Well, this is a really big job... we have to do all 12 pictures and then the quilt will move back and give way for the next frame of picures...problem is (probably) that the quilt cannot loop unless someone changes the centre of the starting frames... interesting idea
Squashed the bug. Only happened on the left column or top row of a quilt without wrapping. Those quilts have too many options. Scaling the quilt doesn't work either ATM...
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We definitely need more active users, but I can't very well place an ad posting on tiles.ice.org every month, that would be rude... I tried recruiting users in multiple gfx forums, but wasn't very successful. Maybe invading chat rooms might work, or just lots of good old word-of-mouth from our members.
Or maybe I'm doing something wrong. We have attracted lots of good artists but many haven't been active in quite a while. I'm sure I'm missing something, maybe we had a bit too much drama in the past, or good artists don't want to get mingled in with the newbies (even if just for a short while until their levels increase). But: the site has been active for two years now and is IMHO still going strong.
That wasn't meant as a complaint. Seven years aren't that long after all
I think ice.org had some more activity; but they also got lots of attraction by their photo packs. And I think they got slashdotted once or twice. But I can also remember times when no new tiles were appearing.
I'm not into any other art communities, so I cannot really recruit. Most others I know switched to 3D rendering anyway. But we cannot do cooperative 3D artwork (yet?) :'C
But there are always 50 to 100 "guests" online. I wonder why noone of them ever joins. Those can't all be search engine bots?
At the current rate it's only 4 years (5 tiles in 1 month, 20x12 tiles) for this quilt, but of course the tiles are big and usually you don't need to do 240 big tiles for one quilt. It's a nice experiment.
In this day and age of "immediate satisfaction" even a few weeks are a long time. In addition to that, having quilts with suboptimal tiles (like the garden quilt some time ago) on the frontpage might drive away talent. Quilt levels are an attempt to improve quilt "quality", and that is successful to an extent. But in order to achieve critical mass and attract more talent, I feel there's something missing. Maybe it's focus; the site tries to please multiple crouds and it doesn't always work.
3D art is nice, but IMO hard to do in collaboration, with everyone preferring different rendering and lighting modes. I myself, being quite old-school, am not attracted to 3D modelling and rendering as much as to 2D drawing and painting, although I have done lots of texturing and some 3D modelling in the past. 2D art is also easier to get into and doesn't require as steep a learning curve. I don't think we can fill this niche yet.
Re: guests, some of them are crawlers (some are too stupid to understand the various rel="nofollow" tags and keep shifting the quilts and crawling almost identical pages every day). There should be some filtering based on the referrer, so the bots could get filtered out. Many of the guests are just members that are not logged in; most members hit the site multiple times per day. Of course, the amount of lurkers is a magnitude higher than the amount of contributors on every site I can think of, so those account for the rest.
I even submitted stories about this site to Slashdot and Digg, but they weren't published. I posted links on tiles.ice.org multiple times, because the shutdown of that site was the reason for onlinequilt.net to be created. I'm hesitant to post there again because I think it's rude to post ads for a "competing" site, even if tiles.ice.org is pretty much dead.
The one feature we don't have (aside from user numbers, and perhaps a chat) are private quilts, but I have seen too many dead private quilts with only three tiles. I try to build elites with the levels, but the sense of community is still not strong enough. If someone told me "hey dude this is the feature my group wants and we'll come in droves and want to be your gfx elite sheltered away in ivory tower private quilts with no n00bs allowed", I might be tempted.
BTW I'm not ranting or even thinking of ever shutting down. This is not a race or a competition, for all I care we can go on forever. It's just that if all good artists we had were active at the same time, I'd be very happy. OK, now I'll stop musing and think about the next tile I'm going to do!
Yes, I doubt that missing features is why we have so few users. Of course having something new like hexagonal quilts or some crazy 3-dimensional quilts would boost activity among the existing users for a short while (as everyone's trying it out) - but I doubt it would help for very long. So it's not really worth the effort. In the end, every new feature will also make the site more complex and harder to use for newcomers!
I put a link on my Elfwood page (http://elfwood.lysator.liu.se/~sven) wrote to Thomas (the founder of Elfwood) whether he gives us a link. But I doubt it; they're very picky with their links. So I guess we have to hope for the e-fairy to make us famous somehow.
By the way: How are you runnign the site? Do you have your own server? All those png images and zoomquilts must generate quite a bit of traffic. And you also removed the google-ads?
Though I do have the fortune of being managing director of a webhosting company (shameless plug: http://www.syswebcom.net/ ), I do of course pay for the hosting myself. I tried some advertising, but with the current layout ads just get in the way and detract from the user experience, so I killed them.
Surprisingly, the site generates only about 4GB of traffic per month, that is well below my limit. The images are mostly so small that traffic is of no concern. Costs are low, so I don't need a Paypal donation account yet
Thanks for the link, I really appreciate it!
Edit: I don't feel "desperate", though
I'm slowly working on the bottom left corner tile. I'm having some minor issues getting it to look the way I want it, so I thought I'd let you guys know. Those tracks don't look very complicated until you start to try getting them shaded correctly to match the tile above.
