GTAStunting should be a stunters hub.

[Madmax]

As the title suggest. I think GTAS should make a radical change to become a stunters hub. WHen anyone talks about stunting in GTA, GTAS should come up in that conversation. This place is much quieter than it was before which is surprising given that GTA:V has created a huge influx of interest in stunting.

Forums aren't as popular as they were before
  - Forums just don't attract the same kind of people as they used to, I've noticed across all fan-sites I visit and Administer that forums just don't have the same kind of pull as they used to. This doesn't mean that the community itself is dead in the water and has no hopes of growth though. It just means that there has to be a pull, something to draw people in.

The GTASunting.net website looks...bad -
 - The GTAS front page looks bad. It's a clutter of boxes, has nothing that really pulls people in, and is essentially a front page pasted over a forum. I try to rep this place as much as possible when on reddit, I put the logo in my video. Honestly, any extra hits that come here probably don't stick around. I've been a member here since 2004, that's 11 years. The place doesn't feel like it has evolved or changed very much since then.


What I believe should happen is a complete revamp of the structure. Create a visually appealing website that is equally useful. The top bar is currently all forum centric, it even has "shop" which is completely useless. I believe the top bar should be as follows.

Home
It brings people back to the front page. The home page would have a short blurb about who we are, what we do .etc

Established in 2004(?), GTAStunting.net has been a hub for people who like to stunt within the Grand Theft Auto game series. Here you can find information about how to get started, various techniques used, share videos, and join in on conversation about tips and new tricks on our forums (link).

Something like above, under the blurb you can have news with new crew videos, popular members videos that are worthy. Maybe even a "stunt of the week", "challenge of the week" or something like that to create a little more pull and return hits.

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GTA:V(Dropdown)
GTA:IV(Dropdown)
GTA:SA(Dropdown)
GTA:ViceCity(Dropdown)

Have each of these be a menu option with a dropdown. Inside the dropdown include:

• Introduction to Stunting
• Techniques and Tricks
• Popular Vehicles

Introduction to stunting would be a small article about stunting in that particular game with very basic techniques to get a newbie started and able to hit small bumps, do small grinds and understand basic physics.

Techniques and tricks would link to a page with a list of tricks, (displayed either in list form or with pictures), each trick would be a link to a page that explains what the trick is, how to do it, why it happens and either a gif and/or video of the trick in action.

Popular vehicles would like to a page with all popular vehicles. Clicking on an individual vehicle links to a page explaining what makes the vehicle so popular and how to use it.

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Crews

Have a page with all the active crews (maybe even a page for old crews in the future).Have a list of all the crews. Each individual crew page can have a little intro, who the members are, a graphic of their logo and all of their videos neatly organized with links to youtube. These could probably be pulled from the crews forum page directly. As long as you instill a format for them to follow. Maybe they could be sorted by game. Personally I don't stunt SA or IV, having just an alphabetical list of crews doesn't tell me what they stunt and makes it hard to discover new crews that I might be interested in.

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Forum

A link to the forum

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The reason for many of these changes is that most of this information is lost in the forums. People seem intimidated when browsing forums and get discouraged quickly. The above requires a lot of work, but I believe a lot of the required information can be pulled from the forum and presented in an easy and aesthetically pleasing way. The forum should be used for the community aspects, not as a replacement for a website. Information needs to be stored properly and made easily accessible.

The forums also need to be a place where you can just sit back and talk about whatever. For example, yesterday I landed a huge stunt with the Faggio in GTA:V. I was super excited but also wanted to complain about the fact that I needed a 1 minute runup. I didn't find a place to really express that. It's probably a sentiment that a lot of stunters have, wanted to do small humble brags, complain (jokingly) about some other aspect and have peers sympathise. A lot of small talk is what brings people together, they are small relatable things. I didn't feel like my situation mandated a whole thread, especially since I wanted to keep the specifics of my stunt to myself. We're all in a very similar situation where we are grinding at particular stunts for hours. There are frustrations, annoyances, things that make you excited .etc. These don't warrant a whole thread individually, they're small sentiments. There should be a place to do that. (The trollbox is very inactive and doesn't belong on the frontpage)

The forums are currently extremely messy and disorganized. There are stickied threads that seem to just remain that way for no real reason. There should be some cohesion between similar threads in different subforums.

Using a forum as a method of storing information never works, it's not what they're built for. There are no formal formats that people use, it's all posts and it's too casual. Information should always be categorised, accessible, professional, and easy to understand.


Additionally, somewhere on the website, there should be a link to the GTA:O Crew. Sure it's filled with a lot of unknowns but having a large crew spreads awareness. Stunting shouldn't be for just a core group of people, we should invite everyone to join and try.

[Rusch69]

I'd also like to see a more structured and nicer redesign for these forums. The site has always been looking boring and unclear.
(The changing banners were cool tho!)

Dropdowns for the categories are a good idea in my opinion. This reminds me of the good old dropdown spoilers, R.I.P.


I think an implemented GTAS Wiki would be the shizznit! It could include crew histories, GTAS' history, every year's award winners, tutorials/methods, game physics, vehicle guides, allowed cheats/mods, patch notes (IV/V), encoding guides, etc.
All the info is basically here already, someone just would have to extract and renovate it.

BUT I don't see any changes happening, simply because no one steps up to actually change stuff. It would be too much of a workload...
There's good suggestions being made every now and then, but pretty much none has ever been realized.




Edit: We used to have a chatbox at the very bottom of the page on GTAS.de, that way people could chat very easily. No matter where you currently were on the page. That encouraged the gossip a lot.

[Simon]

I'm down for a change. We just need to find someone who has the know how, is willing and does it for free.

I'd love to add you on Skype or something though Madmax 

[Ltab-]

I agree with the changes in the site, any kind of renewal will be cool but it's hard to see it happening either. Which is very sad to be honest. If these type of suggestions happened like about two years ago I would've been very keen to help but nowadays I have a very busy schedule therefore no time for such a workload. It's not that I'm not interested in this right now, but you know what I mean.
I don't really know who is managing the whole GTAS website (I guess it's AJ Collins?) but whoever actually takes the responsability should contact him, to get access to anything in the website.

To whoever takes the job: you got my support mayne

[Artifex]

support

[OrangeW]

support

there was a thread on what to do with the forums, but I somehow can't find it, even though it's pretty recent.

With more and more GTA V stunters checking the site out, a lot of them are telling me on Skype that the forum and homepage is just too confusing. I've no idea how to fix this, since I'm not a designer by any means, but it's something that needs to be done

[NEM]

I'm more of a underground kind of person, so I don't complain about as it is.

[Rainbow]

I don't know if we can change the website if we don't have AJ around, but a wiki is completely independent. I would be down to help sorting out stuff for it and help a bit but I have no idea how to create one and not the time to go and learn how to make one 

[Madmax]

I work/studied in IT Management Business Administration. Basically I can help with pitfalls, planning, organisation, seo, website erogomics, and all that bullshit. Unfortunately my programming and website making skills (I can design, not execute) are fairly intermediate.

There are ways to offset any additional costs making this would incure. Usually images are the biggest culprit, hosting images externally, although not ideal, would offset some additional server costs if that's an issue.

If there really isn't anyone who can step up to make a front page, there is always WordPress. You can make some pretty solid webpages, or customise premade ones. The issue with this solution is that, again, there is an associated cost. Not as much as a programmer/web designer, but still a cost.

As for wiki's, its a good idea in theory. The issue with wiki's is that smaller ones don't tend to have good formatting, it has some of the same pitfalls that the forums have. They also require some form of moderation unless you lock the wiki up so that edits have to be approved (still requires moderation).

The main hurdle here I believe is getting all of the information organised and formatted. We have most of the info on the forums already and the rest in our collective minds. I feel like if we asked, we could get a good deal of the information collected on the forums. If the wiki idea is the best solution/most popular idea, implementing formatting rules for content would probably be the way to go. Have a couple content moderators have final say and clean up articles so that they are up to par with standards.

I've never made a wiki myself but I believe they are pretty straight forward. I will investigate when it's not 1am.

So I see a few solutions.

• Make a WordPress website. Gather content on forums and make content pages slowly but surely.
• Make a WordPress website. Make a wiki and combine the 2.
• Make a website by hand, collect content on forums and make content pages manually as well.
• Make a website by hand, make a wiki and use those for the majority of content pages.

I think if we go the wiki route, the last option is the best. Making a couple of pages isn't that hard. The wiki takes care of the rest. We would have to make a website master page (a top bar) and be able to combine the wiki pages and the master.

Alright. That's enough from me for now. I apologise for the lack of grammar, the rambling, and the general unorganized flow of ideas. I've been very busy with work (managing/running a family business is all consuming) and been substituting a little too much sleep for gaming/stunting time. I'm running on fumes and really just wanted to get ideas down. I'll be going to sleep now (weekend! Only half a days work to do tomorrow, I get to sleep in )

I'll look into wiki's asap.

[MV]

Direct contact might help..getting big names on youtube/twitch to add gtastunting into their intro on YT and a sidebar on twitch or something. but a lot of them are so big that they probably wouldn't, and it's rather bothersome. no idea. just an idea.

[Rainbow]

We should not rely on big names to help us out. And why would they?

[OrangeW]

We should not rely on big names to help us out. And why would they?

Agreed. I posed this question before, and Daffy shut it down, they have nothing to gain, unless we collectively sponsor them or some shit, and besides, there aren't any *regular* uploaders of stunting, or any stunters on Twitch

[NEM]

stunters actually use twitch?

[Rainbow]

there aren't any *regular* uploaders of stunting, or any stunters on Twitch

Well the reason for no streaming to twitch is that people don't want to lose spots. I sure as hell won't stream what I am trying  As far a regular uploaders, it's hard. Either you have to do easy stunts all the time to meet deadlines because only uploading hard stunts won't work. You just don't know when you will land it.

Also, if you have a big sub list on youtube you can watch a new stunt video everyday if you want.

[Reynard The Fox]

I'm afraid the problem is not that simple. The truth is, forums are a dying breed. People who want to talk about their hobbies do so on the bigger social media platforms and websites, like Twitter and Youtube. This is seen as the stunting scene on Youtube really proliferated. For most younger web users signing up on a forum is too much of a hassle. I don't know if these forums support OAuth integration, but it would help the influx of new users because it lets you sign up with an already exisiting account on Facebook or Twitter.