- 07/16/2010
NCSOFT provided community forums for most of its games using Vbulletin and had community teams for each game that moderated and engaged with players. Community managers are often hired from within the game community and are already super active.
We would create a custom theme and icon set for each game. Plugins for Vbulletin were very hit or miss in terms of whether they met our security requirements, so we couldn't use most of them out of the box. Several plugins were created to provide features that players expected or tools that moderators needed to maintain quality content.
In my first couple of years at NCSOFT, all forum development was done by a single person who left one day. In the following months, I was responsible for building the development pipeline, writing documentation for the forums, and getting other developers trained. It supported local development with dummy data, staging environments for QA, and used the same interface for release management as the other properties.
