SugarBombed.com (Forum and News)

Date

2015 - 2017

Technology

Description

SugarBombed.com was founded in mid-2015 as a community for fans of the Fallout franchise to discuss the games in anticipation of the Fallout 4 launch later that year. I was one of the original three founders, the other two being a fallout community social media personality (Monte) and a Bethesda YouTuber (MrMattyPlays). The purpose of SugarBombed was to create a positive space for fans of the Fallout franchise to discuss the games, and to provide a platform for content creators to share their work with the community. The majority of communities dedicated to Fallout were mostly negative at the time which is why we decided to create our own.

Over the few years that SugarBombed ran, I took on several roles. I was the lead developer, the lead designer, the lead administrator, and the lead community manager. I was responsible for the design and development of the website, the management of the community, and the management of the over 50 volunteer staff. I was also responsible for the creation of the SugarBombed social media accounts and managing them through various platforms such as TweetDeck.

The original website was built on phpBB to gauge interest. After the community was determined to have sufficient demand, the website was migrated to Xenforo 1.5 and eventually Xenforo 2.0. I built a variety of custom plugins and modified the Xenforo code to fit the communities needs. Initially the website was hosted on a shared hosting plan with Bluehost (cPanel). As SugarBombed rapidly grew it was moved to a VPS on Vultr (Plesk) and eventually a dedicated server with Psychz to accommodate our needs. The dedicated server was running a LAMP stack with NGINX as a reverse proxy, two Minecraft servers, a nightly internet radio show, a staff chat server, a public chat room, a mail server, and a variety of other services. SugarBombed used Cloudflare for DNS and the CDN to serve its assets. I extended the website to include a news section, a wiki, a custom theme, a public chat, a public content creator showcase, and a variety of other features. In late 2017 I began experimenting with authenticating to Xenforo using C# and allowing members to chat through a desktop application. This was never completed. The majority of the design and logo concepts were created by a volunteer staff member, DarkKitarist, but I did work on translating these into CSS alongside them.

Early on I led efforts to increase SugarBombed.com's exposure. The news section was introduced to create articles by volunteer staff members and content creators. I onboarded our initial set of writers with Monte taking over writing duties in late 2016. Our increased exposure allowed us to secure early access to products and exclusive interviews a variety of staff involved with Fallout development, including Chris Avellone and Brian T Delaney. Our new-found status in the Fallout community enabled me to secure press passes for some of our writers to the E3 Expo. Additionally, I continuously introduced new features to the website to increase engagement. I added a content creator showcase to allow content creators we partnered with to share their work with the community, and a digital currency system inspired by Fallout (Bottlecaps) to reward members for their contributions to the community.

Starting in 2017 I was unable to dedicate as much time to SugarBombed.com as I initially did. The day-to-day management fell to Monte and eventually SugarBombed entirely shut down for good as community interest began to decline. The website was taken offline after the domain had expired. At it's peak, SugarBombed had over 15,000 members with an average online presence of over 400 at a time and over a 5 million unique visitors per month.

Links