FactorioForum.com - Ideas

[azoundria]

I bought this domain before the forum was set up here. (Yes, even before Factorio was released.)

I would like to build something useful for the community. Some ideas I have:

- A place to upload/share maps, mods, scenarios, creations, pictures.
- Some kind of fanpage.
- Another forum.
- A blog/newsletter.

If anyone can think of anything that they'd like to see, that would be great!

[ssilk]

- A place to upload/share maps, mods, scenarios, creations, pictures.

Great! How many space do you have?

- Some kind of fanpage.
- Another forum.

Uh? What reason?

- A blog/newsletter
If anyone can think of anything that they'd like to see, that would be great!

Maybe a tips&tricks section? It's a complex game and many didn't know that they can catch fish and how to use it.

[SilverWarior]

I bought this domain before the forum was set up here. (Yes, even before Factorio was released.)

Don't lie!
The domain FactorioForum.com was created on 11th February 2013 and that is a lot later than Factorio was first released.

http://whois.domaintools.com/factorioforum.com

[slpwnd]

- A place to upload/share maps, mods, scenarios, creations, pictures.

This is something we would want very much. It is a lot of work to do properly though.

At the moment this forum works as sort of an improvised "sharing place" for everything you mention. However it doesn't scale and is not very user friendly. Especially dedicated mod database would be awesome.

[ficolas]

- A place to upload/share maps, mods, scenarios, creations, pictures.

This is something we would want very much. It is a lot of work to do properly though.

At the moment this forum works as sort of an improvised "sharing place" for everything you mention. However it doesn't scale and is not very user friendly. Especially dedicated mod database would be awesome.

Would it be posible to make it in this same domain? like the wiki
www.factorioforums.com/share

[wrtlprnft]

I think that making factorioforum.com and factorioforums.com contain different things will only be confusing…

[ficolas]

I think that making factorioforum.com and factorioforums.com contain different things will only be confusing…

it alredy contains the wiki and the forums

[wrtlprnft]

I think that making factorioforum.com and factorioforums.com contain different things will only be confusing…

it alredy contains the wiki and the forums

Of course, but that's not what I meant. If one domain contains the wiki and forums, and the other one contains something else (maybe even a different forum), I'll be forever confused and unable to remember which domain is which.

One domain containing multiple things is completely normal. I suppose the developers chose to register this domain instead of using http://forums.factorio.com/ or http://factorio.com/forums/ to separate their e-merchandise site from the community stuff from an XSS perspective. I might be wrong of course, but it's a good choice nonetheless.

[ficolas]

I think that making factorioforum.com and factorioforums.com contain different things will only be confusing…

it alredy contains the wiki and the forums

Of course, but that's not what I meant. If one domain contains the wiki and forums, and the other one contains something else (maybe even a different forum), I'll be forever confused and unable to remember which domain is which.

One domain containing multiple things is completely normal. I suppose the developers chose to register this domain instead of using http://forums.factorio.com/ or http://factorio.com/forums/ to separate their e-merchandise site from the community stuff from an XSS perspective. I might be wrong of course, but it's a good choice nonetheless.

What I dont know, is why the forums and the main website are separated, wouldnt it be better if there were:

www.factorio.com
www.factorio.com/forums
www.factorio.com/wiki
instead of
www.factorioforums.com/forums
www.factorioforums.com/wiki
www.factorio.com/

[slpwnd]

The reason for separation is the hosting. AFAIK the www.factorio.com/forum is not possible, because the website is our custom thing while the forums are a php template. On the other hand recently we put a DNS alias so forums.factorio.com will get you here at the forum.

[wrtlprnft]

Using different domains is a generally a good idea.

One advantage is that you can use different servers or service providers. factorio.com appears to be hosted by heroku, which seems to be a great service if you happen to like the programming languages they provide or use server software written in those languages. factorioforums.com is hosted by forpsi, which is a general-purpose webspace/vserver/dedicated server provider. Both the wiki and forums use software written in PHP, so heroku can't host these.

Separating the physical servers also improves the security, because some random phpBB or MediaWiki exploit can't easily be used to mess with their customer database.

Having different domain names also makes browsers treat the different sites as unrelated to each other, which makes cross-site-scripting attacks less dangerous.

All of these could be archived by using http://factorio.com/, http://forums.factorio.com/ and http://wiki.factorio.com/, but I guess it's a matter of personal preference which they choose. I also guess that both hosting services include a domain name, so why not register factorioforums.com?

EDIT: beaten to it by splwnd, of course an official statement is always better than my deductions ;-)

[slpwnd]

@wrtlprnft
That is very much correct. Well I haven't thought about lessening the possiblity of xss attacks, that is a good point. Separating the domains does feel sort of natural. The factorio.com is an official representation for the game while factorioforums.com is more of a fan page. There might be more in here in the future than just forums and wiki (see the OP).

Just a couple of comments:
- The website is written in Clojure
- The separation also has downsides - sharing the data about user accounts is (AFAIK) very hard (we don't have it now).

[ssilk]

The reason for separation is the hosting. AFAIK the http://www.factorio.com/forum is not possible, because the website is our custom thing while the forums are a php template. On the other hand recently we put a DNS alias so forums.factorio.com will get you here at the forum.

Hm, it's normally possible to put more than one server on a host an union them by another. A common, more or less well working setup, that I already used for that is for example making some apache hosts (forum, wiki, homepage) and put that together with a nginx-server. The apaches can run on any port. Or using a proxy before the servers, for example haproxy or varnish... With this setup you can route a single page of one domain to another server than the rest or make the whole thing scaleable.

What is the best solution? This depends only on the setup... And on the time you want to spent for that. In my work we decide this normally very soon and try to keep it as flexible as possible. But it's in general a good decision to keep the different software parted on different virtual hosts and don't put it on one virtual hosts, parted by directories, because this can be made later, but not the other way around. (or only with more effort)

Also a very bad idea is to have slightly different domains (here with and without s) and put completely different things on it. Nobody will understand that and the community is splitted, both will get only the half.

Edit: I'll try to answer any technical question about setup or best architecture for this website.