Figured it'd be good to start a Suggestions thread specifically, rather than a general threat to say "what we think" about the site in it's current (or rather, previous since it was before the Google Map idea) state.

Local Maps:

Store Locations – Done-ish, but could always use more.

Player Locations – Not specifically people's addresses, if they don't feel comfortable, but maybe nearby intersections to get a better "feel" of where people are for games.

Gaming Locations – Whether it's at someone's house or we use places like Round Table Pizza, Denny's, or wherever else that will allow us to play.

Asking the stores for their permission would probably be good manners, although I don't think they're going to openly object to this site promoting their business, even if we didn't ask. Still, I think it'd be a great idea to try to put flyers up about this website at those businesses. A lot of them have bulletin boards and such for gamers to advertise open games, so, I don't think it'd be out of the realm of possibility…

How can you send a private message to another member?  I couldn't see this option when I selected a member from the member list.  Did I miss something or is it not an option?  If it's not an option, I think it should be.

admin said:

The information is readily available, and I found all the stores already listed publicly in google maps, only not all in the same place. I do plan on contacting them all now that I can show them the map and show it's usefullness.

I like the flyers idea, if the site becomes popular I'll have to visit them all and ask if I can leave a small ad/notice for the site too.

Can only really make the site popular if people know about it, and the way for people to know about it is to post flyers to the site. :P It's kind of circular logic like people say "You gotta spend money to make money"..which is odd because in a sense it's saying if you don't have any money to begin with, you can't make any money to spend it to make more.

Didn't really mean anything about making money. It's just a weird saying. But in our own case it would be more like "You need to have people before you try getting people", but at the same time, how do you get the people without trying to get the people before you have the people necessary to make it happen? :P Flyers.

Also I am not really big on expanding "our borders" too much, because people may want to expand it piece by piece, and then it's no longer about being a somewhat localized community site. Folsom seems about as far to the east as we should try for. Base it more on how far away from the center of Sacramento it is.

What I did was use Yahoo Maps, put the little crosshair in the middle of the picture at the intersection of 80 and 99, and then moved the bar on the left up and down until Elk Grove just broke in through the bottom and Citrus Heights was on top.

So I think our borders, based on that map should be: Davis, Woodland, North Highlands, Citrus Heights, Folsom, and Elk Grove. We don't want to make it more difficult for us, even if it will be better for other people..because then you have to think about travel times and whatnot based from the middle of Sacramento (which I decided was 80 and 99).

Well, tell us where you live. I am not trying to make it bad for other people, but you have to look at it semi-realistically at the beginning.

If we start this out too big, it can be overwhelming and then you'll have people spread all over the place in small numbers. But if you start out small, you can build a base, expand a little, get more people, expand a little more, get even more people and so on.

If we need Adrian to design a flyer for a Download section for people to print out to put on their own local comic/gaming stores then that's fine. I am just thinking about it more realistically at this stage.

I live in Grass Valley.  See, in the foothills we don't have enough gamers to warrant putting anything together online.  Meetups, etc. won't work because there simply aren't enough of us.  So anything web related, we have to go with Sac. Having said that, there is NO game store in the Grass Valley area.  The closest one is in Colfax or Auburn which really isn't that far from Sac :)