Salsa's forum thread, offering his graphic design services for a pathetically small amount of money, has had so much success that it has triggered a similar thread from Drew "Gaiiden" Sikora who's offering his video editing services. Now while Drew's thread might not have quite the same runaway success as Salsa's original, (due mainly to the nature of Drew's offer), it does strike me as odd that we don't really have a formal forum for such threads. We have two related forums -- Help Wanted and Your Announcements -- but neither lends itself to this kind of marketing. This set me to wondering whether a formal "GameDev.Net Marketplace" feature for contractors / freelancers to pimp their services. This could take the form of a forum group which would include a "GameDev.Net Marketplace" forum, along with the two existing forums, "Help Wanted" and "Your Announcements". By grouping these forums together and completing the marketing circle, we could provide a more complete service to the community for a tiny, tiny amount of effort on our part. IMHO, of course.

I vote I.

Interesting. What would it be called? Indie Service at GD.Net? Well if such a forum does end up existing, may I suggest grouping it in the Forums listing as such:

Services       GD.Net Marketplace/Indie Services (or whatever it'll be called)       Help Wanted       Your Announcements

It leads to another question as well. Granted I don't know how many posts there on the subject, but there's a forum for 'Help Wanted' but there's not one for 'I Want to Give You Help (for free or paid)'. Would that be part of the GD.Net Marketplace forum?

Quote:Granted I don't know how many posts there on the subject, but there's a forum for 'Help Wanted' but there's not one for 'I Want to Give You Help (for free or paid)'. Would that be part of the GD.Net Marketplace forum?

We get a reasonable amount of them, and they currently go in Help Wanted. My understanding of the suggestion was that yes, those threads would then go into the Marketplace forum.


Sounds like a pretty good idea to me; it'd free up a bit more front-page space in the Help Wanted thread listing by moving those threads elsewhere as well as grouping offers of services under a single location which could also cover slightly unusual offers such as the ones from Salsa and Drew which you mentioned.


Ideally in the long run it would probably be better to move Help Wanted (and this theoretical additional forum should it come to be) away from the traditional forum format and instead provide a more customised environment better suited to the task; rather than enforcing a posting template for HW threads a simple form similar to the one used in the IOTD 'forum' could be used to provide all the neccesary information and we could then offer additional functionality specific to the task, such as the ability to filter out specific target platforms, genres of project, etc.

<pest>
I think Your Announcments should be considered a "help" forum. Think about it when a member posts there it's for "help" with: word-of-mouth advertising, beta testing, bug testing, making money. Also it too could be better serviced by a form to acknowledge: platform, system requirments, API used (if the member wanted to divulge that), files needed to have it run properly, and a link or some ways to deliver comments (other than posts).

Just my opinion.
</pest>

Quote:Original post by Oluseyi

Quote:Original post by Kazgoroth
Ideally in the long run it would probably be better to move Help Wanted (and this theoretical additional forum should it come to be) away from the traditional forum format and instead provide a more customised environment better suited to the task; rather than enforcing a posting template for HW threads a simple form similar to the one used in the IOTD 'forum' could be used to provide all the neccesary information and we could then offer additional functionality specific to the task, such as the ability to filter out specific target platforms, genres of project, etc.

I think it's pretty well known that we're interested in switching Help Wanted to a "Classifieds" type service. As for the Marketplace idea, there's been some recent discussion of something quite similar, also inspired by Salsa's thread (before Gaiiden posted his own).

Fair enough. But given the workload on the technology team, I feel it'd still work well enough for the time being using the existing forum code. Create a "Community Services" section, move the two existing forums into it and add the "GDNet Marketplace" forum to it as well. Job done.

We can always improve it later once the technology team have cleared some of their current workload.

I'd love to have an ideal situation where everything works exactly how it should from the off, but pragmatically, it's just not going to happen. The more work we pile up on the technology team, the longer we'll have to wait for even the simplest improvements. Wait too long and our members will start to drift away.

Quote:Original post by Kylotan
How would we exclude 'commercial' services from the list, or to put it another way, how do we distinguish between drive-by spammers and legitimate service offers? It sounds like a lot of moderation could be needed. On the other hand, I'd be glad to see such a forum started, as it would take a lot of the irritating self-pimping threads out of the Sound and Music forum.

If someone wants to offer their artistic, musical, written, design or programming services, I don't have a problem with it personally. We'd need an FAQ (very basic) and make it clear that non-gamedev spamming will not be tolerated.

Oh yes: no Anonymous Posters would be allowed to post to the forums. (If you're going to criticise, have the balls to put your name to your words.)