Applications to join the Advertising Team have reopened - please see the bottom of the post for more info.
Alright, it's still November, but it's almost December, ok?
Due to a rather lovely post in the community news thread recently I got when users didn't really know what the advertising team were doing, I've decided to create a little update we can post now and then to let people know what's going on. Let's start.
Donations
The community admins and those paying for the server have recently been struggling to meet finances. We need people to donate, or we will be forced to close. Even though we've met November's donations, we have had very few donations for the past couple of months, and that money that isn't given is having to come personally out of the payer's pockets, and they don't want to do it now, which we don't blame them for. Therefore, the team has been looking at better ways to get donations coming in.
One big way we've found is Patreon. This allows you to give a small amount each month and get rewards in return for it. We're doing this so we can get more consistent donations coming in, which means we don't need to worry as much about whether we meet our target or not. The automatic Discord integration in Patreon has allowed us to give a free Donor role on Discord, which we will also give on the forums. On Discord, Donors can change their nickname, and we may look at giving them special permissions for the ERBot in the future. Forum donations will stay as-is, but donors will not get the role on Discord. Take a look at our Patreon page and please consider donating at https://patreon.com/escaperestart.
Social Media
Ogarci and Hexical_ have recently set up a new EscapeRestart Facebook page that they are now maintaining. Posts on the page are regular, and it's a great improvement on our social media presence. Please make sure you follow/share/whatever at https://www.facebook.com/escaperestartgaming/ to show your support! Huge thanks to Ogar and Hex.
The (really) most observant of people may have noticed that our @EscapeRestart Twitter isn't getting the same amount of love and care that our Facebook is being shown. It's sort of getting a bit, but not much. I intend to look into rectifying that in the future.
On the forums, we have recently implemented some social media integration onto our pages. On our pages, at the bottom, you may have noticed this:
Obviously, it being at the bottom isn't the most ideal for visibility, but it's where XenForo puts it. Please use that if you see a post you like on the forums! We've also given people the ability to register to the forums using Facebook and Twitter. This may not be very helpful for you, but for those signing up, it may make things slightly easier. You can associate your Facebook and Twitter accounts with your forum account in the External Accounts section of your settings.
Adverts
We wouldn't be the advertising team if we didn't look at hosting ads - 'ad' is in the name, after all. We've been experimenting with a couple of different platforms - Facebook and Reddit for example, and we've been trying to find how good and cost-effective they are, and basically whether to keep doing them. We have been receiving analytics on these, so we will be looking at the results very soon.
Gameservers
Since the creation of the Advertising Team, we have added a third voting site - minecraftservers.org, to the sites you can use to support our server. A lot of our ideas about Minecraft at the moment are still in idea form - a lot of this with games needs to be automatic to prevent the admins from going insane, and automatic means devs. We don't have a lot of devs, and the devs we do have already have things they need to dev and also have lives. That means progress on that is really slow. Things we have been discussing include linking forum accounts to the server, the rewards you can get from that (which is where the actual dev work is needed) and better voting rewards, given to those who vote consecutively over a certain time. Hopefully, progress will be made by the next Advertising Update.
Applications for the Advertising Team have reopened!
Our team is currently quite small and consists of Controllers+. That's not very good, and you could really say there's no point in having the team. We need more users to help contribute to advertising. Obviously, advertising isn't easy, or we would have had it done ages ago. We would like applicants to be able to come up with creative ideas to get our name out and work well in a team. The team has a private forum and Discord channel for communication. Applications will close next week, and those involved will be PMed once the decision has been made, with successful applicants being announced in the Community News. All applications will be private, and at the most read only by head staff (but probably just me). Apply now at http://polr.me/PleaseApply.
Alright, it's still November, but it's almost December, ok?
Due to a rather lovely post in the community news thread recently I got when users didn't really know what the advertising team were doing, I've decided to create a little update we can post now and then to let people know what's going on. Let's start.
Donations
The community admins and those paying for the server have recently been struggling to meet finances. We need people to donate, or we will be forced to close. Even though we've met November's donations, we have had very few donations for the past couple of months, and that money that isn't given is having to come personally out of the payer's pockets, and they don't want to do it now, which we don't blame them for. Therefore, the team has been looking at better ways to get donations coming in.
One big way we've found is Patreon. This allows you to give a small amount each month and get rewards in return for it. We're doing this so we can get more consistent donations coming in, which means we don't need to worry as much about whether we meet our target or not. The automatic Discord integration in Patreon has allowed us to give a free Donor role on Discord, which we will also give on the forums. On Discord, Donors can change their nickname, and we may look at giving them special permissions for the ERBot in the future. Forum donations will stay as-is, but donors will not get the role on Discord. Take a look at our Patreon page and please consider donating at https://patreon.com/escaperestart.
Social Media
Ogarci and Hexical_ have recently set up a new EscapeRestart Facebook page that they are now maintaining. Posts on the page are regular, and it's a great improvement on our social media presence. Please make sure you follow/share/whatever at https://www.facebook.com/escaperestartgaming/ to show your support! Huge thanks to Ogar and Hex.
The (really) most observant of people may have noticed that our @EscapeRestart Twitter isn't getting the same amount of love and care that our Facebook is being shown. It's sort of getting a bit, but not much. I intend to look into rectifying that in the future.
On the forums, we have recently implemented some social media integration onto our pages. On our pages, at the bottom, you may have noticed this:
Obviously, it being at the bottom isn't the most ideal for visibility, but it's where XenForo puts it. Please use that if you see a post you like on the forums! We've also given people the ability to register to the forums using Facebook and Twitter. This may not be very helpful for you, but for those signing up, it may make things slightly easier. You can associate your Facebook and Twitter accounts with your forum account in the External Accounts section of your settings.
Adverts
We wouldn't be the advertising team if we didn't look at hosting ads - 'ad' is in the name, after all. We've been experimenting with a couple of different platforms - Facebook and Reddit for example, and we've been trying to find how good and cost-effective they are, and basically whether to keep doing them. We have been receiving analytics on these, so we will be looking at the results very soon.
Gameservers
Since the creation of the Advertising Team, we have added a third voting site - minecraftservers.org, to the sites you can use to support our server. A lot of our ideas about Minecraft at the moment are still in idea form - a lot of this with games needs to be automatic to prevent the admins from going insane, and automatic means devs. We don't have a lot of devs, and the devs we do have already have things they need to dev and also have lives. That means progress on that is really slow. Things we have been discussing include linking forum accounts to the server, the rewards you can get from that (which is where the actual dev work is needed) and better voting rewards, given to those who vote consecutively over a certain time. Hopefully, progress will be made by the next Advertising Update.
Applications for the Advertising Team have reopened!
Our team is currently quite small and consists of Controllers+. That's not very good, and you could really say there's no point in having the team. We need more users to help contribute to advertising. Obviously, advertising isn't easy, or we would have had it done ages ago. We would like applicants to be able to come up with creative ideas to get our name out and work well in a team. The team has a private forum and Discord channel for communication. Applications will close next week, and those involved will be PMed once the decision has been made, with successful applicants being announced in the Community News. All applications will be private, and at the most read only by head staff (but probably just me). Apply now at http://polr.me/PleaseApply.
