AfterWorldForum - Store, paid subscriptions, banners and more

Hi everyone. Finall, part of our work is done and we can present you some new features:


Buy goodies with your AWFD!

First and foremost, we're putting your AWFD to use. We implemented an AWFD store, which is filled with all kinds of little gifts and goodies (BEER!). You can find it in the upper navigation bar, inbetween "Wiki" and the "Forum rules". We will later on be updating the shop with new icons - also game related :)

We've decided to combine the store release with the announcement of our subscription based membership. Rather than coming up with all kind of different schemas, we've figured we'll stick to three of them.


AfterWorldForum subscriptions

So secondly, the table below will contain an explanation of the three different ways to get involved on our site. I'll try and explain a bit more about the various options after the table.

[TABLE="head;width=100%"] | Registered user | Wiki contributor | Paid subscriber

Standard forum functionality | | |

Max stored private messages | 200 | 500 | 5000

Max amount of PM recipients | 5 | 10 | 20

PM users who reached PM quota | No | Yes | Yes

Can open / close own threads | No | Yes | Yes

Max profile picture dimensions | 150 x 150 | 300 x 300 | 400 x 400

Max profile picture filesize | 65kb | 125kb | 250kb

Max avatar picture dimensions | 80 x 80 | 120 x 180 | 150 x 250

Max avatar picture filesize | 25kb | 80kb | 200kb

Can use reward system | No | Yes | Yes

Max reward | N/A | 250AWFD/post | 500AWFD/post

AWFD system | | |

Weekly AWFD paycheck | 50 | 150 | 500

AWFD Shop Discount | 0% | 10% | 25%

AWFD accelerators | 100% | 150% | 250%

Give anonymous gifts | No | No | Yes

Arcade | | |

New arcade games wait period | 4 weeks | 0 | 0

| | | |

Price per month | Free! | Free! | USD 3.50

Price per year | Free! | Free! | USD 35.00

[/TABLE]


As promised, a quick explanation of some of the features.

PM users who reached PM quota - This means that if a registered user reaches 200 PMs stored, wiki contributors and paid subscribers will be able to send that person a PM anyway, where registered users cannot.

Can use reward system - Wiki contributors and paid subscribers can award users for helpful posts. This means the user will be paid AWFD, from a common account (taxes paid to the system), rather than their own AWFD balance.

Max reward - The maximum amount of AWFD the user can award per post.

Weekly EPD paycheck - The amount of AWFD you will automatically get per week if you are active on the forums.

AWFD accelerators - Every action you take to participate on the forum (referring friends, rating threads, posting regularly (which does not mean spamming), replying, starting threads, using the rep system), etc will grant you a certain amount of AWFD. The accellerator means that Wiki contributors and paid subscribers will benefit extra from these (and suffer extra in case of spam or abuse of the system).

New arcade games wait period - From now on, when we add new arcade games, registered users will not be able to play these games straight away. The games will be made available after the wait period expires. Existing games will remain available for everyone as is.

Apart from the described above, we have absolutely no intention to start charging you for any existing functionality you enjoy for free at this moment.

We have done some tweaking over the last few days, so should anything have changed, or the information above not be 100% correct, please PM us with the details.


Wiki contributer benefits

The Wiki contributor is a free subscription method that we want to use to reward those of you who invest your time to help us improve our wiki. Not only will the articles you update or enhance later on be visible on our frontpage so everyone can see you're working and contributing (as well as keep an eye on what has recently been added or changed), but if we spot you putting in countless hours, you just might be rewarded for your efforts. So it is our way to say "thank you" for helping us out. Please realise that spamming the wiki with garbage or bogus edits to try and qualify for this subscription model will not get you anywhere, as we manually add people to this group.

For those of you wondering how we came to a price of 35 USD per year, we plan on upgrading our VPS to a faster and more powerful server somewhere in the near future. The plan we will be subscribed to then will cost us 35 GBP (British pounds, as our host is located in the UK) per month. 35 USD does not equal 35 GBP but it'll be close enough for us. So in other words, by buying a paid yearly subscribing to our site, you will keep the hamsters up and merrily running for one month.


Banners to promote your services

Thirdly, as you probably noticed, we now have the ability to host your banners as well. Should you be interested in seeing your own banners (standard sized banner (static or flash)) featured on our site, we offer these to you for the following prices:

[TABLE="width=50%"]1 week | 15,000 AWFD or 50 AWD

2 weeks | 24,000 AWFD or 80 AWD

4 weeks | 45,000 AWFD or 150 AWD

[/TABLE]

The mathematicians among you will have quickly deducated that this means we estimate 300 AWFD equals 1 AWD. This is not guaranteed by us, as we do not buy your AWFD for AWD (ahh, the no guarantee clause!).

If you are a society leader, and interested in getting your banner up here, please PM us. We might be able to make you a lucrative deal and get you your banners up cheaper.


I want more AWFD!

Of course, if you currently lack AWFD or AWD, but want to advertise here quickly anyway, let us know. We are looking into purchasing a paid add-on to the store, which would allow you to quickly add more AWFD to your account. At this very moment, the only option would be to use the Donate button (which is located in the very low-right corner of the forum), and which will allow you to make a paid donation to the site, using paypal. The AWFD will manually be added to your account upon receipt of payment.


Future features...

We are still working on the possibility of making an auction system, which we will fully integrate with the wiki, and we are planning on releasing 'Yellow pages' where you can promote your events, auctions, stores, or corporations. These features takes a little longer to implement - but will be merged into the subsciption prices, when they are up running.

For those of you who want to see the available subscription, they can be found in your User CP, under Miscellaneous. We currently only accept Paypal.

You probably also noticed the neat format of the table above. We also implemented that today, and an explanation of the table system will be added to the site shortly.


That's it for today, folks :kos:

Ty :) but we still need a few things! We're working on it though :dancinggirls:

Just gonna reply fast on the wiki question, because I'm heading out of the door :)

First we didn't want the wiki because of the obvious reason - we have one. Some people did ask us for another wiki though - a place where everything could be updated and public.

We are going to have a couple of neat features here on AWF in future - one of them is the auction. Hopefully, like on EP, we will also be able to run a 'running' in game auction on the front site. It depends on how the auction system and feeds are working in AW.

Anyway both the auctions and the yellow pages we will introduce to you later on - are all connected. As you might have noticed, you do not need an extra password for the wiki here. It is implemented in the forum-module.

Beside this nice feature, all the things in the auction and eventually also from the Yellow pages at a point, will be connected to the wiki. F.x. if you see an item in the auction, click on it - you will end up on the info site about the item in the wiki.

This is main, why we wish to have an implemented wiki to the site - because no doubt, the other one works fine - but not for the use we have in mind.

Lykke

About the auction

I can feel some might not exactly know what I mean with auction system:

It's a system integrated on the forum where you can sell/buy items (as if you where standing on the corners in QA1 or Saransk shouting your sales in chat)- you put in an item - you place a first bit or buyout bit. You can put in pictures etc. and it gives both the buyer and seller a much more clear overview of what is on the market and what is not. When an item is sold, the auction for it will disappear. The seller put in her/his prices, just as they would do in the in game auction system or when they shout out loud. In the system you can see which forum member is bidding on what. The seller and buyer has to meet in person in game to exhange items/AWD though.

The same with the running auction, which we would love to implement on the front site. This is taken from the in game auction - and will be the last 10 auctions running. The auctions you see, will be the same auctions you see when you are in the game - so nothing is changed or will be changed pricewise compared to how people are setting it in game. This only is there to give you the opportunity to see what auctions nearly is ending and go into game if you are interested.

The links from auctions to the wiki is to asure people they know exactly what items are interested in buying - see the stats etc. before they decide to buy. It's a neat feature, if you ask me - and very helpfull.

Non of the above will in any way conflict with any prices already made by players in game.

------------------

We have to remember, that hopefully there is a time after the testing period too. While the game is for testers, do not forget it is also for players - which I'm sure most testers are proud of also to be. To a lot of people AW is already the game they wish to continue being a part of! It is already their home - the place where they spend most of their time etc. There are no rules on how to be a member of this community - how to act as a tester and how to act as a player - and hopefully both is connected.

This community forum will be build up slowly - and we make an honor in making the features and tools here as helpful and useful for all of you as possible.

If this means we have to implement something which is already there, we will. It is not because we wish to put down other peoples work/sites or favorite tools and places. Actually we have a main link to the other Wiki in the navigation bar together with talk.afterworld and the main game site. But we make sertain tools twize because we wish to level up the usabilities of the forum.

Rewarding people who wish to work with the wiki might draw in people who are only doing it for the sake of the reward. Well, so be it! We just need the wiki to be filled with everything important for AW - no matter what peoples deepest purpose with it is - as long as it is a help for the community and the tools we are releasing, then everything is fine! But be aware, that we are not just rewarding everyone putting a single little thing in there - we keep an eye on people to see who really makes an efford and deserves the reward. Those to decide that is Peter and I only.

I'm not exactly sure where to start addressing your posts, because it seems to me as if you manage to contradict yourself quite a few times within them, but I'll try and give it a shot, and offer you some of my food for thought. I'll address the blatantly negative and accusatory words I coloured in your reply first.

1. Afterwiki is a wiki. This means that any information added to it becomes public domain. If something is public domain, there can never be anyone claiming to own that information. Thus, the accussations of "stealing" information are wrong. If people don't want to their information to be used elsewhere, they should not put it up on a wiki, as once it makes its way into a wiki, it is public domain. Just because you say that information is owned by someone does not make it so.

But once again, we have absolutely no intention whatsoever to replace the official wiki, but rather we hope we can complement it. And rest assured, that if people copy/paste information from AfterWiki, we will ask them to link to the original source, just as AfterWiki asks people to do.

2. BRIBING members? Quite a strong term to use, don't you think? I see it as tipping those who put time and money into helping to build up a database. So on one hand you claim that people who worked hard on filling up one wiki should be rewarded, and when we actually offer a (non-monetary in nature) form of recognition, it's suddenly called bribing?

Somehow I have trouble imagining the ability to get some little icons or a banner up on a website will suddenly entice people to start copying stuff, but maybe that's just me.

3. Trying to gain control? Trying to gain control of what, exactly? Here we were, thinking we could help out people by accumulating as much information as possible into a single spot, which hopefully will be easy to use, and add lots of value for everyone involved, but obviously, that's a weird idea, and we're after "power".

As a gamer myself, I hate that in order to find information, I have to visit numerous websites. If I were looking for information about a game, and would find a website offering exactly that, I'd be happy. That you think we're trying to gain control over something actually says more about how you think, than anything else.

Oh, I'm sorry. I did not realize I needed anyone's permission or a document stating I hereby have the official authority to set up a website. To me, it seems that by the devs linking back to this website, they actually DO appreciate us taking work from their hands.

Furthermore, you have absolutely no idea about the amount of money involved in running this website, or else you'd not even bother mentioning money. I can assure you that so far, on license costs alone, we spent hundreds of dollars (180 for an initial license, 130 for the gallery, and another 130 recently to get an upgrade to the license for the upcoming next version of the forum software. If I would start adding up the countless hours spent on working to get things up and running smoothly at the rate I typically charge when I'm doing consultancy, I'd be down quite a few thou). We got a few dollars back from the Google Ads, and we had a single generous donation, but overal, if all we're after is money, we'd be beterr off pulling the plug on this altogether.

You also state things should be left to the devs, and that the official forum was closed due to bickering. So a new forum pops up, which provides the devs with a way to ensure they can focus on developing (which you just stated was desirable) instead of having to take time to moderate all the time. But here you are, arguing on the new forum, against the owners of it, because you claim we aren't letting the devs focus on taking game decisions and progressing the game. Huh?

And hey, if things are, as you state, free market (what that has to do with starting a wiki is beyond me, but that's a different story), exactly what is wrong with us setting up a forum? In a free market, one can do that, and we did. That's the nature of a free market. Again, you contradict yourself within your very own posts.

I am not sure you saw what admin wrote - this forum is, with everything else you invest in, a risk we are taking. We are paying everything out of our own pockets - we are not demanding anything in return. If people are contributing we are very greatful, but if they don't, it won't change a thing. We are working on the forums because we like the games/the communities and we wish to provide you with usefull tools.

Admin wrote specifically, that IF anyone should copy anything from afterwiki to the forum related wiki, it will not be done without a link to the original source. Which means, no one will take the credit of another persons work!

And about money. Life is not only about money - not in our world, at least! Peter and I spend all our free time on the forums, despite having two fulltime jobs, kids, pets etc. - but we do it because we love the connections to the communities and believe me, not for the moneys sake because then we would never have started.

You might be right, that maybe this forum will pay back some of what we paid, but you know, it COULD as well go the other way. Either way, we are not complaining about anything!

Whatever you believe or for whatever reasons, we have no hidden agendas. We are quite honest and open about what we are doing - we do not try and take anyones job from anyone. We see opportunities and we take them as we also work, develope and improve the tools, features available for you.