Website/Domain Name Poll

[David]

Just taking some thoughts since people have told me it's much to RPG-esque if we expanded into other popular series like Call of Duty or sports franchises.

[Unknown ProbLem]

I decided to vote and I'd post why. My reasoning behind it, is that it's named Eldersouls. granted if you actually come to the site, the message says Skyrim and Dawnguard forum.However, I feel that without generally coming here and just hearing the name or telling a friend broadly that they would probably assume some sort of gaming site.I think it's fine, but if you want to stray the 100% ES sounding title, just change the domain message from Skyrim and Dawnguard to something more general if you see it as a bother.

[Brad]

Well I voted for a name change purely because I would like to see more people asking about different gamesANDI was talking to a clan you used to war with regularly I found out. And they were under the impression TRR had closed and had gone into skyrim instead of RS. Took me a while to explain it was a gaming forum you see :/

[Unknown ProbLem]

Now I may feel as if I'm wrong, because that makes a lot of sense and my approach was just more general where as you have a rather large point with that :/ maybe it would be time? i don't know, but I do know i'll still be posting Skyrim stuff and what-not here because this is by-far my favorite forum site.also, @Brad, nice Sig, lol.

[David]

Well I voted for a name change purely because I would like to see more people asking about different gamesANDI was talking to a clan you used to war with regularly I found out. And they were under the impression TRR had closed and had gone into skyrim instead of RS. Took me a while to explain it was a gaming forum you see :/

Interesting. What clan was that? I figured the RS link to the TRR index would have fixed most of that.The only thing with changing domain names is that our search engine traffic (like 85-90% of our traffic) would likely tank and it would take months to recover, if ever. It's the same reason I'm afraid of burying the Skyrim sections to the same level as other games. It's such a large majority of our traffic that I'm afraid change will jeopardize it.The only thing I can say is that regardless of the domain the Skyrim stuff is eventually going to need to be relegated to the "Game Specific" category like RuneScape. Possibly under an "Elder Scrolls" series link to it's own mini-forum along with previous/future TES installments.It then just becomes a matter of whether or not people are going to join a Call of Duty community/section (just an example) whose main domain "Elder Souls". It's kind of a genre stretch.

[Unknown ProbLem]

Maybe, and this is just a thought about what you just said would be to (And doing anything coding wise etc. is a hassle) would be to make individual game-specific forums like you have with Skyrim and RS for games that generally attract viewers. like just throwing a random example would be like the Fallout or Assassin's Creed series. maybe that would help a little more?As of right now, I don't really know of a way to help you, even as much as I really do want to because keeping this place alive kind of depends on Skyrim over RS or any other game.I do however believe that due to Skyrim bringing in around 90% of our traffic like you said that it should probably stay somewhat/mostly Skyrim, but I don't think my original idea/paragraph thing would be a bad idea so at least if we have others, they can post in what they like etc.maybe a poll for favorite games and have people list them? idk. not just Xbox or PS3's either, we're multi-platform!

[Blake]

The first answer, to me anyway, is an obvious yes.As for changing the domain, that is a double edged sword. We keep it and we deal with other games not being represented well, but keep the current traffic. We change it, and the opposite happens.I would say, for now, to change the Skyrim and Dawnguard message, but I'd imagine that even that brings a lot of people to the forum.

[David]

The title "Skyrim and Dawnguard Forum" or whatever will definitely be changed. That's just up until the whole Dawnguard thing settles down."ElderSouls".com itself doesn't bring any traffic really. The problem in switching domains is that every page that's linked to on other websites is now a broken link. This is bad because not only is no traffic able to come directly through that link, but all of the "link juice" (the boost we get in search engine page ranking when legit sites link to us) that we get from simply being linked to is lost and ALL pages in Google are then affected. Google itself will even have to re-crawl EVERY page and determine whether or not we're worthy all over again.Domain age is also something that's important. At 6-7 months, ElderSouls.com is finally maturing into something that search engines will rank (tons of spam sites are just up for a month or two and there's a threshold) and our traffic has been steadily improving at a pretty good rate.For the reasons above changing the domain name isn't really practical or advisable at all unless it's obviously going to greatly hinder future growth. Is having the current domain name going to matter to Assassins Creed or CoD players to the extent that they don't visit/register? Will they immediately discount the site as something other than what they're looking for? Is there a clearly superior alternative domain available? That's what it comes down to.

[Nathan]

I voted yes to both but really I'm unsure as to whether its worth changing, it does currently give the impression that this is mainly a Skyrim community but at the same time I understand it would be really difficult to recover from moving and could just make everything far more confusing.

[Eric the Bard]

I think the name is good for a gaming community. I don't mind, as long as you change the Skyrim and Dawnguard thing.