Game Reviews 42 RPGs 55 Arcade 34 Puzzle 18 Platform 10 Strategy Sections QB News Site Archives Game Guides Our Projects Entertainment Awards QB Links Interact QB Chatroom Mailing List Submissions Link to Us Job Openings (6/21/2002) With only one obvious domain name to tie QB sites together, it's important now more than ever for trafficked QB sites to keep their links up to date.
By default, this makes QB45.com the next most obvious choice for a domain name pertaining to a QuickBasic-related website. For five good years, QB45.com had all the ingredients that made it the perfect sticky glue for the QB community: links to major active QB sites on the home page, access to a massive number of QB downloads, QB news (which would later be divided into what is now qbasicnews.com), and the ultimate QB link search engine, the Q-Finder. Why, oh why then, did the good folks at qb45.com throw all of the good stuff (not to mention potential site traffic) away by changing qb45.com's mainpage into a multi-platform news page? Before, the mainpage of qb45.com was nothing more than a series of links to the site's various programming and non-programming sections, making access to the QBasic section a breeze. Under the current setup, a person visiting qb45.com would have to click on the site area box nestled in the lower left tab, then click "Quickbasic Area" to find the QBasic area of the site. It's easy to find if you've been to qb45.com before and you're looking for it, but to a person who's trying to get in touch with fellow QB programmers for the first time, it isn't the most obvious place to look. And perhaps that's the whole point: the Quickbasic area of QB45.com needs to be one of the easiest areas of the site to keep new blood flowing through the QB community. That's because QB websites, whether their active or dead, all seem to have one thing in common; there's always a link to qb45.com (sometimes called by their original name, Future Software), plastered on the top of their links page. QB45.com has become such a centerpiece for QB downloads and the QB community that it's status is directly proportional to the ability of the QB community to exsist and expand. Of course, this doesn't mean that other big QB sites don't need to step up to the plate. Several unmentioned big QB sites (and you know who you are) have links lists that are severely out of date. It might not seem that big a deal now, but I think every QB webmaster can benefit if they started to update their links lists now, before every big QB domain name goes the way of the dodo. Either that or the entire community could raise a million dollar fund so we can purchase QBasic.com and replace it with Connor's QBasic Links page. Vance Velez Editor, V Planet! QuickBasic Magazine |
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For
years, the most obvious domain names for QB sites have fallen victim to
great expectations and deterioration. QBasic.com claims to be "The
Home of QBasic on the Net", the site has been put on permanent hold ever
since June of 1999. Quickbasic.com and Quick-Basic.com have
suffered similar fates: Quickbasic.com, once the homepage of the QB coding
group Dark Elf Productions, has long since disappeared from the
Internet. Quick-Basic.com leads to a German website promoting one of Quickbasic's
competitors, Purebasic.