Official forums for BZFlag.org

As you may or may not know, there are a few Facebook pages for BZFlag, but (correct me if I'm wrong) they are all inactive. Me, Swigg, and Yosef are working on a Newsletter idea and we have made a Facebook page we hope to keep active. We need more fans because right now it's pointless to post updates to only 4 people. You can find the page here. I also made a twitter page for those that use twitter and with twitter having less privacy than Facebook as far as who can see your tweets (I have then set to public), more people will see em which in turn will lead to hopefully more players. Like Facebook, the Twitter page for BZFlag is inactive so hopefully by having an active page we can attract more people.

I also had the idea of setting up a community newsletter roughly a year ago. But halfway through planning I had serious doubts about who would contribute text and more imporantly who would read it.
My idea was to let people submit texts which I (or newsletter staff) would add to the next newsletter or something similar, but that would end up in a more or less standard mailing list.

Also, the question is, what would a subscriber expect from such a newsletter? New servers? New versions? General development updates? Social stuff going on in the community? Which team won the most league matches that week? Sure, you could cover all the topics, but I would not read that anymore (of the likes of TL;DNR, just like I do with the sourceforge newsletter where I read the subject line and then delete it)

I still think most of the social stuff of BZFlag is taking place in game and in the forums. People who want to organize themselves meet on a server to discuss and have fun ... Surely news are good, but the only news I would really be interested in I can find at http://my.bzflag.org/bb/viewforum.php?f=8.

I'm not saying, it's a bad idea. I'm saying think it well through, know where you want to go and don't just put up yet another facebook page. Good luck.

Hmmm, maybe a "like on Facebook" button on the BZFlag main webpage would help get this going.

Nah, don't need Facebook tracking all our users.

The whole idea behind making fan pages on Facebook and Twitter (more so Facebook) is that when you like a page on Facebook, it shows up on your profile. One of your friends decides to creep on your profile and they see you liked BZFlag. They're a gamer and are looking for another fun game to play and pawn n00bs on , so they check out the page. They think it sounds interesting and go to the website and download it. The community just got a little bit bigger.

Then, why not post a link to BZFlag.org directly to ones (your own or the one of you friend) profile?

Cobra_Fast - my approach is to keep everything on Google Docs. To start with there is news, new maps, gameplay tips, pictures, and a joke. In the future I hope to have interviews from map creators. I mass-message people on the forums, so whoever plays BZFlag under a registered nick will see that they have a message waiting for them at the main site. They don't subscribe, they just read. Honestly, the very idea of a BZFlag newsletter is not something most players expect, so hopefully that will work in our favor.

https://docs.google.com/document/d/1ksP ... edit?pli=1