Help with SLHomePage.com

I am the owner of the domains SLHomePage.com and SecondLifeHomePage.com and they don't currently have a mission. With there being some controversy over some established alternative forum solutions, I have gone ahead and purchased a Linux-based hosting package from GoDaddy.com that should provide the storage and bandwidth requirements for the whole of the Second Life community. However, as anyone who has read some of my recent threads would likely point out, my active involvement in Second Life is being reduced. Besides my job, a few other projects and my abject laziness, I am in no position to run a major community portal on my own. My hope in this thread is to find some established members of the community who would be interested in taking on this job with full control of the site, help pick the needed software, and move on to setting up the necessary manpower to make such a site a single starting point as the current Forums system now exists.

I have purchased two years of hosting services in advance. This package can be upgraded to as much as 200GB of storage and 2TB of bandwidth should the need arise. Below are the features lised with th package I have purchased:

1. Disk Space - 100 GB
   
2. Monthly Data Transfer - 1,000 GB
   
3. MySQL - 25 Databases
   
4. Access w/o "www."
   
5. External Domains - Unlimited
   
6. Subdomains - Unlimited
   
7. Multiple Web sites - Unlimited
   
8. Alias Domains - Unlimited
   
9. Forums
   
10. Blogging
    
11. Photo Gallery
    
12. Language Support
    1. Server Side Includes (SSI)\
       
    2. Frontpage Server Ext.
       
    3. PHP4 or PHP5
       
    4. Custom PHP.ini/PHP5.ini
       
    5. Perl w/FASTCGI
       
    6. Python CGI
       
    7. Java
       
    8. Ruby CGI
       
    9. Ruby on Rails w/FASTCGI
       
    
    
13. FREE Pre-Installed Apps.
    1. ImageMagick
       
    
    
14. FREE Add-On Apps.
    1. Nucleus
       
    2. Geeklog
       
    3. pLog
       
    4. Serendipity
       
    5. WordPress
       
    6. Gallery
       
    7. Coppermine Photo Gallery
       
    8. 4images
       
    9. Joomla!
       
    10. Mambo
        
    11. Xoops
        
    12. PostNuke
        
    13. WWW Paint Board
        
    14. Magnetik Poetry
        
    15. SMF (Simple Machines Forum)
        
    16. PHPOpenChat
        
    17. AzDGDatingLite
        
    18. Advanced Guestbook
        
    19. Advanced Poll
        
    20. phpCollab
        
    21. SiteBar
        
    22. Aardvark Topsites
        
    23. paFileDB
        
    24. phpMyFAQ
        
    25. Noah's Classifieds
        
    26. anyInventory
        
    27. OpenDB
        
    
    

I am a Windows developer and while I'm sure I could come up to speed on these technologies I was hoping that the active community would like to take control and set up whatever options they thought would best serve the current and future Second Life userbase.


I have a second license to vBulletin 3.6 that could be transferred to this domain if that is the preferred Forums software. This is the full license which does not need renewal. The hosting package has been pre-paid for two years. I am willing to cover all software and maintenance costs, advertising and anything else that community leaders advise would be helpful in ensuring there would be a starting point for Second Life users as they have here today.

Please use this thread to discuss this option, volunteer, flame me, or whatever. I have bound slhomepage.com to this hosting service and it should be online before the end of the day. I will forward secondlifehomepag.com traffic to the site as well. I am willing to give full domain access to a group of users who are passionate about maintianing this current one-stop Forums solution even if it is a third party site.

SLHandbook will continue as the site it is toda with its own Forums as its intent is deifferent than that of a portal, and because I am developing its functionality personally.

That is very generous of you. If anyone needs any tips or help I can be a resource. Currently my private site is implementing Second Life functionality and I would love to hear what sort of resources would be of value to the community.

If I had a bit more time I could be able to take the bull by the horns and get an incredible site together within a week or so. But alas, my own community keeps me very busy. Along with Real Life!!

Once again your generosity is amazing.

This sounds like quite an impressive package.
I do not personally have the requisite skills for this project myself, or rather time.

However I wonder how the tech power capabilities compare with
the other 3rd party forums already out there.

I am mainly posting this to try to bump it up to the first page for more attention.

Way to go once again Clubside.

Wow -- I'm speechless. That's astoundingly generous, and I wish I had the training and management skills to help.

With the many other topics out there and all the other activity going on with the SLCC I will leave this offer open-ended for as long as it takes. However, if anyone who doesn't have experience with any of these technologies is interested in learning, please Google the product and see if it interests you. If so, this web hosting package supports multiple domains and it would be easy enough to install one of the packages there and let you learn!

While I hope there will some volunteers interested in doing some basic forum maintenance (I can think of no restrictions necessary for these forums beyond watching for generic advertising spam), this package has a lot of other options for communication. If any of those strike you as tools for the community, let's get them out there! I picked the domain name for that purpose!

Sorry for the double post, but I figured I'd go ahead and get the site off the ground and hopefully that will lead to some more advice and even volunteers!

I have installed WordPress, the same blogging tool used by Linden Lab, at the root. I haven't added any links to the other portions site, but will tomorrow. I will be installing a copy of vBulletin 3.6. I have already installed Aardvark Topsites to allow people to add their own websites to a directory of community information about Second Life.

The active links right now are:

http://slhomepage.com
http://slhomepage.com/aardvarktopsites/

If there are other serious authors out there it is easy enough to add multiple blog authors to WordPress. Topsites allows anyone to add their links without my moderation. vBulletin will also be an open site with no moderation beyond the search for advertising spam, but I am willing to take on moderators if that would be best.

For anyone worried about their information being shared, beyond my promise not to do it, I can only offer the following information:

My real name is Chris Rowley, and I live in Maryland. The best e-mail address to get me for Second Life related questions is [email=clubsidegranville@gmail.com]clubsidegranville@gmail.com[/email]

Just a quick note that I have activted vBullletin as well and am in the process of duplicating the current Forums structure. I hope to have all of the Forums here in place by the end of the day, and I will try to match as many of the setting from this vBulletin setting as I can.

http://forums.slhomepage.com

I'm not sure about the domain name, but the package comes with a lot of good stuff ;0

I've yet to see a really well done community portal for Second Life.. People try to copy myspace or just drop some forums in and let people do whatever. Perhaps something more akin to SLDevelopers.com for the general community would be appropriate.

Great work so far. All of the tools are definitly there. If I wasn't busy working up the implementation of Second Life tools in my own site, I would defenitly jump at the chance to take this project over. Good luck with it!

Yeah, sorry about that Baba, I'm still "old school" where "HomePage" meant something...

Do you hav any recommendations about other portal tools, eith fetures or specific packages worth adding?

For everyone else, I have now replicated the entire Forums structure here, I just need some feedback: should the "New Products" sections be like they are here, as in no-reply?

Hi Clubside

Just looked at your site and I think it is incredible to see this place duplicated.

I guess we are in for a turbulent time with many websites competing to become the major forum for the increasing population of sl. sldevelopers has so far appealed to me most, but there is no incentive to post or read there when the official linden forums cover the same technical subjects. Robin's post implied that technical forums (fori ?) would remain in the forseeable future.

You may also find out why LL has decided to drop most of the non-technical forums. I think there is an incredible amount of moderation required to keep the forums readable and interesting, not just a way of facilitating unjustified personal attacks.

I wish you luck with this site that you have so generously set up.

Ed

Thanks ed44, I guess I replicated the "whole shebang" because if people still have certain forums here they will be forced into multiple round-trips between sites to cover what was once a basically one-stop-shop with only the threat of a forum/world ban at stake.

vBulletin has also come up with some pretty neat new features since the version installed here was released. I also looked at the traffic being generated at SLHandbook through links and particularly Google searches and figured I could leverage that into a portal.

On that note, I was thinking of adding at least one forum that allowed posters who were not registered to participate. In one "Second Life Answers" post it was mentioned that the blogs gave "the outside world" a chance to read and participate. Since one of my goals was always to encourage new people to try Second Life, perhaps having aplace for them to ask their questions beforehand might be nice. What do you think?

moved from General to Resident-Run Websites as this is just that; however, i also left a re-direct link as this is also inferring a meta-discussion on the official SL forums.


i also took a look.. your forums look quite promising, Clubside! (i have it bookmarked and will check it out again after SLCC.


Ps - about that "volunteering".. need a ResMod? J/K!! lol..

I don't know doodlysquat about the technical stuff, so I don't know what kind of help I could be. But I'm really happy to see this. Thank you!

Sorry for not replying sooner.. I was at SLCC ;0

I'm thinking you should leverage the front page for articles and announchments that tie back to the forums for discussion.

For new products... maybe have a feedback/reviews section

Thanks Baba, hope you had fun.

I plan on using the front page to point to major topics on the Forums. I have series of articles planned to start later this week dealing with the seeches at the conference and some of the issues I had planned to raise before I decided not to attend.