Wednesday, May 11, 2005

7.5 or 8?

Bio: The Guild will primarily be for OBers and other Otakuites, but I don't think it'll be an "OB Guild". It'll be my own Guild and it will have its own theme and name. I don't know what the cape designs will be like, though. Too early to say. But there is the possibility of having a site to accompany the Guild at some point. So, definitely look out for that. Arcadia: Oh good. The more people who get in on it, the better! The weather is gorgeous, but it's cooling down somewhat as winter approaches. What great weather for Guild Wars, huh? Nothing like jumping into a dreamy fantasy world while you're sitting in your room all rugged up... Tonykins: Oh yes, I'm definitely into the band to that degree. I suppose that I'd always been more of a casual fan, but that's definitely changed in recent months. Yum. There are non-official DVDs though, right? I feel certain that a local Sanity rep had listed at least three that they had in stock. I'll have to see what that's all about. And now, to the subject of this post's title. As many of you know, I often use myOtaku to discuss network-related happenings and my own thoughts on such things. Recently, I have been talking about OtakuBoards in pretty vague terms. Most of you are aware that a Version 7.5 is in the works and most of you probably know that my attitude toward it has been "it's finished when it's finished". Normally, this would not be the case. But there are several things occurring right now that have a direct impact on OB. Freelance web work and myOtaku 3.0 are the principle things that mean less time for OtakuBoards. The former is always hanging around, but the latter is unusual in the sense that it's an extraordinarily large project. And, unlike previous iterations of myOtaku.com, I will be more hands-on with the development of the new version. Previously, I had played a role in various capacities, but generally speaking my role has been more limited with this particular site. But because myOtaku 3.0 is such a large jump forward, I'm going to be more involved in the development and design, including more specific things (such as the comments system, private messaging and style modification). myOtaku 3.0 is arguably the most important site we've ever made in this network. And since OtakuBoards is operating well enough for now (and since it is tiny compared to the rest of the network), it obviously isn't a top priority. However, you do know that the site is on my mind all the time. I've made some comments about it here, in terms of what I'd like to do with it and where it might go in the future. The current Version 7 iteration of OB is the one that had the most development work involved. Justin and I were working with a totally new Virtual Bulletin platform (OB was one of the very first sites in the world to utilize vB3; it was also one of the first sites to fundamentally modify the layout). With V7, there were many firsts. New software, a seperate "OB mule" for testing and development purposes and even a limited beta testing program. Such things had never really been done with the site before. The reason for all of this was simple: I didn't want V7 to be a flash in the pan. I wanted it to be able to last for quite a while; more than six months. Today, V7 is almost one and a half years old. That is definitely a record when it comes to OB versions. ~_^ Toward the end of last year, I knew that we'd be developing some of our most important new sites during the course of 2005. And I also knew that V7 had plenty of life left in it. So, rather than thinking about a V8, I felt that it would be better to take V7 and add a series of small-but-noteable updates to further extend its lifespan. That included some styling changes, an arcade, a multiplayer/challenge system and various other key upgrades. I intended to launch 7.5 in March, but unfortunately I just didn't have the time to do it then. And now that myO 3.0 is entering development, I simply won't have any ability to complete 7.5 in the near future. In addition to this, I recently discovered (thanks to Justin) that Virtual Bulletin 3.5 will be entering a public beta phase next month. When we developed Version 7, we had a seperate mule that we were able to work on. A mule is basically a clone of OtakuBoards, stored at a secret location, purely for development purposes. By developing on a mule, we can create what we want and test it and see how it all works...and then very rapidly transfer the changes over to the actual site. This means that it isn't necessary to have a month of down-time (if we'd had no mule, OB would have had to be offline for a month while we developed V7 - that's something I wanted to avoid at all costs). Our V7 mule was running on vB3 Beta. When the final version was ready, we were able to launch Version 7 almost simultaneously (meaning that we were able to introduce a full, final version of vB3 very rapidly). So, how is this all relevant to the current situation? Well, I have been looking over the additions to vB3.5 and many of them are quite impressive. It certainly isn't the quantum shift from vB2 to vB3...but it's significant. When the updated vB platform is combined with the planned V7.5 changes, you essentially have quite a large package of updates. Since I will be pretty unable to finalize V7.5 in the near term, I was considering an alternative idea. It goes something like this: a new default skin for OtakuBoards V7 would be developed and added within a pretty short time frame (within the next month or two). Existing skins would be given slight updates and a couple of minor OB issues would be fixed (ie: no more receipt confirmation pop-up when you send Private Messages). This would coincide with staff changes and some other small revisions. But it wouldn't be a V7.5 - just a very slight freshening-up. Then, at the end of the year (after you've had a few months to play around with your shiny new myOtaku), we could launch a full Version 8 of OtakuBoards...complete with not only the 7.5 changes, but also a number of other very significant enhancements (further improved design, vB3.5 engine, much much stronger myO integration and so on). That is one alternative that I'm considering presently. The other alternative is to simply wait for a few more months and release V7.5 at the end of this year, perhaps with a few more updates than I'd planned (to make up for the lateness), in addition to making it vB3.5-equipped. Then, when vB4 is released (perhaps next year), we'd start thinking about a full-blown Version 8. I think both ideas are viable and both are certainly doable. At the moment I haven't made a decision about that, though. What do you guys think?

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