Haha, oh man, that's some next level tom-foolery! Bravo! I don't remember this, so I guess I must have been gone by 2013? Kind of makes sense, I guess. Felt like I was on this site for more than a year before I disappeared though...

I wasn't gon' to, but then I saw you posted it so I was like, "No way man, I ain't listening to you, even if that means doing exactly what you want me to do!"

Heh, no my parents don't know about Vizzed, but I don't think they're really in a position to give me advice about which sites I should and shouldn't go to. Pretty sure they still have Bonzai Buddy on their computers.

Then you need to add another at the end.


Think of it this way, each DIV represents a box. The first box you put down will be on the outside, and every DIV you add creates another box inside that one.

You can nest the boxes, put boxes one atop the other, or side by side (This is a bit more difficult with DIVs and why many people give up and just use tables)


***

Anyway, you applied that to the outside box, but you should apply those settings to the one on the inside that will hold your text.

Ugh... I have a black leather chair and I hate it. It's comfy enough but it retains heat like no other. I sweat like a stuck pig while I sit in it. I used to have a nice cloth chair with a mesh back. It was so comfy and breezy, I could sit in that thing all day. Luckily, I have that kind of chair at work or I would definitely go insane. But yeah, this chair? Not my cup of tea.

Wow, I'm pretty much the opposite of everyone in this thread. I did not come here looking for ROMs, and in fact, I've probably spent less than a single hour of combined time in the RGR in the four and a half years since I registered. No, I came here when I noticed a bug in Sonic Generations and was wondering if anyone had found a workaround for it. I didn't, but I didn't find other people talking about it. On a forum.

Now, for those of you who don't know, I am a huge forum whore. When I was a teenager I would literally spend twenty hours a day in forums and IRC. I. Love. Forums. But in 2012, forums were hard to come by. In fact, I thought they were all but extinguished. Just a few dusty old tomes full of green dust with nothing but friends talking to each other. I thought the age of the forum was dead. But here one was, active in 2012. And what is this? It couldn't be... It looks like it's running Acmlm. But that's impossible, there haven't been Acmlmboards in years. But sure enough, it was. You know what I love more than forums? Forums based on Acmlmboard. Yeah. Double check, I signed up that day, and posted all weekend. I was in heaven. An active forum. I couldn't believe it.

That's why I believed in this place. That's why I still come around from time to time. I just love forums. It's harder as an adult, but it's still one of my guilty pleasures.

(PS If anyone knows of other active forums just give me a hoot)

David man... I'm not talking about spending more time on Vizzed. It's great that you are devoted enough to spend 60 hours a week on the site, but you've got to take this more seriously. Time spent is not a measure of success, the only measure of success is cash in hand, and you clearly don't have it. Your business is failing, and just spending time here is not helping.

This is going to get hurtful, and for that, I am sorry, but it needs to be said. You spend sixty to eighty hours each week here... Doing what? I've got to be honest, man, it doesn't show. I don't see it, and very clearly you don't see a return on that time. So I've got to ask, what are you doing? Replying to notifications all day and running contests does not at this point constitute working on the site. You've been doing that and the site is still failing.

So let me address your points more in depth.

A: You wanted to offer your services on this site before searching locally. Great. So far, so good. What do you intend to do to get your name out in the community? You've been running Vizzed for over a decade, which means you haven't been taking outside clients in as long. Trends have changed. No websites look like this anymore, because nobody wants a website that looks like this. I know, I know, you're a designer, and you can take things in a million different ways, but think of what a potential client is going to do. If anyone finds your name (Again, how do you plan to get to that point?), they'll look at your portfolio which is, I'm sorry to say, lacking. It's stale, Maybe fifteen years ago, if you didn't have kids you could have landed a job with that, but it looks like you've been sitting on your hands since 2007.

Let's think about this. As a client, why should I invest in you to make my business more successful when yours is failing? Why should I invest in you to update my web presence when yours looks like it came out of the nineties? Again, please do not be offended, I like the Acmlm look, but it is not good from a business standpoint.

And this segues quite nicely into my next point.

B: Why should you listen to me? You've been doing this longer than I have. Very, very true. In fact, I'm not in that business, so you've definitely been in it longer than I have. But let's look at this: If you know what works and I don't, why do I own a house? Why am I not begging teenagers to give me jobs? I have steady, multiple income streams. Yeah, it's not a glamourous as owning a web-forum, but I eat three times a day, and don't ask for handouts.

C: So that's how running this site is not growing up. You are trying to save a business that you started when you were a teenager. You did great for a while, but you can't work to impress people anymore. You need to work to feed your children. We all want to be our own boss, but honestly, making sure my children have dinner and can go to college, and won't need to pay for my when I'm to old to work is far more important that my personal goals. That's what I mean by growing up. And they're not jabs at you. I am not trying to insult you in any way, I am just being honest with you, as one father to another.

--------------

I would also like to take the time to reply to your last post. Again, I mean no insult, but self-reflection is the only way to move forward. Please do not get offended, and try to be critical of yourself.

I honestly don't know how you can have hundreds of new ideas, and spend sixty hours per week, and not implement one of them. This again goes back to my early point, just what are you doing? At eight hours per day--and I mean eight hours of honest work, the VGR should have taken you a week at most. Actually less because you already had the existing Vizzed architecture. Since it's cleary just the RGR again, it really should have been a day project to port the code over to the new location. Maybe it would take more time to upload all of the information, but since you farm that out to your users, I honestly don't understand what the hold up was. So let's move on to your more specific points.

1: A newsletter is your big plan? David, I'm sorry but that is not going to bring people back. The very first one you send out might bring a few people who have completely forgotten about this place back for the nostalgia high, but most will go unread, and you're going to notice many diminishing returns on that. And in any case, if you really think this will help, you should have done this as soon as you noticed funds dipping, but dude. People are just going to unsubscribe from the newsletter--or worse, mark you as spam because they never signed up in the first place, completely negating all the "work" you've been doing in getting vizzed.com unblocked! I'm sorry if this sounds negative but I've actually done research in marketing, and newsletters... Newsletters are not what you need.

Now, that said, to anyone else I would say try it because it doesn't cost much. But to anyone else, the newsletter would be a simple project they spend a slow afternoon on. Not a weeks long ordeal perfecting your anti-spam campaign. You're wasting far too much time and driving down your worth. When you own a business, if you aren't making money, you're losing money. Vizzed costs too much to worry about people's inboxes.

2: Donations are great, but how are you going to retire on them? I know you've received some amazing donations in the past, but that is not a sustainable business model. I would highly suggest revamping this page, but this shouldnt' be something that's "in progress". It takes fifteen minutes to open a patreon page. Gofundme even less. Google Checkout, Square, whatever. It is not an all-day affair, so again, what's the hold up? If you're working on this why isn't it already done between the time you posted that and now?

3: How much time have you sunk into that? And how much extra revenue has it generated? If the answer is less than at least $30 per hour spent, then you've been wasting time. Someone with your length of experience should be earning much more than that in industry. This actually made me curious. So you live within driving distance of Minneapolis (And don't you dare tell me you don't like driving, that's an excuse to not find a job, I don't like driving either but I do it because I'm an adult.) According to Glassdoor, an entry level developer in Minneapolis should be making $34/hour. So if you're making less than thirty four dollars for every hour you spend on Vizzed--and I mean take home pay--you are failing yourself and your family.

4: This is the first thing that could potentially make Vizzed viable, but I don't think you'll be able to bring enough value to Viz to make earning it worth anything. Buying steam games and real products with it is kind of a great idea, but a back-of-the-napkin calculation shows that games are far too cheap. If a game costs $20 to buy on Steam, then the Viz price should earn you at least $40 in ad revenue. That's a very hard thing to calculate, and I'm not sure you've done the proper calculations on it. Seriously. People get paid upwards of $100k per year just to figure this kind of stuff out.

5: Expanding the site doesn't mean anything. What do you plan to do to monetize your existing assets? How do you intend to make money from the new work you plan on doing? When you own a business, before spending any time or money you need to think, "How will this help Vizzed succeed?" And as a father, before every single [color=red]thing you do, you need to ask yourself, "How does this help my children?" If you cannot answer the first question with a specific dollar value, stop and reevaluate. If you have no answer for the second question, do not do that thing.

6: And what will you do when you get take down notices for those games? Remember, you are operating outside the law, and you don't have a legal leg to stand on. Nintendo pulled the rug out from under you with their take down notice, don't let someone else do it to you. You need another source of revenue, plain and simple.

7: YOU'RE GETTING CLOSE TO TAKING THE INITIATIVE?! No! You should have done this years ago! Like I said before, this should take less than fifteen minutes. Your rewards are fine but please remember, most people make less than $100 per month on Patreon. And also remember that for every thing you do, you need to be making more than $34 per each hour spent to ensure your time is invested wisely. None of your rewards look like they'll take that long to implement but you mentioned a custom username and stopping benefits when someone discontinues paying--so are you going to constantly monitor this? If that's the case you're throwing time away. Are you going to script it? Do you beleive you'll make enough money through patreon to cover $34 per hour of learning the API? Just be careful with that, don't let it consume you.

8: Again, how much time will you spend on those ideas, and how much money will you earn back?

Promoting and advertising: nah. Sometimes you need to spend money to make money, but first you have to have a way to make money. Ads on a site serving illegal content is not the way to make money.

[quote]SEO can be a nightmare[/quote]

False. Canonical links (This should be easy for someone with as much experience as you), valid HTML so spiders can crawl the site effectively (Again, should be easy), and more prioritization of content. This is why QualityRoms had userbars on the right, so spiders would see the post before the user. This is beginner stuff, man. You've got to get with it. At QualityRoms' height I spent maybe six hours a week on it, and in a matter of three months got it to over three hundred visitors per month, with only some twelve ROMs available. And even that was not enough of a return-on-investment for me to continue, mostly because I didn't want to operate in illegal goods.

The biggest reason for the decline: Again, wrong. The biggest reason for the decline is that your business model has become obsolete, and you've lost your biggest draws. It's fine that there are copycat sites now (I mean, no there aren't, ROM sites have been around since long before Vizzed started) but if that's a problem, then you need a new revenue stream.

[quote]
I'll never ditch this site, the very worst thing I would do is possibly ditch the RGR but this community means too much to me and I know it means a lot to many others. Even if I have to get a 2nd job, I'll always have the drive to get this site back to where it use to be. [/quote]

This is what I've been saying the whole time. You need to get a second job. If Vizzed isn't paying the bills, and you can't find a way to make it do so, then it's time to move on. But you can't look at it as a second job, it needs to be your priority. Vizzed can be your hobby again. And if you ever think of something that allows you to make money from Vizzed again the way that you used to, then come back and do that. But think of your children before you think of this site. They need stable income. I know you haven't put effort into finding income outside of Vizzed, but you really need to. And you need to prioritize that over Vizzed. You can't keep this site going if you can't afford to keep the lights on.

[quote]I would hire myself because I view myself a jack of all trades. I've done and can do Search Engine Optimization, I can work on servers, I can do graphic design, I can do programming, I can do database work, I can pretty much do everything required to make an entire website (which should be obvious based on Vizzed). [/quote]

You might, but I certainly wouldn't, and I make those decisions for my company. Your whole biography talks about how you were too lazy to do well in school, this whole post has been you talking about things you think you should do but haven't yet because... "Iunno". Every one of your projects in your portfolio lists the time spent making it and it's all twice if not three times what an expert can do it in. Yeah, you're a jack of all trades, and a master of none.

Look at it this way, WorthOfTheWeb says that Vizzed could be sold for almost half a million dollars. It should be earning $12,000 per month. And yet it's not. Why? It's great that you would never sell Vizzed, but you're clearly not marketing it properly.

You've spent a great deal of time in this thread justifying your actions to myself and to Sox, telling us how commited you are to your site and its community. Great. You really have done something amazing. You built a self-sustaining web site, and even made some money off of it. You have succeeded. But now you can't eat three times per day. But at the end of the day, you don't need to convince me, or Sox, or your dad that you've done a good job. You just need to put a roof over your childrens heads. And that roof shouldn't be your mother-in-laws floor.

Ahh, I got lucky and the hard work was done when I started working at my current job. I just have to not break anything, which has been pretty easy so far!

Vanelan : Only half? =P


Anyway, yeah my whole work environment is virtualized on ESXi. I like it but it's no bhyve.

This is probably going to be one of my most unpopular posts, but I'm sort of used to voicing the unpopular opinion...

You need to put Vizzed away and grow up.

Vizzed is great but it is not and can not be a reliable revenue stream. When you were a teenager and living for yourself, you lived the dream man. And it was awesome. Never forget that. But you're an adult now, and you have children who need you to act like it.

You need more money and you're willing to take on side jobs to get that done. Awesome, great first step, but if you're not willing to put in the hours to compete with others on big sites you're never going to get anywhere. Clients aren't going to just fall into your lap. You need to actually get out and find people. That means spending hours, days looking for them. And yeah, you'll chase a few leads that go nowhere, I've done it, everyone who has ever tried to earn freelance cash has wasted time. That's the nature of the beast, and why so many people charge upwards of one hundred dollars per hour.

If that sounds like it's not going to work for you, I've got bad news: You will never earn a living freelancing. It just won't happen. If that's the case, then you need to get out of your house and get a job.

If you cannot eat three times per day your business is failing. If your business is failing you need to evaluate it--and since your business is built on selling copyrighted material that people could otherwise get for free, you likely have no path forward. I'm sorry man. The dream has to end some time, and when you can't afford to feed yourself and your children, that is the time.

Why did you summon me to this thread? I can't close bad threads anymore.

First off, cut off everything before 0:32. We don't need to know you're new to this. Also, you want to have the VM ready to go before you start, and keep the virtualization software off camera (This means the popup when you click in, telling you how to get out).

And the one thing I say to all people who post such threads: SCRIIIIIPT. Seriously. What you should have done was taken this video, then decided exactly what you wanted to say, wrote a script, and just condensed it down to that. You would sound so much more expert and could look up what stacks and static lists were before recording, giving viewers a bit of an extra look into interesting (if incomplete) history.

A good early attempt. It was much better than I expected.

Are you asking about the best Vizzed plugin? Your question doesn't really make sense... What are you looking to accomplish?

How to Protect Against Losing Long Posts

This has happened to me in the past, though since I've been building my own PCs and keeping things working, errors have typically been on the server side. So even if your computer is wonderful, you can still lose posts. What do you do?

1: Don't Type on Vizzed

No, I'm not saying don't post on Vizzed. I'm saying don't type on Vizzed. Open a Google account if you don't already have one, and start using your free Google Drive. Docs on Google are cached as soon as you stop typing for any reason. No matter what happens, your computer could crash, Vizzed could go down, your house could be hit by a meteor, and Google will still have your post safe and sound, ready to go. Seriously, if your post is longer than 100 words, don't use the Vizzed editor.

2: Turn off Smart Quotes

We’ve all seen it. Weird characters instead of “quotation marks”. What’s up with that? Simple: People write posts in Word or Docs or something else that prefers the traditional quote marks over the internet standard double quote (") and single quote ('). But that's easy to fix. In Google Docs, just click Tools > Preferences and un-select Use Smart Quotes. It's really that easy!

3: But Wait, There's More!

"Lazlo," you may say, "I wrote my post, copied it, pasted it into Vizzed, but Vizzed was down. I was going to try later but I accidentally my whole clipboard. What do I do?" Ahh, that's a bummer. But luckily for you, Docs caches changes, too! So as long as you didn't do something foolish like deleting your Doc before seeing it posted, it will be waiting for you at the last change, ready to go.

Follow these steps my young champions, and some day, you too can be King of Threads.

It's typically good form to, when you ask for help, reply with what you did to resolve the problem. In this way, when someone is looking for help in the future, they can see what you did and hopefully it will help them.

So I uninstalled this on a computer at work that we're not ready to upgrade yet. Took about ninety seconds, including googling time!

If you want file retention for free, you're going to have to register. I like Google Drive myself, but they're each as good as the other, so just pick whichever of Juliet's options looks coolest to you.

By the way, avoid MEGA like the plague. Most people won't click your links because a lot of people host viruses and other malware on MEGA.