Welcome back everyone - and happy new year! For 2024, I have decided to relaunch Caster Clubhouse, an ‘old school’-style MetaZoo-related discussion forum.
Since the shuttering of the official MetaZoo Games Discord server’s discussion areas, it is now much harder to find a place to chat about MetaZoo, ask gameplay questions or talk to a judge, share deck builds, or even advertise your MetaZoo content - and that’s the space Caster Clubhouse hopes to provide! All of this and more is welcomed in the Clubhouse, and we’ll be updating with more direction in the coming weeks as we figure out what the community needs.
So what is a forum anyway?
If you’ve never joined a forum before, it’s not dissimilar to Reddit, or even Discord - but there are a few differences. Caster Clubhouse is as an independent website that doesn’t rely on those platforms, or Facebook, YouTube, or any other social media or messaging company for its base service, which also means we aren’t subject to their algorithms and practices.
A forum is chronologically organized, with all posts simply being displayed in the order they were made or replied to. It is also split into different subject areas, called “boards”, which separate discussion into relatable categories the same way channels do on a Discord server. Whenever you want to talk about something, you find a “topic” or thread that’s already discussing it, or you hit the “new topic” button at the top of a board’s main page, and you just start making posts. Because all topics are thread-based, you can return to the same subject again and again, and can separate discussion into different spaces without changing the subject. This also allows you to ignore discussions you don’t want to participate in, as all you need to do is not click the topic to view it.
Because of the way a forum is hosted on a website, instead of inside an app, you don’t need to download anything or even register an account to view the forum. Topics, once made, show up in search results, meaning people who google something like “how does the blood sucker trait work?” can see any topics or posts made on this forum about the blood sucker trait. You can also easily share the links to any post on the forum just by clicking the little URL symbol at the top of a post, meaning you can share your content, replies, or discussions in videos, in servers, or anywhere else without those posts becoming harder to find over time. It’s also a lot easier to catch up on what you’ve missed. ;)
So what’s Caster Clubhouse’s plan?
As a goal, I would obviously like to see Caster Clubhouse have a great variety of daily users, who can pop in to ask and answer gameplay questions, advertise tournaments and form playgroups, and just talk about MetaZoo. I hope to make this a place that is easily accessible and useable for new and old collectors, players or even disillusioned former fans to chat about MetaZoo for many years to come!
Logistically, I have a few things that I hope to accomplish soon; in the short-term, I want to update the forum’s layout and design, and find some dedicated posters to help me generate more content and interest. I would like to create some “new to forums” guides, and find some volunteers to help me moderate and manage the community.
In the long-term, I would like to switch softwares. Currently, this forum is run using phpBB, an open source forum software which - while reliable - is not as cutting edge as it could be. Ideally, I’d like to get a license for Xenforo, a paid forum software that is much more user friendly and has many features phpBB doesn’t, such as letting users install the forum as a progressive web app on their devices, live page updates, post reactions, topic tagging, and more! This would likely require a sponsor of some sort, however, as the license costs about $200 USD to buy, with an annual renewal fee of $40 USD if I wanted to keep hosting it myself, or a monthly fee of $60 or more USD to be hosted on their cloud-based hosting service. If/when that happens, however, there’s no need to worry; all accounts and posts will be migrated over to the new software, and we won’t lose anything!
What can I do to help Caster Clubhouse grow?
Post! Give me feedback! Share your stuff! Make posts here, and then share them elsewhere! Give us a shoutout on your platform of choice! All of this is so much more helpful than you know. At the moment, the most important thing is ensuring the forum looks and stays active, so new users don’t think it’s a dead site (which admittedly, at the moment, it kinda is), and sharing it about so it gets some exposure. Even a single post or share goes a very long way to helping Caster Clubhouse grow. :)
Thank you for reading - and happy new year once again, my friends! Here’s to a 2024 full of Casting for us all!