I've played Sins since it was released, purchased it before beta and there's two things which I think the community needs more than anything.
1) A dedicated forum for mods
and
2) A torrent service for mod downloads.
More details on each point, as follows
1) A dedicated forum for mods
I personally find this official sins custom forum a pain in the rear to use, it lacks features I'm usually accustomed to from brands such as Vbulletin, MyBB and other softwares.
It's often slow and unresponsive in general
Additionally, mods are restricted to a single thread for all feedback, which makes searching for a possible issue, not to mention getting feedback in general, a pain, to say the least.
As I have some 8+ years running community sites for games, I propose setting up a dedicated forum, seperate to this site (of course), which would be dedicated to modders/mods.
Each mod would have it's own category and forums for news, support and other information, making it much easier to find the information you need, plus it'd be much easier for modders to respond to feedback and post new information etc.
The forum would run on commercial software, perhaps Vbulletin 4, or Xenforo, thus, it would be much easier to use, than this one.
It would be hosted on a dedicated server, with sufficient ram/cpu/diskspace to accomodate lots of posters/readers.
2) A torrent service for mod downloads.
One of the problems I seem to face as a user and what I notice modders face as developers, is the ability to find a decent download site, which is happy to host their mods.
Sites that are used, are often slow, have loads of adverts and are a pain to download from, which must be frustrating for both modders and players alike.
I propose the creation of a torrent network, purely for sins mods (both past, present and future ones), with the main torrent device being a dedicated server with a "fat pipe" (so to speak)
This service would be offered to those who host their mod forums on the dedicated forum I mention above and to those who choose to use this forum.
Having a torrent service for mods would make it much easier to download/upload mods, plus it'd get rid of the need for download services which bombard people with ads, popups and slow download speeds.
So, any thoughts?