SPLODER [Share Creativity]

[CyanGaming]

Myself, and 3 other admins (sticki, joji and r) created a New Forum called Sploder 4 days ago. We already have 133 Members and are looking to grow much much larger! The community is active, friendly and enjoys creativity. We were originally all members of a gaming forum which has recently shut down, and had almost 15,000 users (most of which were inactive). It also had over 3,000,000 forum posts, 200,000 topics and ran for 8 years. We are currently in the process of transferring all active members over to the new forums and opening our doors to new people! So feel free to join and let people know who you are in our general discussion board, everyone will do their best to make you feel right at home

Link to the forums: http://sploder.tk

The forum uses the BR Finale theme with major customizations. We have an dedicated art team that is always growing that help in redesigning all the default forum icons, and create art for member awards/badges. We're always looking for people with special skills, whether it be art, coding, a good sense a feel for design, advertising, branding and any other skills you may have. Also, if anyone knows how to make a forum more fun for the users, there are board mod and staff positions for you!

Here's a picture of the forums:


Title modified to comply with Showcase rules, but otherwise everything is okay, so approved - Iris.

[Steve]

Just a note for readers ... profanity is allowed so if you have any sensitivities about it, you've been forewarned.

@CyanGaming - nice job!

[Mick.]

Wow 8k posts in 4 days?lDamn.  Out of curiosity, why you guys didn't use a responsive theme?  Anyways, rock on brother!

[GigaWatt]

We're always looking for people with special skills, whether it be art, coding, a good sense a feel for design, advertising, branding and any other skills you may have.

Does IT, electronics, hardware, low level coding count ?

Out of curiosity, why you guys didn't use a responsive theme?

I'd keep it the way it is . Who does serious gaming on a phone ?

[Mick.]

Out of curiosity, why you guys didn't use a responsive theme?

I'd keep it the way it is . Who does serious gaming on a phone ?

Where are the games? lol

[CyanGaming]

Wow 8k posts in 4 days?lDamn.  Out of curiosity, why you guys didn't use a responsive theme?  Anyways, rock on brother!

We have a mobile version of the forum that isn't quite finished, however it exists I need to sit down one day and dedicate time to making it better, but we really want to make the forum experience easy for users on mobile.

[CyanGaming]

Does IT, electronics, hardware, low level coding count ?

Not sure, we're always looking for new people who are actually willing to dedicate time helping the forum grow.

[GigaWatt]

No offense, but I was just kidding . Gaming is actually not my thing... and as I gathered from your description, the forum is mostly about gaming.

In any case, I would even get involved in that, if I didn't have a ton of other engagements :S. I actually love exploring new things, but unfortunately, time is never on my side :S.

Good luck running the forum, it actually looks like a nice place .

[CyanGaming]

No offense, but I was just kidding . Gaming is actually not my thing... and as I gathered from your description, the forum is mostly about gaming.

In any case, I would even get involved in that, if I didn't have a ton of other engagements :S. I actually love exploring new things, but unfortunately, time is never on my side :S.

Good luck running the forum, it actually looks like a nice place .

Thanks dude and don't worry about it.

Btw, I'm not sure how sure how you got that misconception, This forum is a tight knit for sharing your creativity.

[GigaWatt]

Btw, I'm not sure how sure how you got that misconception, This forum is a tight knit for sharing your creativity.

We were originally all members of a gaming forum which has recently shut down, and had almost 15,000 users (most of which were inactive). It also had over 3,000,000 forum posts, 200,000 topics and ran for 8 years. We are currently in the process of transferring all active members over to the new forums and opening our doors to new people! So feel free to join and let people know who you are in our general discussion board, everyone will do their best to make you feel right at home

The "ex gaming forum" part, I guess .

[CyanGaming]

The "ex gaming forum" part, I guess .

Ah sorry about that, completely forgot that part was even in the OP. Anyway, we aren't primarily a gaming forum anymore, just to clear that up xD

[vbgamer45]

Nice site, I saw you were on my forum host createaforum.com for a while as well.

Why did the main site close down their forums. I tired to chekc it out but looks like you can only see one page of old topics

[CyanGaming]

Nice site, I saw you were on my forum host createaforum.com for a while as well.

Why did the main site close down their forums. I tired to chekc it out but looks like you can only see one page of old topics

Hey man! I'd like to thank you for making createaforum.com. It gave us a place to temporarily settle the community down during the biggest crisis we've ever faced, and I'm thankful for that. Sploder.com started around 2006/2007 when most of the userbase were either just kids or young adults. It was a site where we could all express our creativity through the medium of game development, story writing and level editing. A couple years later, 2010, a forums was created for the site however at this point it was under vanilla, not smf. Before this, everyone on the mainsite seemed to be distant from one another. There were friend groups here and there, but mostly everyone was doing their own thing, and there was no sense of community.

The site received updates, but there was no communication between the owner(Geoff) and the user's of his site. When the forums were created, that was the first sense of a community. People began talking and discussing their work, hyping their up coming games and discovering other peoples. Everyone was helping each other, but at the same time competing to be the best. Geoff would notify the forums on updates the mainsite was receiving, and this is when new game creators started getting introduced to the site. Mid 2012 the forums moved from vanilla to smf, and luckily there was an easy way to transfer all the forum history over. We all lived on this forum, in this community. Most of us were part of it for 8-12 years and we've always had new additions.

Sadly some things started taking a turn for the worst in the most recent years. Ever since 2014, Geoff was visiting the community less and less. He had an illness which preventing him from doing much to any work on the site. He described it as hurting to do what he loved. He also got a job at Disney working for MeetCircle He would pop on every now and again to say hi, but not much else. In 2017 we were informed that flash would no longer be supported, and that it's finally going to be killed off in 2020. All major mainsite functionality was built on flash, and with the owner no longer able to dedicate his time to the site, it was going to perish in 2020.

If you visit the forums here now: http://forums.sploder.com/ the only thing you'll be able to see is the last thread Geoff made on the forums, and everybodies responses. We assumed that the forums would stay up even when the mainsite died, however, the forums ended up shutting down first. I'm really not entirely sure what happened, but you can break it down like this. A staff member made an impulsive decision to delete all staff accounts. You can find his apology here: http://sploder.tk/index.php?topic=304 When Geoff was finally informed on what happened, he accidently corrupted all the data in his attempt to restore the forums(Not sure what exactly went down, but I can imagine he simply doesn't have the time for this. I really don't blame him).

Upon hearing the news a forum was quickly setup on createaforum, before we all eventually move to a forum that a few members of the community and I worked on for a couple days. We were all devastated from the loss, 8 years of sploder history and memories were washed down the drain. I really don't have the words to describe the sorrow we all felt. Now all we can do is try to keep the community alive, and hopefully grow it much larger than ever before. We've shifted our main focus from gaming to creativity. Many of the members of our community all have their own skills, gifts and talents. We want to build an active community where we all can share our creativity and have a laugh

[vbgamer45]

Good to know if Geoff had a backup or the old database we could look into restoring/making an archive site.

I would suggest getting SSL to build up trust/rankings for google.

[CyanGaming]

Good to know if Geoff had a backup or the old database we could look into restoring/making an archive site.

I would suggest getting SSL to build up trust/rankings for google.

That's a nice idea, I'll have to see if I can get in touch with him about this.

Hmm, not sure what SSL is exactly. Can you inform me a little about it? I'll do some research into it myself too.

[vbgamer45]

SSL gives you the lock icon in browser all links will start with https://  if you have a control panel like cpanel then it can be setup there if you buy an SSL certificate.

[CyanGaming]

Ah okay, thanks dude
I don't have a cpanel, using a vps haha. I'll take your advice and look into getting it set up

[vbgamer45]

Cool, best way to do it. I like to skip cpanel since you have more knowledge/control over everything.
I do recommend doing backups often in your situation. And not just backups online download the backup to your computer as well always keep backups in multiple locations.

[CyanGaming]

Thanks for the advice! We wouldn't want any repeats of last time haha, I'll make sure to do that