Ideas to improve Squidboards / Help it grow - feel free to add your ideas!

[Lightspeed_Lunatic]

Squidboards is already great, but I had a few ideas for some small improvements to the site, as well as a few ideas I had to help it grow! If you have any ideas that I missed, feel free to add them in the reply section!

My ideas, in no particular order:

1. Add a feature similar to Google Translate. This will allow the forum to support non-English speaking Splatoon fans.
2. Add a form of subcategories for guides. I don't want to overcrowd the guides section, but I think that, for example, being able to set "Overfishing" or "Normal Play" when making a Salmon Run guide, or set which weapon class your guide is about when making a Weapons guide.
3. Add a video player. This will allow people to upload videos to suppliment their discussions, without needing to link to an outside website, as well as greatly enhance guides by allowing them to submit video demonstrations of what they are explaining much more easily.
4. Collab with Sendou, maybe? I'm not really sure what we could do with him, but having a link to our website on what's currently the most popular Western competitive Splatoon site would definitely increase our visibility.
5. Update the website to a Splatoon 3 design. Not that the current Splatoon 2 one is ugly or anything, but to newcomers, it might give the wrong impression (That this site is outdated and dead). Updating to a Splatoon 3 design and color scheme would avoid that issue, though admittedly, that would take a lot of work.
6. Alongside Turf and Anarchy, show the current X rank and Salmon Run Rotation, as well as if a Challenge is active. It would be a helpful little addition, and I can't think of any real downside to adding this feature, so why not?
7. Hold some kind of contest/event to drive engagement. Everyone loves a friendly competition, why not hold one to drive engagement? It doesn't have to be a full tournament or something, maybe just a "Most unique locker design" competition or something like that.
8. Add a little "How to use this Forum" page somewhere. Not that this site is extremely confusing to use or anything, but it is slightly intimidating to someone who's most complicated experince with the internet is Twitter, which is where a good chunk of people are coming from when they join this site.
9. Add S2 and S3 emojis to go along with the Splatoon 1 ones. It doesn't relally add that much to the site, but it would be a nice touch nonetheless!

Again, I already love this place, these are just a few ideas I had to make it better and make it grow more! Remember that I don't know how much some of this stuff would cost, so there might be some things here that couldn't work. Again, if anyone else has any other ideas, feel free to post them in the replies!

 

[Lightspeed_Lunatic]

Oh, I thought of one more-

It would be nice if we could embed Youtube videos!

 

[Shayreep]

A video player or some way to share videos from your switch would be extremely useful

 

[McSquid82]

To further elaborate on your idea of creating subcategories for the guides section, I believe there should be subforums for weapons, Salmon Run and story mode at the very least. Weapon specific forums would be useful for both the casual and competitve player. For example, I'm a firm believer in the vanilla Wide Roller (I know it's localized as the Big Swig but I much prefer the Japanese name in this case) and I really want to push it competitively.

 

[cryfecta]

For number 8, I believe there's already a userguide in the Welcome Center, if I'm not mistaken? Other than that, really good suggestions! Adding more subcategories would be so much better for filtering and usability in the long run. I'm also surprised that the site doesn't already have a Splat3 palette swap in the first place. Same with embedding Youtube videos, which would make crossposting for creators and guide makers wayyy easier.

We really need to focus on getting people to acknowledge Squidboard's existence right now, and making this place more appealing to Youtubers and the like may encourage them to spread the forum around. Getting the casual Youtube community to acknowledge Squidboards would be MASSIVE.

 

[Lightspeed_Lunatic]

For number 8, I believe there's already a userguide in the Welcome Center, if I'm not mistaken? Other than that, really good suggestions! Adding more subcategories would be so much better for filtering and usability in the long run. I'm also surprised that the site doesn't already have a Splat3 palette swap in the first place. Same with embedding Youtube videos, which would make crossposting for creators and guide makers wayyy easier.

We really need to focus on getting people to acknowledge Squidboard's existence right now, and making this place more appealing to Youtubers and the like may encourage them to spread the forum around. Getting the casual Youtube community to acknowledge Squidboards would be MASSIVE.

So I check out the guide you were talking about, and while you are correct, it is fairly outdated (Notice how the screenshots are of an older version, as well as a category (Shoutbox) that doesn't appear to exist any more), and still a little hidden for total newcomers. Good point, though, and thanks for pointing it out, as I had no idea!

And yeah, netting the casual YT community would probably be the biggest score we could get for the website in our current state, now that I think about it.
Thanks for pointing out all this stuff for me!