Monday, January 14, 2013

These Parts of the CC Need Activity

After a wonderful bout of activity courtesy of Survivor and a couple of wolfling runs, the CC has hit yet another period of silence. If I had to take a guess, this is mostly due to the winter holiday period ending and people returning to their usual work/school/what-have-you schedules. It's a boring silence, as silences tend to be, but I don't think there's much that can be done about it apart from waiting.

That said, there are parts of the CC that have been silent a long while before this current one, and so I decided to blog about these parts and see if I can help snag them the activity that they really need.

First order of business: the Creatures Wiki. We all know about it - it's probably the prime hub of knowledge as far as the community is concerned. However, it's in need of a little help - no one's been actively keeping it up-to-date for a while (most likely due to the fact that there was talk of a move that never went anywhere). So, the place needs curators. I'm planning on doing my part soon, starting with the pages for my own stuff, but there's no way I'm going to be able to update the whole wiki myself. For anyone else who's interested, here's what I think we need:
  • Cleaning up the older pages. There are some dead projects that had a wild history and therefore deserve pages, but there are other projects that have but a few lines dedicated to them on their pages. I think the latter should have their pages axed and their contents moved to the "Development Ideas" page. This category also includes going through the older pages and updating them with things like new versions, spelling and grammar corrections, rewriting the pages so that they're more informative and seem less like advertisements (a lot of pages seem to have this problem...), etc. 
  • Adding new pages for the things that don't have them. This includes a lot of my own work (which I'll get to adding myself at some point), but I can think of other things that deserve to have a page, but don't have one.
That's pretty much all I can think of; perhaps other people can think of a longer checklist?

Second thing: The Creatures Repository. It has 2000+ creatures, but recently it's been suffering from a lack of uploads. The only person who's been actively uploading creatures in recent history is Ylukyun. No doubt the recently improved CCaves Download section is giving it some competition, but that doesn't mean that the place has to be shafted. It's just as viable an adoption center as any place, and submitting a few creatures is easy.

The final place that I can think of that could use some activity is the Garden Box forums. The Garden Box is quite possibly one of the greatest agents ever made, but there has been an extreme lack of drive to get anything made for it, and all in all it hasn't been making the splash that it should have been (the fact that it didn't get a spot on Ghosthande's C3/DS Must-Haves isn't helping matters). It's not so much that there's a lack of people using it; there's a lack of people making agents that work with it (even Amai hasn't been doing anything with it as of late). We either need more developers making stuff for it, or increased awareness of it so that the developers can get the motivation they need to make stuff for it.

All three of these websites can be found in the Links section, but I'll also link to them here:
Creatures Wiki
The Creature Repository
Garden Box Forums

Let's give these websites some more love; they certainly need it!