An old dog not learning a new trick :)

Well, let me preface my post by saying I love this site and the games that have been developed here. It is a great little community. Now onto my comment. I am from the old school of where mods for a game were discussed in a forum and everyone was able to link to their particular mod or plug-in or file regardless of where it was. I had a couple of hosting sites myself for the games Morrowind and Oblivion. What I don't understand is the reasoning behind allowing people to post their creations and link to them here? What is unique about a site like that is it drives traffic up, allows authors and users to have good discussions about the mod they created and provide any help if needed. One of the things I loved about the old site was the links, finding something new when I visited, and looking for help when I was stuck. I just don't seeing the level archive coming close to that community feeling in any iteration that may be created. It is to sterile and far removed from this site now. Thanks for listening.

That is exactly why they are doing a big overhaul of knyttlevels.com. The new site will have a comment sustem, some kind of rating system and I am guessing it will have some kind of favorites system too.
For some reason though, LPChip doesn't want us to say what we would like to see at the site until the site is up, (something I find rather odd by the way) so I don't really know how to talk about this without going into a discussion like that.

the reason is because he does not want anyone to think any of the ideas he got from someone else and that he made it all on his own. Well, I hate to say it but all the level archive sites have been done to death and if there are no forums that go along with it all it does is become a repository. The forums are an integral part of any mod site. TESNexus and Fallout3Nexus for examples are marvelous mod sites with screeshots, a comment system, a rating system, etc.  It has all been done before. There is a forum component to the TESNexus and the Fallout3 Nexus but the main site, where all the mods are discussed and linked to, is the main Bethsoft site http://www.bethsoft.com/bgsforums. The repositorys are nice but will never take the place of a forum where people can make mod release announcements and work in progress threads. I think it is a big mistake not to follow that model. The file repository model does not work.

I think that making major changes to what was previously a level-hosting site in order to attempt to replace what was previously an integral part of the forum is a bad idea. It'd separate the most active part of the forum from the forum itself, and separate commentary on completed and near-completed levels from commentary on levels early in development. Propositions for such things on the old forum always treated the new systems as supplementary to the forum, never replacing any of the forum altogether.

And, of course, in the meantime we are left with nowhere to announce newly-released levels and nowhere to discuss already-released levels.

No, the reason is that, like Nifflas, I don't want to get side-tracked too much by getting all the ideas from everyone before I got something that works. I have a fair amount of ideas already, and as usual, when you have alot of idea's many of them will simply not be able to put together because one would contradict the other. To ensure that this won't cause a problem for one of the main components I have planned, I want to wait thinking about any addons that the system will have. I have little time, so my main issue is that I want to focus on the system itself first. Adding to that will be easier at that stage, than to keep it in mind now, and get drifted off.

Doing it now could in my case lead to a project cancellation because I lost the overview.

My first priorities are these: Getting a simple system that has a login system that shares the users from this forum so you don't have to register twice.

Once I got that working correctly, I will start adding the ability to upload levels. After that, I will make something to query the levels using different ways, like: by author, date added (newest), then I'll add support for commenting on a level, cus at that stage you'll actually be able to browse them. Then I will add a rating system, and from there I probably take requests.

But for now, I already have some hard time getting the login system to work. Not because I can't, but because I have too little time to work on this, and its not an easy task that I can just do in between a moment, like I can do with the other parts.

Why, oh why, can't we just have a temporary forum to post levels in till the archive comes along? To be honest I'm not keen on the archive either, but in any case, right now we've got nowhere.

I don't really have a problem with making a temporary forum, and remove it when the archive is ready, but I thought it would be pointless, because people will have to resubmit their levels a second time, and I don't expect the wait to be that long. I'll talk with Paula about this.

I have had a couple of mod sites myself gamersroam.com and oblivionfiles.com, and was the administrator at morrowindfiles.com. All three of these sites were based off of the content managment system phpnuke, the first two more specfically ravennuke, a wonderful recoded nuke system, anyway, the reason I speak of this is that phpnuke has all the features you are looking for built right in. A file upload system, a forum for discussions, a rating and comment system, a news system, a newsletter system, etc.. All of it is in the same package. I notice this site is php and probably has a sql db that is administered through phpmyadmin... linking the file repository to the registration of this site might be problematic.

Well, the biggest problem with changing software to another package, is that there always will be something that is not working as we want. I have played with systems like phpnuke before, but the downside is, that its not as easy to get mods for them or to change the code, because if you change the code, you get a chance that you cannot update the software anymore. Next to that, I'm really satisfied with how SMF does things, and probably the biggest issue here would be filespace.

This forum doesn't have the resources that knyttlevels.com has. So if we'd be continuing using some software on this page, we'd still have the problem that levels would be hosted elsewhere, like on knyttlevels.com.