airsoft-arena.com Posted February 16, 2014 Report Share Posted February 16, 2014 Hello airsofters! My name is Silviu and I want to present you a website: www.airsoft-arena.com. What is Airsoft-Arena? It’s a website created by me and two friends of mine, with the intention of building the largest airsoft gun database on the internet. Motivation for creating airsoft-arena: At the moment, there is no place on the web where you can find an airsoft gun database and I (as an airsoft player and airsoft gun collector) thought there should be a website where all airsofters can centralize all the information they have, so it would be easily accessible to others. What does airsoft-arena offer at this moment? - airsoft gun catalog with over 2000 airsoft guns - individual page for each airsoft gun with stats and other information - airsoft manufacturers list, grouped by region - news module - search system with relevant search results (even for guns with code names) - airsoft guns filtering system based on multiple characteristics (class, propulsion, manufacturer...) - user system with personal page - user comments system for guns - discussion boards for each airsoft gun - airsoft guns rating system What we want to implement in the future: - latest discussions and most active topics section on homepage - complete and up to date airsoft guns catalog - comments system for news and manufacturer pages - rating system for manufacturers - reviews module that allows users to create an airsoft gun review or embed a review video - a system that allows users to update the information for an airsoft gun - wants & owns system for each user, allowing to have individual gun lists - notification system for comments and discussions on each user's guns from their wants and owns lists - shop links on each gun page, providing an easy way for the user to find a place to buy the gun - possibility for users to upload pictures of their guns Please have a look on the website and leave your feedback, positive or negative, doesn’t matter, we would love to get it anyway. If you like what we have done so far and think this is a good project, please support us by visiting the website, registering and using its features. Together we can grow the largest airsoft community and database on the web. At the moment, our progress is very slow because we work only in our free time. If you think this project is worthy, consider making a PayPal donation and help us get going faster. Any amount is welcome. Thanks for reading and we are waiting for your feedback! Silviu www.airsoft-arena.com Link to post Share on other sites
airsoft-arena.com Posted February 16, 2014 Author Report Share Posted February 16, 2014 The Long Story Airsoft-Arena started as a project when I was a student. Me and my friend Marius (who is still part of the airsoft-arena team) built an early version of the website. There were only a few airsoft guns in the database, just for presentation purposes. This was 3 years ago. Since then we changed the design three times and gradually added new functionalities and grew the airsoft guns database. We were also joined by the third member of our team, Sebastian. We added all guns made by some of the more notorious manufacturers: Ares, ASG, Cybergun, Classic Army, Echo 1, G&G, G&P, ICS, King Arms, KJW, KSC, KWA, KWC, LCT, Marushin, Real Sword, SRC, STAR, Tokyo Marui and VFC but the database is now more than a year old and some new products are available now that need to be added. We also want to implement an easy method for users to be able to add an airsoft gun or update the information available for the already present guns. Our goal is to stimulate airsofters all over the world to visit our site and browse the airsoft gun database and also contribute, adding information about airsoft guns, comment, make reviews and rate airsoft guns. We have already implemented the possibility to create a user profile and to manage your personal information, ratings and comments. In the near future we will implement a lists feature for each user where you can track the guns you own and the guns you want and also a form for adding reviews. We also want to implement the possibility to mark discussions you want to watch and get an alert when something new was posted. After we complete the gun database we will contact the major airsoft retailers all over the world and choose some of them by region and post on every gun page a link to the retailer's page of that gun. This way, users can go directly to the place where they can buy that gun. This way we hope we can also get some funds to continue updating and maintaining the website. Another idea is to make some in-depth video reviews of airsoft guns. This means not only presenting the looks of the gun and its basic functionalities, but also disassembling it and presenting the inner parts and recommending upgrades if needed. The reviewed guns will be kept by us and if members of the community will have any more questions, we can anytime provide more information or do more videos, tutorials and tests. We have lots of ideas for the website but little time to implement them all. When we started this project, we were students and had more free time available but now we had to get full time jobs as programmers. We would love to earn our living by working only on this project but first the website needs to get more popular and maybe later on we can collaborate with airsoft related companies. But to achieve that we need support from the airsoft community. That’s why we ask you to register on the website, try out all its functionalities and let us know what you think about it. Send us suggestions on how to make the website more useful for you, what features you would like and also what we should change on the existing ones. Please also consider making a donation with PayPal. Raising some funds for the project would help us really much to get going faster. It would motivate us and give us confidence that people are interested in this project and make us hope that one day we can earn our living by working only on airsoft-arena.com. Thanks for reading and we are waiting for your feedback! Silviu www.airsoft-arena.com Link to post Share on other sites
Horsem4n Posted February 17, 2014 Report Share Posted February 17, 2014 this isn't the first time a website like this existed. most have come and gone due to a lack of popularity. i have to say though that the site is well designed and looks good. you should inquire with an admin to gain commercial user status before continuing to post on this site. we don't take well to advertising without going through the right channels (which is one reason nobody has posted in this thread yet) a couple more things you should implement: allow long time contributing members to upload new pictures to weapon pages. wouldn't want new users to be able to post pics, but would allow more than just distributor stock photos on the pages so that users could get a better sense of scale the guns have or what they look like with certain accessories. a tagging system so that users can apply tags for better search results. for example, if you searched HK53 to see if any manufacturer has ever made an HK53, nothing would show up even though Classic Army had manufactured a few variants of it but chose CA53 instead of the real name. its a system that could be prone to abuse, but a good idea nonetheless. 2 things i see off the bat that should be changed: the "similar guns" bar makes no sense. the star rating system isnt all that great of a rating system for airsoft guns. i think once the pages are fleshed out, a system like that is pretty useless when you can just read the reviews. maybe a star system could be used, but most guns can be easily modified to be much better than they are out of the box. Link to post Share on other sites
airsoft-arena.com Posted February 17, 2014 Author Report Share Posted February 17, 2014 Hello and thanks for the reply. First of all, I really didn't know about the commercial user status. I will send a message to the admin and try to clarify this. This topic really isn't supposed to be commercial in any way, we just wanted to announce the website launch. Or... I don't know, maybe it is if asking for donations counts as commercial. Anyway, this will be hopefully clarified after I contact an admin. About other websites like this, I didn't know there were others. When we had the idea of creating Airsoft Arena, we tried to come up with something that would be useful for airsoft players and airsoft gun collectors. I, for example, really like "exotic" airsoft guns and was looking for rare models on the web but couldn't find a place with a large airsoft gun database. I thought there should be something like the IMDB of airsoft guns or something like that. We want to implement functions on the website so it will get more popular. That's why feedback is really important for us. About the things we should implement or change: - Allowing users to post pictures of their guns is a function we really want to implement as fast as possible. Not allowing new users to post pictures is a pretty good idea, we will have a talk about that. - About the search system, we already have tags but it needs some more refinement. If you search for "HK 53" you will find the CA53. We only need to add also "HK53". - The similar guns section was created by the designer. We could change it to get more relevant results but we can also take it out. - The star rating system is intended for rating an airsoft gun as it is "out of the box", without any modification. It should reflect the satisfaction of the buyer based on the quality of the gun and its overall value. We hope to solve the commercial issue as soon as possible and maybe then we will get some more feedback. Horsem4n, thanks for the heads up and your feedback! Link to post Share on other sites
Horsem4n Posted February 17, 2014 Report Share Posted February 17, 2014 this board has a very simple rule for a user to need commercial status, if you are advertising anything for any reason, you are a commercial entity. without gaining proper status, your posts and topics will be deleted and you will be banned. i like to talk about the places i work at, so at one point were i was up front about it, i requested commercial status. its no big deal, its just a way we organize things. that way, spammers can be taken care of and sincere, relevant companies can KBO. anyway, good luck and i will definitely help out once i can start editing pages. hopefully the site won't die in a few months like all the rest. Link to post Share on other sites
Skarclaw Posted February 17, 2014 Report Share Posted February 17, 2014 I'd let a mod make that call horseman. Personally i dont see a commercial bent - no adverts either. I think our review database is a really good idea - its a shame its not as popular as posting a review in the forum. Its good to have multiple reviews to scroll through. Link to post Share on other sites
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