iSoaker.net :: Soaking the world!

by **Ben** on Mon Dec 31, 2007 12:18 am

Due to the lack of feedback I'm getting at SSC, I'll ask for some here.

Developments towards SSC have stalled for the past 3 years. I consider the current website and my previous ones to be unfinished and rushed. Later I became too much of a perfectionist and was a little intimidated by the amount of work I wanted to do. Recently I decided to quit stalling and do something. Despite college being the end to water gunning for many people, SSC seems to have been energized by it. Maybe I'm better organized. I don't know. But we're actually going somewhere. Winter break has given me a lot of free time and I've put it towards a new website update. What we have right now is solid and I could release it as is.

While I would like to go into detail about what brand new content we're adding, I'll leave most of that to surprise. I will say that the vast majority of the content outside of the reviews is brand new. Many articles from our current website were transfered as well, but a lot of them didn't make the cut. And unlike previous updates, you won't have to wait another 3 years for new pages. More frequent small updates are good.

Anyway, the real reason I am posting here is because I want some feedback before we go online. What do you like about our website or forum? What don't you like? What would you like to see? Stuff like that is what I'm interested in.

I'm most interested in what could make our website and forum more attractive to you guys. Many of you guys only use this forum. I realize that some people prefer to use one forum, but I'd like to know what we could do better to address what shortcomings you see in our website/forum. I'd like to make SSC more enjoyable for everyone.

Look forward to the update in late winter or early spring. If you'd like to help in any way, let me know. Anything from submissions to suggestions is help.

by **cobralex297** on Mon Dec 31, 2007 2:29 pm

I've been looking forward to this update since it was mentioned this summer.

I'm excited to see updated reviews and statistics, specifically for modified and homemade guns. They are not included on iSoaker, and that's fine because it is a different kind of site. If anyone is to do these reviews and stats, it should be you, Ben_.

One thing that stops me from using the SSC forum frequently is the lack of stimulating content and activity, at least for me. There's not that many people that post there regularly (at least by comparison to iScF), and because of this not much for me to post in response to. This is really something that not much could be [IMO] done about by one person (you) in an update, but you asked for feedback, so here's my 2¢.

Also impeding my frequent use of your forum is the interface, which to me seems to be far less user friendly and less conducive to posting than that which is used at iSoaker. I guess it's just because I'm an impulsive and rushed person generally, but the quick post mechanism that's on this site really helps me to express my thoughts. The fact that on SSC I have to press a button and wait for a page to load before I post really deters me. I also at one point had much trouble with the physical closeness of the 'new thread' and 'post reply' buttons, frequently creating new threads as opposed to posting replies.

What I do like about your site is that you, the webmaster and admin, despite lacking many updates in the recent past, you do your best to keep up with the community. That is always a good thing.

I look forward as well to reading the new articles and content. I enjoy greatly reading articles, and especially considering that a large focus of SSC is on modding, something that I am inexperienced with, I hope that these articles will help to familarize me in such a way that I will myself become a competent modder.

Do you intend to do anything about the aesthetics of your site? By comparison to some other community forums, SSC (in both boards and content-areas) is lacking, IMO.

Do you have any idea about when this new update might be up? I'm quite excited>... I mean, you've given us a pretty vague idea, but I'm wondering if you have a target date/week/month.

Good Luck, I can't wait!
Best Regards
- Cobralex297

Edit:

P.S.>
I'm just going to add a little note to help sum up and comment on the above post:
I hope that it doesn't seem jumbled, I first made a post of a few sentences, and then reread your post, commented further, and then repeated that process again a few times. I didn't do a great job organizing my thoughts, but the ideas are all there. I also hope that I wasn't overly critical, as that was not my intent- you had asked though for opinions, and I gave mine.

Edited By cobralex297 on 1199125971

by **isoaker** on Mon Dec 31, 2007 3:03 pm

If there's any shortcomings at SSC, it's the fact that the main page presently showcases updates from 2004 on it and showing off nothing really new for the past three years despite having a good amount of activity on the SSC Forums. Other than that, the rest are just differences in layout and other subjective things that are neither good nor bad, just different. The SSC Forums have a different feel than here, not so much due to the layout or type of board, but mostly due to the primary types of topics created as well as the usual members who opt to respond. I'm looking forward to seeing the variety of updates when they go live, but at the same time, having read about them coming soon since the summer (or even a little earlier), my enthusiasm over them has admittedly diminished a bit due to the wait. I truly believe that the SSC Forums is a great resource for the community and the SSC website has been good up to 2004, but it'll be even better once the website half catches up with the current knowledge present on its forums. That's my 2.414 cents. :goofy:

:cool:

by **Ben** on Mon Dec 31, 2007 6:17 pm

Thanks for the replies. This is the kind of stuff I'm looking for.

One thing that stops me from using the SSC forum frequently is the lack of stimulating content and activity, at least for me. There's not that many people that post there regularly (at least by comparison to iScF), and because of this not much for me to post in response to. This is really something that not much could be [IMO] done about by one person (you) in an update, but you asked for feedback, so here's my 2¢.

That's a problem I've noticed too. This past summer I didn't do anything in particular to stimulate the forums because I was busy working. A few months ago, Drenchenator compiled the post statistics and put marks in where updates were made. When an update occurred, activity increased dramatically and then tapered off. A lack of things to keep people interested seems to be the problem. Right now, there's nothing interesting unless you dig.

Anyway, I figure that we started the forum once, so restarting it again wouldn't be much of a problem. My experience tells me that the update should help restart the forum a lot.

Also impeding my frequent use of your forum is the interface, which to me seems to be far less user friendly and less conducive to posting than that which is used at iSoaker.

That's a good point I hadn't considered much. Perhaps I'm just immune to interface problems because I've used so many different forums. While it might not be added immediately after the update, I do want to ditch the current skin. We've been using that for two years straight now. I heard complaints back then and it's starting to annoy even me.

I'm looking to custom code a new skin that's less confusing. Sadly, there's not too many vB skins that do anything like what I want. vB3 seems so much more bloated than vB2. vB2 was the reason I wanted to buy vBulletin...

Do you intend to do anything about the aesthetics of your site? By comparison to some other community forums, SSC (in both boards and content-areas) is lacking, IMO.

I wouldn't use the current design. I'm past my NerfOnline imitation stage. That design stinks.

Half the update was a design change, and it's a big change. Right now we have a basic design made with some test graphics. There's no set logo and the colors are still to be decided, but the test graphics right now are pretty nice. There's nothing fancy. The design is pretty simple and has some nice elements to it. Most importantly, it's easy to read and loads fast. The real meat of the website is in the content.

I look forward as well to reading the new articles and content. I enjoy greatly reading articles, and especially considering that a large focus of SSC is on modding, something that I am inexperienced with, I hope that these articles will help to familarize me in such a way that I will myself become a competent modder.

I've finished some of the modifications section. We'll have by far the strongest modifications section online after this. I've simplified the organization into capacity, nozzle, power, individual gun, and other modifications. A lot of things are being said explicitly now as well, such as which guns this medication works on, how the modification works, what problems you might have, how it might work better, and so on. For example, the K-mod article I wrote is over 2000 words long and I wanted to add a little more detail to it. We're going all the way. Maybe we'll have to scale back a bit after this!

The homemades section actually is complete aside from some videos I want to add. I'm debating whether to put them on YouTube or not. We've got a very detailed APH guide with about 80 pictures. I also finally completed a guide to CPS water gun construction. That was due before the last update. Maybe we'll see some actual homemade CPS guns in the near future. The Supercannon II guide is done too.

If you have any questions in particular about anything you think I'll know, feel free to fire them towards me and I'll not only answer them, I'll make sure their answered in the appropriate article on SSC. We're trying to answer as many questions as possible. We actually did a lot of research to find questions to answer. That's partially why the update is taking so long.

We'll also add a lot more than modifications and homemades. I don't want to go into specifics, but there's something to like about every section we're adding. It should be really cool. I actually can't wait to finish some of these other sections.

Do you have any idea about when this new update might be up? I'm quite excited>... I mean, you've given us a pretty vague idea, but I'm wondering if you have a target date/week/month.

There's not particular date or time in my mind right now. With a few days of work to finalize the design and make some redirects, I would be happy with what we could put online. It would obviously be incomplete, but right now I'd say the development website beats the current one, so I'd be fine by it.

At latest, we'll release sometime in March. At the earliest, we could release tomorrow. I'm basically tired of setting a specific date because that hasn't worked. As iSoaker has said, we've been saying we'll release on a certain date, but work was slower back then and nothing happened. If there's a certain date, we'll end up being late. Having no specific date takes a lot of the pressure off us, so we can't "lose" if you think of it like that. It also adds the element of surprise, which is cool.

I might write some more later, but I'm going to get back to work. If you have any questions or concerns, feel free to ask.

Edited By Ben_ on 1199140637

by **mr. dude** on Mon Dec 31, 2007 6:19 pm

My only problem with SSC is that it took me about a month to find the link to the homepage from the forums. Other than that I love the site! Only reason I don't post is because all my posts have something to do with a really stupid mod or homemade that I'll never make but want feedback on.

by **Ben** on Mon Dec 31, 2007 6:39 pm

I'm looking to put the site header back on the forums with our custom skin. That's a big problem I'd like to address. Here the site header is on the forums and everything works great. We used to have something like this, but I never learned how to do much vB skinning, so we haven't added it yet. It's on the plan for sure now.

by **cobralex297** on Mon Dec 31, 2007 11:53 pm

Your response was great, Ben_... It made me quite excited for the new update, or- more at least than I had been previously.

I hadn't requested this or anything specific directly in my more general original post, but is there any chance you might have room for, or have already planned for, a step-by-step guide to colossus modding, with accompanying pictures?

Also, one more thing,
although I consider myself to be an intellectual; competent linguistically, practically, and mechanically, I sometimes have trouble following directions. I'm great at engineering and understanding how things work, but sometimes I get caught in small steps-
Is there any chance you could try to see if you could do your best to make your guides for modding pretty idiot-proof? I know that there are other people like me who are on the edge of being able to mod, but are held back by little things, or perhaps just need a more detailed guide to help them build up the confidence to go in and do work...

Regards-
:laugh:

by **Ben** on Tue Jan 01, 2008 12:38 am

I hadn't requested this or anything specific directly in my more general original post, but is there any chance you might have room for, or have already planned for, a step-by-step guide to colossus modding, with accompanying pictures?

That was one of the planned articles. Our current one uses old pictures from a really bad digital camera. I assigned the article to Drenchenator and gave him an Arctic Blast and a piece of LRT to colossus it with. It should be very step by step. If he doesn't write it I will and it will be as detailed as everything else I wrote.

However, a problem with that guide will be that the Arctic Blast is dissimilar to other older water guns like the CPS 2500 in a few ways, and I fear that by using that in the guide, some people wanting to modify older guns will get confused. So, I'd like to add some parts about older guns, especially pictures to show people that it's pretty much the same procedure. I don't own an older cylindrical CPS gun, however. I'm hoping someone on the forums in 2008 will donate some pictures.

Anyway, the guide here in the underground is pretty detailed. Check it out in the CPS4100i project.

The guides written so far I've tried to idiot-proof. I first try to simplify everything. One thing I did for the pressure relief valve disabling article was classify the types of check valves and listed which guns have which type. People previously asked about individual guns as if the pictures in the articles didn't cover what they had (the articles did and they would have trouble believing me). So I spelled it out explicitly here. After that, I look at what has been asked before on the forums about this and try to answer as many of those questions as possible. I then think about some other things that have been said over the years. In the modification guides I also explain what the modification does and how it works because some people are reluctant to do a modification if they don't truly know what's going on. And most importantly, I explain the disadvantages of the modification and give reasons not to do it.

It's a pretty involved process that includes a lot of research in addition to just making a guide, but it's very worthwhile. I'd consider the guides I've written so far to be definitive.

I wrote a little bit more about what exactly's in the K-mod guide to give you an idea, but it really wasn't necessary and it might ruin some of the surprise factor I'd like to keep.

by **Ben** on Tue Jan 08, 2008 11:36 pm

SSC forums have been down for about two hours now. I don't know what's going on, but it appears to be a server wide MySQL outage. Hopefully this problem will be resolved soon.

Edit: We're back a minute or two after this. Weird.

Edited By Ben_ on 1199850013

by **isoaker** on Wed Jan 09, 2008 7:44 am

Ben_ wrote:SSC forums have been down for about two hours now. I don't know what's going on, but it appears to be a server wide MySQL outage. Hopefully this problem will be resolved soon.

Edit: We're back a minute or two after this. Weird.

Just tried accessing both SSC message board and website; neither are pulling up for me at the moment. Hopefully they'll both be back online soon; always frustrating to have one's host having technical issues.

Update: 9:20am. Forums and site are running for me now.

:cool:

by **Ben** on Sun Jan 13, 2008 12:17 am

Another update:

I've completed a rough, but workable guide to Colossus. It'll need a little refinement, but right now it's pretty good (Are 18 photos too little or too many?). I used a relatively new method that involves rolling up the tubes. This method is much easier than sliding the tubes over each other. I thought I invented this new method, but SilentGuy remembered that a forum member suggested the same thing a while ago. Hopefully this new guide will be helpful to some people.

Tonight I'm going to work on some more modifications pages and also do some graphics work. Work over the past week has been slow on the page front because of a focus on other important things like graphics and things like dates and descriptions on pages.

by **Silence** on Sun Jan 13, 2008 12:41 am

I need to chime in...because SSC 2008 really is exciting. Ben has done a really nice job graduating SSC from a hasty fansite to a polished information center like iSoaker.com is. The new site is no longer plagued by glaring aesthetic, spelling, and content problems. The articles are comprehensive and professional.

Criticism of the forum layout is even more valid when compared to the main website's layout. Good suggestions here!

Edited By Silence on 1200199315

by **isoaker** on Sun Jan 13, 2008 9:32 am

Hearing about developments is nice and all, but I've been awaiting an SSC site update since at least last May if not earlier. At the very least, shouldn't some news or something be added to SSC's main page? It's disenchanting to still see news items from 2004 listed as recent site updates. :goofy:

That said, glimpses of new images and articles based on various posts Ben has pushed online in the past little while show a lot of promise so I'm sure the update will be quite substantial. I suppose I'm no longer so inspired hearing about it and now await the day that I can see the updates online.

:cool:

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