Tips on starting an online community?

[AveryMaurice]

Well me and my friend started a Marathon community, seeing how the Marathon scene is virtually dead (besides marathon.bungie.org, which has a terrible forum design from the 90s.). We have a very neat site, soon to be a ".com" domain (currently .tk) but the new problem is attracting people to join the site, how do I get people to join the community? I'm finding it hard to get people to join and have no idea how to get them too, we only have a few members so far. Any help would be appreciated and tips.

If anyone wants to see it, its here: http://planetmarathon.tk/

So how would I reach out to people that play Marathon to join?

[pavera]

Buy advertising I guess. Also that link doesn't work for me.

[wildweasel]

The issue here is that there probably already is a community like that. I would not try to start another one, rather, join the existing one and try to draw back the veterans by producing something awesome for their beloved game.

One thing I've learned is that you can't run a community on nostalgia alone.

[Sharessa]

Some Halo fans were Marathon fans back in the day. If you can't find an existing Marathon community, I'd suggest posting about it in the Halo community. Just watch out for all the kiddies there.

[AveryMaurice]

Danarchy said:

Some Halo fans were Marathon fans back in the day. If you can't find an existing Marathon community, I'd suggest posting about it in the Halo community. Just watch out for all the kiddies there.

Yeah I bumped into the "graphics suck in this game" crew on bungie.net forums. Heh.

[Jodwin]

1. There has to be people that are potential community members. If there isn't enough Marathon fans out there, your forums will never thrive.

2. There should not be too prevalent existing communities. If the Marathon fans are already set on other websites, why would they join yours when they've already got what they want?

3. What can you give to them? Just a mere forum is very little, and especially when there's no community at the moment there's practically no value to joining the website. You need to offer them something, be it a pre-existing community, a website with useful features or something else. If there are already pre-existing communities, yours needs to be different enough from the others to justify its existence (Compare Doomworld to ZDoom forums, for example).

Since you don't have a pre-existing community, and you aren't the first one, your only choice is to create something worthwhile for your website. It's something that is likely to take a lot of work, but without it you'll never succeed.

[AveryMaurice]

Jodwin said:

Since you don't have a pre-existing community, and you aren't the first one, your only choice is to create something worthwhile for your website. It's something that is likely to take a lot of work, but without it you'll never succeed.

Thanks, I guess I have to start brainstorming. :P

[kristus]

My advice is to make sure you got a good looking, well designed website to greet people coming there. And collect all information you can about the games and make it available on the website.

Here's a site for all things Syndicate that I keep coming back to. It doesn't even have a forum to keep it going. It just got so much stuff for me to gawk at so I just keep coming back for more looks.
http://syndicate.lubie.org/

[Jodwin]

avery1555 said:

Thanks, I guess I have to start brainstorming. :P

Of course, most of the time trying to make up content for the sake of a community is the wrong way around: You're supposed to make content on leisure and the community may eventually grow around that content. Problem is, if you try to create content just for community building, the content will often end up sucking or misunderstood. Not always, but often.

[Creaphis]

Doomworld started around news, features and interviews, right? Then forums kind of came later?

[kristus]

Creaphis: Yes. Forums weren't as common back then IIRC. IRC, project websites and E-mail was where it was at.

[Quasar]

You can't create a community, it has to arise naturally out of meetings between people who share an irrationally intense interest in something, such as DOOM :P

I was in something of the same position with Dungeon Keeper, and my answer was to create this: http://dk.youfailit.net -- for a while we were starting to build a small community around that site, with an IRC chat room, and I was looking into getting a forum going. But it all died out with pretty much no warning.

Now there are active DK communities on various forums around the internet, but at that time, interest in the game had dried up almost completely. Nothing I nor anyone else could do was going to bring it back to its 1999 high-water mark, when Fizzban's Keep was the center of keeperdom on Earth. The closure of that site almost single-handedly destroyed the DK community.

[Use]

Danarchy said:

Just watch out for all the kiddies there.

Did you forget who you were talking too?

[AveryMaurice]

Use3D said:

Did you forget who you were talking too?

I'm 15, and I play Doom and Marathon. I highly doubt that makes me a kiddie, by which he was probably referencing to the younger graphic whore gamers.

[Use]

I'm just picking on you. I hope you find some more Marathoners.

[AveryMaurice]

Use3D said:

I'm just picking on you. I hope you find some more Marathoners.

I know, lol :P and thanks.

[fraggle]

In the grand scheme of things, it's unfortunately a pretty obscure game. You might have trouble simply in finding people who have an interest in it. Rather than leaping into creating a forum and trying to build a community, you might want to see if you can gauge the level of interest. Find some classic Mac / Mac gaming forums (or other forums where Marathon fans might post), create a thread about Marathon and see how many people respond. If you get lots of positive responses, propose setting up a separate Marathon forum.

Aleph-One still seems to be in active development. Have you looked to see if people are developing for this?

I found this recent post on the MacTalk forum about people playing Marathon, so that might be one place to try.

EDIT: I think someone beat you to it.

[40oz]

Quasar said:

You can't create a community, it has to arise naturally out of meetings between people who share an irrationally intense interest in something, such as DOOM :P

Yeah I always figured this.

I don't think you can recruit people to be in your "hey let's like this" club. I showed up here from my own personal interests, not because someone invited me in.

[AveryMaurice]

Thanks for the tip Jodwin about making it worthwhile, I started a Aleph One clan around the site and have gotten some people interested and some are signing up. =D