The Clan Guide

1. The Clan Guide Your guide to building, running and being in a great clan

2. What is a Clan? • A clan is a group of people who do the same thing for fun, generally a form of videogame or online game. They usually play as a team, and help other members. Clans are known for practically every online game in existence, from War Craft and Runescape to Mario Kart DS and Metroid Prime Hunters. • Some clans also cover a variety of games, such as all the Nintendo DS wifi titles, or a variety of online Role Playing games.

3. What are the Clan Types? • The main type of clan is the normal kind. These are often based at their own site or forums dedicated to the clan, have a decent amount of members when established and hold sign ups externally from larger gaming websites.There are also clans which are dedicated to a specific part of the game, like using one character, or one kart, or racing on one course. They are usually smaller, but can have a loyal fan base.Another type is a message board based clan. These are different in that they have no external website or forum, but base around a topic on a large gaming site's forums. These are generally very short lived and close after a few days.

4. How to make a clan • To make a clan, you first need to decide what you’re making a clan for. Basically, what game it’s about, what the requirements are, and how you expect it to be run. • Qualifications/Requirements are a good thing to consider. On one hand, if you are making the Elite, top clan for the best players, then qualifications, generally strict are ideal. However, for most clans, they are not worth it, since clans without such rules generally get more popular in the end, seeing as more people can become members. • The game is the most important thing, as the game covered, while popular, should also have few other clans for the game. While Runescape is popular, or Mario Kart, there are an enormous number of clans all for the same thing, and the shortage of members means that most are condemned to die after a few days. And another game, if you make the ONLY clan for it, will help your clan grow and become more popular. • How you run it is a good point to think about. If the clan is run professionally, there should be less trouble, and more people bothering to join. However, if it’s run sloppily and badly overall, keep your expectations low.

5. The Clan website • A good clan needs a good clan site. While forums are often used on their own, they are very tricky to make popular as they have no pre existing content of their own, and rely on member topics and posts for the information. Plus, many websites such as Raurus Return look down on forum websites as lazy, cheap and a very bad thing, hampering possible affiliation with bigger websites. • Now, don’t go and start using an online editor to make your site, or the schools local copy or Microsoft Publisher. A good site requires decent tools and a program like Dreamweaver is a good option for those who don’t want to learn the best way. • The best way though is good old HTML coding by hand in Notepad. Basically, learn the technique on sites such as http://htmldog.com and code the site yourself. You will have much more control than if you used an editor, and can add advanced things such as cursor styles, Javascript, advanced CSS and div positioning. • Here’s a quick reference for those who want to learn basic HTML. This list is in no means all you will need, but just the basic tags needed: • <b>Bold Text</b> • <i>Italics</i> • <u>Underline</u> • <a href=“#”>Hyperlink</a> • <p>Paragraph break</p> • <br/> Line break • <img src=“Image location”/>Insert an image • <form>A form</form> • <ul><li>List choice 1</li><li>List choice 2</li></ul> Un ordered list • <ol><li>Choice 1</li></ol> Ordered List

6. Hosting the Clan website • Don’t choose the likely options. Tripod, Geocities, Angelfire and Freewebs are not even that good, riddled with advertisements and have extremely limited space. • Instead, you could choose one from this list, of reputable hosts which offer good services: • Awardspace • Sitesled • Funpic • The above sites offer at least 100MB of space with no advertisements added to your pages. In fact, Funpic even offers 2500MB of space! • Or, you could try a host which is just for fan sites. Yes, there is such a thing, so research it in Google.. • Or, you could try being hosted by a large site. Zelda Legends, Ganon’s Tower, Classic Gaming/Gamespy network, Toads Castle and Zelda Cavern all run hosting deals, generally better than what you can normally get for free. If you have a clan, you could go to my clan hosting forum on my message board and get a free forum or sub forum for your clan, where you would have full control.

7. Making a Good Forum • First, do yourself a big favour, do not use Ezboard forums. They are not only useless, but get spammed with irrelevant information so often that unless you have a very good moderation team, your forums will look disorganised and be ignored. • Also, do not use Bravenet forums. They aren’t even really forums, but basically a multi topic Guestbook, and since they don’t allow moderators, or different topics and you can only post 250 comments at a time, they will get really useless quickly. • I recommend Invisionfree forums, or Proboards forums if you want to use some. Possibly also Yabb forums, and if you can get VB Bulletin Boards (very unlikely, the license is £80 per hour per board), then use them. I would not recommend PhpBB as the boards are known to be open to various kinds of hacking attempts. • Appoint good moderators. Basically, you want them to be there all year around, and to be in various time zones. • Get a shoutbox. Many people indeed like shoutboxes, and they cause many more people to join if you have one. The basic level is free from http://cbox.ws • Cover multiple topics. The more you cover the better. However, don’t cover too many, as it makes your forum look much more dead than it is.

8. Advertising a Good Clan • Now, a clan with no members might as well not exist, as it is practically dead. So what you need are some loyal clan members to support your clan. So advertise! Use the below tips to advertise: • Submit your clan to Google. This is very simple, so just fill out the form at this link and Google should start indexing your site: • http://www.google.com/addurl/?continue=/addurl • Also, take part in many top sites and Clan directories to get more people knowing about your clan. For a good one, see the button on my site’s home page, that’s a listing of Nintendo DS sites and clans. • Advertise when relevant on forums you go to. Also, put a bit of thought into your adverts. • This won’t get no members: • ‘Please join my clan now at [address]’ • This will: • The [Clan name] is the leading clan for various wifi games. We cover all the top games such as Mario kart DS, Metroid Prime Hunters, Animal Crossing, Lost Magic etc and we plan to cover Starfox Command and other such games in the future. • Our clan is a growing community with [member count] and extremely friendly staff that will also help you. The clan address is [clan address] so please join and take part in one of the leading Wifi clans. Thank you.

9. Links • Example Websites: • http://dsultimate.sitesled.com- My website • HTML Sites: • http://htmldog.com • http://htmlgoodies.com • Forum sites: • http://invisionfree.com • http://proboards.com • Website Hosts (good): • http://sitesled.com • http://awardspace.com • http://funpic.org • Large Clans: • http://z13.invisionfree.com/Platinum_Crystals/ • http://z13.invisionfree.com/Blue_Diamond_Clan/

10. The End • If you want to contact me, please speak to me in my old Advanced Strategies and Shortcuts Topic on Gamefaqs (so useful comments go in the new one). You could also send me a PM at my forums, or contact me through one of the many e-mail forms at my website. Thank you. • I will also be happy to rate any clan and clan site that advertises, and also happy to host any clan that so far only operates on a message board at a large gaming site if the clan shows potential. • Please also feel free to read my Crescent Moon Village PowerPoint Presentation at: • http://dsultimate.sitesled.com/Crescent%20Moon%20Village.ppt • Personal Phrases: • ‘All games existed to be exploited’