New Website Proposal

[Erick_Cantu]

Ultimately, the decision by you to start your own website is none of our business. If you want to, great, if you don't, don't.

[qballbandit]

"there really is not a site dedicated just for Open Rails and all of the sites have MSTS content mixed into them"

Here , for instance - Then don't frequent those specific forums and stay active in the ORTS ones???

[eric]

"there really is not a site dedicated just for Open Rails and all of the sites have MSTS content mixed into them"

Here , for instance - Then don't frequent those specific forums and stay active in the ORTS ones???

Exactly. The order of the forums displayed here is quite deliberate:

• Open Rails & TSRE
• Run 8
• Dovetail Games
• MSTS
• Trainz
• The Yard
• Everything Else

Clearly ORTS is the largest audience here by a large margin.

[Nels_Anderson]

I see the point about a visitor here being potentially confused by coverage of multiple sims when they are only interested in OpenRails. I've been aware of this for a long time now... at one point on FlightSim.Com we had "Landing Pages", which were essentially alternative site home pages but devoted just to a single sim. It was possible to filter things so on a landing page you'd see new, latest posts, new files, etc. but only for just one sim. We even set up unique URL's, i.e. instead of "www.trainsim.com" you could point to a landing page at "openrails.trainsim.com". This was done within the capabilities of vBulletin, so maybe Eric could do something similar here.

Actually, here is a flightsim example:

https://www.flightsim.com/landing-pages/fsxlanding/

The site isn't vBulletin any more but will still give a general idea of what the concept can look like.

[eric]

Not a bad thought, Nels.

I'm in the final planning for the vBulletin 6 upgrade right now, but landing pages can be added fairly easily, with the added ability to pre-set sorting and filtering in the file library searches.

[eric]

Something like this?

https://www.trainsim.com/forums/OpenRails

The searches are still generic, but getting them to be pre-loaded as ORTS for the platform is pretty simple.

[Nels_Anderson]

Yes, that's the general concept. Nice to see it's still fairly easy to do.

[eric]

The Sitebuilder capability in vB5 and vB6 does make page layouts fairly straight forward. I'll have to write a little code to set the filters for the search form and new files filters, but that's pretty straight forward.

[scottb613]

Hi Eric,

All your new page needs is some good badging.
😉


ORTS_Logo2.png


Regards,
Scott

[BrandonS261]

I really like this idea Eric and it is exactly what I was thinking. Thank you for doing this!

Brandon