Greetings Citizens! Community Manager Jared Huckaby here, and I wanted to talk with you a little about the newest addition to the Star Citizen website experience, the Community Hub. This is an exciting chapter in our continuing efforts to give the best community in gaming the best community tools imaginable. What you’re going to see as this rolls out to more and more of you (2015.09.15 EDIT: the hub is now live to all backers) is just the very first iteration of everything we have planned for the Community Hub, so let’s take a look at what will be available now, and towards the end, a sneak peek at a few of the things still in the works and yet to come.
What is the Community Hub? The Community Hub is an outside content aggregation section for our overall RSI site where Citizens can share with each other all the content that is created by you, the fans. From screenshots to video, from fan art to fan fiction, from livestreams to podcasts, from fan reviews to press editorials and everything in between, this is the place where you can go to share those findings with your fellow citizens, see what’s already been shared with you, and hopefully discover something you like that may have eluded you otherwise.
Citizen Spotlight The first section you’ll encounter is the Citizen Spotlight, our resource dedicated exclusively for images and video. Here our users can upload their own image galleries to our servers, and displayed with a link to the original source files, enabling you to share your screenshots or original artwork with the fans at no loss of image quality, or link to their videos previously hosted on YouTube. After providing a short summary of what’s being shared, that gallery or video will be available for all to see in the Citizen Spotlight portion of the Hub, where Citizens can comment on what they’re seeing, and even upvote the content they truly enjoy. You’ll be able to sort this content into a number of ways including by subject category, what’s newest, what’s rising in rank fastest, what’s sitting at the top of the heap with the most upvotes, and Staff Picks, the submissions we at CIG think are exceptional contributions to the community.
Live Streamers Twitch! Livestreaming has become a cornerstone to the Star Citizen community experience, and now there’s an easy way to find out who’s streaming about Star Citizen now. Just connect your Twitch account and Citizens will see a list of folks streaming live at any moment.
Deep Space Radar Is someone talking about Star Citizen on another website? Deep Space Radar is where you can post links to the websites that cover Star Citizen around the Internet. Articles in the press, websites dedicated to improving the game experience, and just about any other resource out there related to Star Citizen, the DSR is our aggregate for those links outside our own website. For this reason, links to our own website or forums should not be included, and links to other content aggregate sites like Reddit should be avoided or they will be removed.
Podcasts Do you create digital media that consists of an episodic series of audio or digital radio, subscribed to and downloaded through web syndication or streamed online to a computer of mobile device? Yes? Then this is the section for you. Post your broadcasts here and increase your visibility amongst likely listeners!
Most Valuable Poster (MVP) Of course, the Most Valuable Poster award should already be familiar with those of you that have followed the project since the days of Wingman’s Hangar. It’s here that you’ll be able to find the posts that earned their posters this award. You can find out who wins MVP each and every week on our flagship webseries Around the Verse, posted to our YouTube channel every week on Thursday at 1200 Pacific, 1900 UTC.
Looking Ahead There are many more features we’re looking to add to the Community Hub in upcoming iterations. These features include, but are not limited to:
The ability for Subscribers to submit questions for 10 for the Chairman, for Citizens to vote on which ones they want answered, and to see which ones have already been answered and what episode those answers can be found on.
Dedicated chat windows for each livestream and podcast. This will be especially useful for single, dedicated RTV chat.
The addition of YouTube gaming to the available livestreaming options.
Dedicated Org functionality.
Alternate viewing/sorting modes.
Integrated Wonderful World of Star Citizen functionality.
Search (yay!)
Personal Post History
And much, much more!
With that we wrap up our first look at the Community Hub. Please remember this is the very first iteration of the Hub, and it will continue to grow and evolve and change over time like every other aspect of Star Citizen. We believe this is a terrific step in our continuing efforts to bring an unparalleled level of official visibility to the amazing work our community does. And if you have any feedback or feature requests for the Community Hub, you can add those here.