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News & General Discussion
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If you are like most developers, you stick your community on things like Facebook and Steam groups. You install convoluted third party forums and wikis onto your site. Probably worst of all, you spend way too much time trying to get feedback and interaction from your users.

EpicJoin is a solution built to resolve these problems. EpicJoin has more community and project building tools than Facebook Groups, Steam Groups, phpbb3 and mediawiki! Now it is easier than ever to cultivate your community using EpicJoin! :smile: Our own software, Forge Networking, has greatly benefited from EpicJoin, now your projects can too.

As a few of you knew (or now know), I am the creator of the Asset Store addon Forge Networking, and I am actually here to find some Beta testers for our latest software. Your project can be either a game, software, or asset store addon.

So what is EpicJoin put simply?
EpicJoin is a tool where you have a forum, wiki, bug reporting, suggestions, and answers all in one place.

If you would like to see Forge Networking on EpicJoin and how our community is taking advantage of the tools then check out this link: http://epicjoin.com/ForgeNetworking/

Why EpicJoin? Where did it come from? Why is it useful?
So, to give a bit of backstory, while creating Forge Networking we gained a fair user base back in beta. These users were super helpful and gave tons of great feedback. One thing we really wanted is for all of the users of Forge Networking was to be a part of a community as well as help us make a better product. We thought about Facebook and Steam Groups in order to build a community, but it was just too clunky or lacking in features. In the end, we decided to just integrate forums (phpbb3) and a wiki (mediawiki) into our website. Well there were a few hurdles we had to get over, luckily I actually am both a front-end and back-end developer so I was able to write plugins and modify both phpbb3 and mediawiki to use a single login for everything.

It was great once we got everything going, however it became a great divide, people would use one but not the other. Also the tools were third party and open source which leads to numerous bugs and known hacks. On top of all of this we needed bug tracking and feature requests for Forge Networking. We decided that we would write our own simple bug and feature tracking system on the main site to try and keep everything together. Well at the end of the day, the whole thing was a mess.

In comes EpicJoin.

We finally decided that it was time to make a website that would help us build the Forge Networking community without all of the madness of Steam Groups, phpbb3, mediawiki, Facebook, and so forth. One thing we did want is to keep all of these features in a simple and easy to use way. This is when we started work on EpicJoin :smile:. While working on this tool we thought it would be great if we opened up the tool to be used by everyone and not just ourselves, so that is exactly what we did, no strings attached! :smile:

Please let me know if you have any questions, registration is free and so is setting up your Epic :slight_smile:

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This sounds great in theory but in practice from my own experiences, customers/players would rather use Facebook or Steam since it doesn’t require extra signing up. Obviously everyone’s mileage will vary here & I can see that it’s a great idea.

My Facebook page has over 17,000 likes and most are players, getting them to email me rather than post on Facebook is difficult enough. :slight_smile:

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Actually, I could see this being very useful in early development. Not sure it could replace Facebook and Twitter, etc., because those are more networking. EpicJoin is nice for communication with testers and those in the community who want a more in depth relationship with the developers.

Our community is still very small, but this definitely could be useful, especially with a game that is sort of different and will probably need a lot of communication to help people understand what it is about. :slight_smile:

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Thanks :smile: we are looking for the best way to connect users and get developers to move their community to EpicJoin to take advantage of our toolset. I sent your comments to one of our developers and so they actually have integrated Facebook Login and will be working on a Steam Login as well. We want to make the Join process as seamless as possible so your current community can start collaborating with you as fast as possible :slight_smile:

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Sounds cool.

Just working on converting my networking that’s currently using Tnet to Forge Networking. Really loving it so far in my tests. Well done!

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Sounds like a good tool.

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:smile: Thanks, it has already proven to be very helpful for working with the community on bugs and suggestions for Forge.

Thanks! :smile: If you have any questions let us know. We have put a lot of work into making it simple to use, easy to port to, and yet as powerful as possible :slight_smile:

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Thanks! :smile: We are super excited to share it with everyone and hopefully help everyone skip out on some of the difficulties we found when trying to build a community ourselves.

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:slight_smile: That is our main goal with EpicJoin. We were trying to come up with a tool that could help us be more productive and interactive with our community rather than having a forum, wiki, chat, bugs, and questions/answers spread out all over the place. :slight_smile: We started this tool to use for Forge Networking, so it is primarily designed for this hehe. I’m loving it so far if I do say so myself XD

That would be awesome! We are also offering the same fanatical support that people are use to with Forge Networking with EpicJoin. So if there is anything you need or would like to see the site have in order to better support your process and community, please let us know! :smile:

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Brent, are there docs for EpicJoin? I joined and Dennis has been trying to respond with more than just a comment but we can’t figure it out. Any help section for it?

That would be very important for users, especially alpha testers or other community members.

edit: Found the tutorial for posting code.

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Yeah, we are still working on all of the tutorial pages but if you click on the “What is …” link on any page on the left menu, it should provide a document about the page and how it works. We are still adding some new features so if you wish to leave a suggestion for the site we are open to those too :smile: http://epicjoin.com/EpicJoin/Suggestions

Awesome, I’ll be moving the docs for these into the tutorial pages (the “What is …” links) :slight_smile:

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Hey guys, just wanted to update that we now support ACL (Access Control Logic)! :smile: Now you can have multiple admins for one project. That means when you set someone as an admin they can then do official responses and post/edit news/announcements. You can also limit users on what they see and can do. :slight_smile: Let us know what you think! :smile:

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Great idea, but you need a web artist to do the visuals! :smile:

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Yes :slight_smile: we have worked hard to make the use of EpicJoin fluid and simple, our next steps are to make it better looking and even easier to flow through haha. Now all we need to do is find a good artist for this XD

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Hey guys, just wanted to let everyone know that we have added a listing for all of the owners, admins, and moderators in the about section so that users know who is admin and for bragging rights (lets be honest haha).

Examples:
EpicJoin - http://epicjoin.com/EpicJoin/About
ForgeNetworking - http://epicjoin.com/ForgeNetworking/About