Thursday, December 13, 2012

Building a Better Hobby: The DFG Community Project


Ladies and Gentlemen, Dark Future Games is changing and we are taking you with us. Old School here to ask you to join us in building a better Dark Future Games. We have always been kind of a commune of sorts, but it has been poorly represented here to the web. We want this to be a blog for other bloggers and for our readers as much as it is a place for us. The problem is that this format has always been a way to talk at people instead of with them. That has all changed as of today.


Helping the Community Serve Themselves

First, we are opening the blog and it's pages to fellow bloggers and forum-goers by helping people find your tutorials, reviews, guides and hobby articles whether they are on a blog -or even on a forum thread. We aren't going to do this through blogrolls alone, we are re-building the pages to be an archive for links to your material. This will allow the 60,000+ monthly DFG readers to find your stuff and your blog or thread! We will not publish whole articles, just a way for them to reach you through links.

Notice we have no ads. We aren't doing this for some profit, we are doing this for the community.

To add your links, all you have to do is either e-mail us at darkfuturegames@gmail.com with the subject line "Links for DFG" and include your links in the body of the e-mail. After a review, we will add your links to the page they best fit into, under the best category for them. I don't care how many you send or how old they are, as long as they are relevant and useful to people in our hobby.

We will also do community round ups that will include links based on the theme of that round up. The idea is to create a place where our audience can stop and find more stuff - thus promoting our hobby as a whole!

We would kindly ask that you help promote the archives on your blog or thread once you are included. It would be nice and would help more people get involved.

Having an Ongoing Conversation with our Authors Through our Face Book Group

We have also opened up a new Face Book group that is specifically designed to have a conversation with our readers and fellow authors and bloggers on any topic we want (we, being everybody). We will post ideas and talk about them, possibly take those ideas and develop posts and maybe even grab some good stuff and create guest author material. The idea is that hobbyists are really at their best when sharing ideas and DFG has always been about that exchange, now we will actually put that idea into practice.

If you are interested in joining the conversation, join our group!

Get on with It!

Look, what we really want is a more meaningful way to communicate. Blogs are great and the Dark Future Games blog isn't going away, rather, we want to improve it by actually interacting in a more meaningful way with our readers, helping people find their material and promoting the hobby - all while actually meeting people (even if it is just over the Internet) and finding out what they think, beyond just the random post comment on the blog! Think of it as crowd sourcing, think of it as networking - call it whatever you want, this is where we are heading.

Of course we will still provide you with our own content, brought to you by our authors. We love sharing that stuff too, but some stuff are better suited for a forum where we can openly talk about it. Then, maybe we can direct more people to the conversation via the blog, or maybe we can just post the best parts of it here.

Get Involved!

Look, I know how much hard work goes into posting and how many blogs or forum articles go unrecognized. I have been at this myself for a very long time. I'm not going to beg you to get involved, but I will hold out my hand to you. Help us build this community together.

Now that I have said my piece, if you are an author, please send your links from your blog or forum tutorials, reviews, how-to's ect. Help us get the word out about what we are doing and by all means join our Face Book group so we can meet you and join the conversation!

8 comments:

  1. This is a work in progress. As you can see, some of the pages have been created already, waiting to house your links.

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  2. Cool stuff! I'll have a root around in my archives and see if I can come up with some useful tutorials. I'm pretty sure I have one for painting the reds I used on the Heresy-Era Thousand Sons that might be of use as a starter...

    Looking forward to seeing this come together!

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  3. Ooooh... Something to link to my blog post tomorrow and a chance to troll my own blog for contributions to this cool idea - great, now I'm web stalking myself. I should be careful or I might disappear up my own butt 0_o

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  4. Needless to say I'll be contributing, though my name is over in that list of authors ;) regardless, this should be an extremely interesting venture and next step for blogging and I'm happy to be a part of it!
    suffice it to say that a post will be hitting my own blog about this very step soon.

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  5. HA!! Not sure how much I can contribute as My blog is in dire need of another post (maybe tomm) BUT Im happy that the Community aspect is returning to the hobby and as we get to know each other more anything that you guys think others might want to know I can hook it up and make a tut for ya!

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    Replies
    1. Tommy, one thing we try to always do is be part of the community, its why we go to Adepticon and do our best to get to know, and hang out with our readers. Hell last year people were stalking us down in the pool for the drinking contest...

      We think its amazing we have the followers we do, and we want to be approachable guys who enjoy the hobby and the social aspect.

      Hope to see you at Adepticon

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  6. I as well have some archives that may be of use.

    Great idea DFG! We need a better comprehensive hub of articles. There's so much that goes unnoticed in the blogosphere as is.

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  7. Absolutely, Monday marks the beginning of my links pumping efforts as I will bring some of the new tuts to the community!

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