Right, some good advice but you need to really consider what you're wanting out of whatever avenue you decide to take. A website for example can be either paid for or web-hosted for free, but free webhosts generally will not host a free website that contains adult content or material, either written i.e. MA stories, or images, i.e. artwork with adult material, i.e. naked elves. The webhosts have to comply with the law in order to minimise the exposure of minors to questionable material, they will if you try to post such content on a free webhosting account either send you a warning to remove it beforehand or they will cancel your account, delete the content, and ban you outright from posting anything else on their web-hosting services.
Basically if you want to post up adult material anywhere on the internet, especially on a website, you're going to have to pay for the privilegde.
Billboards, forums, and newsgroups can be more lenient by allowing you to post up your stuff in an adults rpg area for holts, which I have done myself in the past on Yahoo-groups, and a warning is posted up that the group is only accessible to those over 18 years of age. Otherwise if you're not going for anything remotely Mature or MA in content most free webhost and forums will be fairly tolerant, you just need to keep the community 'clean'.
Again a word of caution before you go leaping into any kind of web-building, or signing up to forums or newsgroups like Yahoo-groups to create or revamp a holt, read the user-end policies, and the small print on what the webhost or newsgroups and forum host expect of their users, namely Terms of Service, and User Policies, and the Privacy policies they should have available, so that you understand what you're getting yourself into.
You need to consider too that reposting of commercial art, especially from Pini, or of photographs 'borrowed' from the internet to make your forums or websites look pretty is generally frowned upon by webhosts too. You'd be in breach of copyright if you post material online that isn't yours, especially related to elfquest, for example, scans from the comics etc, or cuts from the comic for avatars etc that were drawn by Pini and not yourself or a group member or a fan-artists. It's stealing, and I know it's been done alot in the past, especially on fan-holt websites too, but you doing this puts your webhost at risk of being sued for copyright infringement, and makes them liable, which in turn will make you liable for damages that they might incur.
Worst case scenario is that your account will be cancelled. So my advice is that if you build anything, than utilise the artwork that you already have, hell, repost it but with the permission of your artists or holt members. Don't just go ahead and do it, you're respecting your members if you ask them first, say if you could use their artwork to advertise the holt, or to create avatars, or to post onto the group or website.
I have a background in IT stuff, so I'm fairly familiar with websites, and stuff like this. Also I've managed several holts in the past too so I know how much work goes into keeping them up to date, and staying in contact with the members, while keeping the rpg flowing can be taxing too.
Best of Luck.
~ Pyre
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Topic: Help and advice (Read 5911 times)