Wednesday, November 21, 2007

MaddenConnection.com Launched

Today is an exciting day for the VG Sports Madden Community. We are taking a big step here to provide our members with a much more robust and powerful community. Our goal this year was to evolve as a company and to provide the best possible services to the community...by doing things we have never done before.

We are launching a brand new site today at http://www.maddenconnection.com

The VG Sports Madden Connection is a big part of this evolution. We are moving past just having a forum, into having a full fledged community site. We will be putting together a series of tutorial videos to show you exactly what you can do on the site, but some of the highlights include:

* Personal profile pages including photo galleries
* Ability to search members by playing style and console
* Create on the fly chat rooms
* Tons of FREE strategy content from the VG Sports team
* Private groups/league bulletin boards and forums

This is just scratching the surface of what is available here.

Okay, so what is changing? On Wednesday we will be locking the current forum. We will leave all of the threads in place, but no new posts will be able to be made.

Please visit the new site at www.maddenconnection.com and register for your free profile. This will give you access to all of the features on the site: forums, profiles, strategy content, etc.

We really encourage you to put a picture of yourself on your profile page so we can get to know you better. It is a lot of fun to see the faces behind the names we have come to know so well over the past 5 years. You can use your forum sig to show support for your favorite teams and players of course.

Fill out as much of the profile information as you like, paying special attention to listing your console of choice and your style of play. These items will be searchable which should aid you in being able to find games with fellow VG Sports members.

Other than that, post away! For those of you that have significant post counts (1500 or more) on the current boards, we have special awards that you will be able to post in your profile. These let everybody know that you've been here on VG for a long time and we'll be recognizing different levels of posts. These "badges of honor" are the best solution we could find to recognize you for your hard work in supporting our community since post counts won't carry over. Once you have registered, please PM me on the new site with your post count in the subject line and I'll get you your just rewards!

Unfortunately, when we moved to the new community site, we had to leave the old forums behind. Many vistors coming to this site for the first time don't know the history of VG Sports or the forums. Even though the old forum is locked for posting, there is a wealth of information, both useful and just plain funny to be found there. With 25,000 members and a quarter of a million posts, the Old School forum served us well for the last 5 years.

I know that there is often a resistance to anything new, but I am confident that the new benefits that this site will give us will far outweigh any negatives.

Thanks!