore enough” (those people no longer play, imagine that).. We’ve lost people to drama.. We’ve lost people because we’re too hardcore.. We’ve lost people due to attrition (40-man vs 25 man) and we’ve lost people to RL..
But the majority of our player base is fairly constant.. We have fun more often than not, and that is probably what makes us “poaching” resistant.. If someone wants to leave for better or greener pastures, let ’em; there’s always people in the wings that are there to take their place..
But the environment has more to do with resisting “poaching” than hiding DKP or attendance.. If they’re succeptable to “poaching” hiding DKP isn’t gonna slow that down much..
I suppose if you see the raiding game as competition this can be more of an issue..