Since I know that there are many readers from my biggest website, minecraft-server.eu, I want to use this space to talk about how I see minecraft-server.eu in the future and what I think are sensible steps to use the potential of the site and to advertise our network.
In February 2011, I created a Minecraft website. I was playing Minecraft at the time and had the problem that I couldn't find a suitable server to play on. There were already English-language server lists where you could register as a server owner, but on the one hand I wanted something German-language, on the other hand all the existing lists were too simple for me. In the lists, you could hardly go into detail about your own server and could only present it poorly. I was also of the opinion that if you consider all server operators as a target group, it is a logical step to offer these server operators a forum in which they can exchange information. In the meantime, this small idea has become the largest German-speaking Minecraft community, essentially consisting of the server list and a forum. Running this site costs money (currently 3 host systems and various licensing costs) and because I don't want to pay for that myself, I'm working a lot on how to monetise it.
So now I have a big website and I want to use the potential of this site. But what actually is the potential? Basically, for me it's about 3 things:
- Enormous reach. minecraft-server.eu has over one million visitors per month. This is a great reach that can be used to push new websites.
- Good link strength. minecraft-server.eu is a server list that is linked to from many other pages. This, but also numerous other links, ensure that Google likes our page. Accordingly, links from minecraft-server.eu to other pages are also valuable.
- Strong infrastructure. minecraft-server.eu runs on 3 host systems. These are designed in such a way that we always have resources left over for performance peaks. In fact, these resources are only called up during attacks (DDOS), if at all. Under normal load, our servers get bored - so there is still room for one or the other project.
With this starting situation, we thought about how we could expand a few years ago. The first idea, which we also implemented with the server list V3, has now been discarded. Nevertheless, I want to go into it and also explain the problems with it.
The idea was to make our server list "multi-client capable". This means that we installed the server list code and the forum only once, and depending on which domain you use to call up the server list, the server list for a different game is displayed.
This was possible because we designed the serverlist V3 (a 100% in-house development) for this function from the beginning and because there is a plugin called "MultiSite" for our Xenforo forum that allows exactly this. The big advantage with this was also that with one user account you were automatically logged on to all server lists. So a large community should have been created.
But in fact it caused more and more problems. Especially in the forum. The plugin used was developed very slowly at the beginning. We participated in the alpha test and reported some bugs. The plugin also got better, but there were still some stumbling blocks that caused more and more challenges, especially for us in the administration and moderation interface.
The MultiSite plugin was also forced to anchor itself very deeply in the forum, so that there were often difficulties with forum updates or incompatibilities among the forum plugins.
The new idea for spiele-server.eu
So we said goodbye to this idea and are now pursuing a more separate network that is also open to communities that are not ours. So if you run a gaming community and want to network, get in touch with me!
The new spiele-server.eu network is no longer an installed server list, but separate systems that are linked via a static navigation at the top of the screen. By the way, only for this navigation we have set up an extra server which does nothing else than deliver this bar (as a Javascript file) via a NGINX and Cloudflare.
This new system makes us more open. On the one hand, a community in the network no longer necessarily has to have a server list, and on the other hand, anyone who wants to can contribute themselves and their community. The communities are also more independent of each other. Attacks on one of the communities no longer affect the other communities.
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