Remember The Trace? I want to make that actually happen. - The Bear and Badger

Diluted Dante

Not defensive, and not thinking you were having a go Beano.

Rather than half remembering what went down I've dug out my last email from Jim. Obviously anything discussed on the forum is lost, but this adresses some of it anyway:

"I'm sad to say that The Trace has pretty much died. A few of the editorial team, key members, disappeared and still haven't responded to my emails and calls. I hope they're okay, but I can't launch without them as they dealt with the technical aspects of the site, marketing, networking etc. I posted an announcement on the site a couple of weeks back asking is anyone was still wanting to be involved and didn't get any replies, so, sadly, I decided to close it down.

Â I'm disappointed and not a little annoyed to be honest, some of us, such as yourself, had sunk a lot of time into it and it had real potential. Unfortunately, without the technical guys doing what they promised, I couldn't launch the site as intended."

Tempy - That's kinda how this began.

Petey

Ok. Lots going on here. Overall, I'm keen to help build whatever will expand this community in a constructive way.

My initial thought of how to achieve this is to set up a blog-type system adjacent to the forum. The general features would be:

Â 1. Any member on the forum could post, with greater options of what content they can display than is available on the forum. Posts could also be tagged.

Â 2. The default view of the blog page would be a chronological list of posts from everyone.

Â 3. There would also be a dedicated page for each member's posts, which would permit certain amounts of (optional) branding to be placed (banner image, descriptive text etc).

Â 4. Each blog post would create a thread in a "locked" category in the forum; so that people could not post new threads to it, but would still be able to comment on the automatically generated ones.

Â 5. Certain amount of code-magic would be used to weave this together so that it feels as seamless as possible (maybe allowing you to post to the forum thread directly from a blog post page or whatever).

I personally feel that this is the best way to do things; the discussion between people is kept to the forum (which is really the whole point of this place), but there's a clearly delineated area where personal content can be added. There would be nothing stopping someone from registering, for example, a "The Trace" account here and then only using that to post embeded soundcloud podcasts to the blog; but similarly, those posts would intermingle with LazyGunn's bat-shit crazy gamedev blog, or Unlikely's "favourite photos of ham" photojournal. Anything more would be overkill for now; and there's nothing to stop a group of people going off and doing their own thing should they want greater freedom. This also doesn't remove anything that we currently have, drives new visitors to the forum, and doesn't rely on any one person (or group of people) to generate content.

Thoughts?

g.man

Initial thought is I quite like the idea of it. whether I'd personally use it I really don't know, but I can appreciate that for other members of the community it might be benificial. Seems like a decent all inclusive plan.

regards

g.man

Elmlea

I want to do a podcast, so I think the best thing to do is take the advice above and actually just do one. Â Does anyone like the sound of the idea I posted enough to do it?

EvilRedEye

Sounds good to me. The idea of having a single blog than can also be viewed as individual ones sounds great.

Yossarian

Sounds good, Petey.

As I say, if we want to use this to try to engage with people outside the community then it would be good if we could allow people to comment with just an email address and any name they want.

In fact, if it's possible, it would be nice if we could try and somehow set it so that the thread associated with any post was also the comments section of the post itself, so that us forumites could interact with any randoms who stumble across the place in our normal manner.

M0stly harm13ss

Elmlea wrote:

I want to do a podcast, so I think the best thing to do is take the advice above and actually just do one. Â Does anyone like the sound of the idea I posted enough to do it?

Personally I think your idea's great Elm. I listen to a couple of gaming podcasts travelling with work (as well as some other stuff) and I think you're right, a podcast that tried to ape ones attached to professional sites and publications just wouldn't work (mainly because it's their job, they have access to games, access to publishers and developers, the budget to go to the events, etc).

One of my favourite parts of the Giantbomb podcast is when they get into a little deeper discussion about the games they are playing. A little of that, but with contributors here instead of the GB guys would be a win with me.

M0stly harm13ss

PS. I suggest the first podcast should be 7 hours of Face talking about Dark Souls...

Edit:- To Tempy

EvilRedEye

Elmlea wrote:

I want to do a podcast, so I think the best thing to do is take the advice above and actually just do one. Â Does anyone like the sound of the idea I posted enough to do it?

I liked the idea of keeping it about different things. I'm a console gamer so if, say, the podcast got dominated by PC talk then I'd end up being excluded and so on.

Elmlea

EvilRedEye wrote:

Elmlea wrote:

I want to do a podcast, so I think the best thing to do is take the advice above and actually just do one. Â Does anyone like the sound of the idea I posted enough to do it?

I liked the idea of keeping it about different things. I'm a console gamer so if, say, the podcast got dominated by PC talk then I'd end up being excluded and so on.

That was my main thing, really. Â I'd be very happy for the PC gaming lot to do a show on Diablo 3, which I'd happily listen to; but I'd also like to actually be on an episode about some of my favourite games.

Brooks

Whatever you resolve to attempt re: poddery, ensure you've enough bandwidth to host all the participants easily. Field a minimum of two recorders.

Elmlea

I thought the accepted method now was for everyone to record their own participation, so even if someone else's voice crackles a bit through bandwidth reasons, you'll never tell with the final recording? Â Be easy enough to upload/download through DropBox or something.

I don't know enough about Audacity, but I presume it's simple enough to stitch together all the feeds.

Brooks

What we did was a two stage thing where Cinto did a first edit in Garageband or whatever his foul Macintosh was running, then I'd do a second hyper-anal edit in Cubase, eliminating awkward gaps in flow, excessive umms and urrrrs, then splice in breaks to tunes and EQ/comp the whole show towards something like reasonable listening quality. It sufficed.

Multiple stems would've been the ultimate, but not everyone's so hot with the tech sometimes.

Elmlea

This means little to me. Â I best not do the technical stuff.

WorKid

I'm happy for the forum to just be a forum, but would also welcome the chance for others to show what they can do.

[Deleted User]

Brooks wrote:

What we did was a two stage thing where Cinto did a first edit in Garageband or whatever his foul Macintosh was running, then I'd do a second hyper-anal edit in Cubase, eliminating awkward gaps in flow, excessive umms and urrrrs, then splice in breaks to tunes and EQ/comp the whole show towards something like reasonable listening quality. It sufficed.

Multiple stems would've been the ultimate, but not everyone's so hot with the tech sometimes.

It was actually pretty spot on iirc. Mongoloid was also inspired. A perfect fit.

Tempy

M0stly harm13ss wrote:

PS. I suggest the first podcast should be 7 hours of Face talking about Dark Souls...

Edit:- To Tempy

Yr a cad.

I actually love Dark Souls but I haven't finished and just marvel at the time that Face sinks into it.

Elmlea wrote:

I want to do a podcast, so I think the best thing to do is take the advice above and actually just do one. Â Does anyone like the sound of the idea I posted enough to do it?

I like the sound of the idea and as a fellow I reckon you're the kind of person who'd do a great job at picking a panel.

cockbeard

To be fair apart from mastering in soundforge, you've probably topped that. It could be fun but I'd rather the focus remained on you dickfucks talking shite to each other. Because that is fun

g.man

+1 Ben

cockbeard

And also what we do here in text

cockbeard

Stop calling me Ben

Obj, carry on then

Heavy Voodoo

We should really get Pranky involved on this. He is the King of Podcasts, or so I am told.

g.man

@ Ben

Brooks

Heavy Voodoo wrote:

We should really get Pranky involved on this.

Podcastdom has enough Karl Pilkingtons.

[Deleted User]

I'd be interested in a Pranky podcast but only if it's people acting out a fictional life of the mad cunt.

Frosty

I am drunk right now and feel like recording a Podcast. Where are my guys?

Elmlea

Frosty wrote:

I am drunk right now and feel like recording a Podcast. Where are my guys?

I'm here, but not drunk.

g.man

Imhere

guess what

g.man

beano

*hic*

beano

Got Gareth Gates or Will Young tunes on the vidzone... And whiskey.

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