I have several ideas for you site/service, and I will outline them for you, however, only as a courtesy. I will not be returning to RomUlation after I write this post, if you want to contact me, use my email and hope I see it. Registration requirement for downloading. The registration page when attempting a download is misleading. The reason I'm upset with your website is because I thought that if I created a "free" account that I would get to download at least a few ISOs for free. I suggest that you re-word the registration page to explain how the site works in terms of downloads so that users know what they are getting into when they register (it will also prevent people from creating an account and immediately abandoning it when they find out that almost nothing here is free.) Trial period I refuse to pay for a service before trying it. What if I don't like the download speeds of your service? There are certainly FREE ways of getting exactly what you provide so you either need to give a limited trial period so that users can understand why they want what you offer over the free options or give a starter amount of "points" (whatever those are) to allow new users to make a one or more initial downloads so that they can see for themselves that you offer a great service. Yeah, people will attempt to abuse such trial periods by creating new accounts. There are always those people, and that is what IP filtering and cookie tracking is for! Chances are, if they don't want to pay for your service, they're more likely to search out the free options rather than make dummy emails all day long. Fix your download links!! Your attempt at preventing unauthorized access to downloads has caused the official download links to fail repeatedly. I spent 20 minutes attempting to download something, registering, and re-attempting to download before I found out that I have to pay for downloads. From a consumer standpoint, this not only makes me want to leave your website with the fury of a romulan (haha pun), but never return, and especially not consider paying for your services. (Along the reasoning of "If I have to spend so much time just getting a good download link, what if I pay for this service, and the download link expires mid-download. I bet they don't even allow the use of third party download managers like flashget that never fail a download".) Advertise why premium is better! Why should we pay for your service over free options on the web? What makes what you offer so special? Unlimited downloads? If it is free somewhere, chances are there is one place where unlimited downloads are also free. However, unlimited downloads are often limited by how many downloads you can make simultaneously AND are often throttled. Are your options throttled? Is there a limit to how much you can be downloading at once? What is your file host upload speed like (A.K.A. How fast can someone with a fiber optic connection download a megabit, gigabit, or even terabit)? That's all folks~ This was my first, and likely last post on this website. I don't know for sure, maybe I'll check in and see how you respond to it. I hope you take these suggestions to heart, they were made in earnest, I don't often take time out of my day to write much on suggestions or surveys, the web is full of them. Sincerely, ~A guy that wants to download ISO's of his legally owned games because ripping them is a pain in the arse and batch downloading on a fibre optic connection is OH so much faster..... if a good rom site can be located. Post Merge: [time]1424059824[/time] Oh, and, one quick addendum: I know that torrenting is always free, but when you have plenty of internet speed, hosted downloads are usually quicker if you want to download a bunch of files at once. A large number of simultaneous downloads with torrenting can use up a significant amount of computer power and when you torrent, there is a such thing as a cap in download speed. Also, torrenting is blocked on the fibre connection (thanks Obama!).
yeah you should really have read the rules(even though i doubt you would read this) especially about the point section. Best bet to try a different site, there are plenty of them you can download roms and iso. Have a nice day.
Eh, dunno why I even feel like checking in on this. Anyways, the point of my post is that I found this website through google while specifically searching for ISO's. I was directed to the registration page when I unsuccessfully attempted a download. After many more unsuccessful attempts at downloading, I then got a message about buying premium. I didn't come here and look for the forum rules, I didn't even plan on registering until the download page hinted that I could download if I registered (which was a major disappointment). And the point is... People coming here looking for downloads aren't looking for the rules. The "please register" page is misleading which leads to frustration after doing so and you still can't download anything and the "please help us pay the hosting bills" page lacks good advertisement/info/guilt trips. "Then why did you come here to make suggestions?" Who knows? I thought that maybe if I made a suggestion, other people wouldn't be misled and you guys would get less whiners like me and more loyal community members. Maybe I didn't do my good deed for the day, there are certainly less homeless people to give booze money to in the town I live in now. Maybe I'm bored because I'm still trying to piece my internet/electronic life back together from a near catastrophic time of being flat broke... Maybe I got over my initial frustrations and might be considering a short term membership. Who knows? EDIT: Btw, I've skimmed the rules at http://forum.romulation.net/index.php?topic=4312.0 as well as the "Read this first" topic about searching and I still don't know what the points are.
Basicly you need points to download files, mostly large files. as a guest you can download 2 files daily without using points as long as the files are less than 100mb. for every Mb the file has, you are deducted 1 point so a 100mb requires 100points. points are giving each day, for uploading screenshots, or you can purchase them. In the future read everything, and be polite. people will like you more.
On the front page after you log in, it shows you your points, and next to it is a link that says 'what are points?'. The link leads here: https://www.romulation.org/introduction/#points, which is where it tells you about the point system, how it works and why we have it.
Thanks for these suggestions. We definitely do not do a lot of things optimally right now and I am indeed looking at doing something about this at some point. The primary issue right now is that the site essentially hasn't been touched in the past 5 years aside from adding new games. It's catering to a crowd that no longer visits and an internet culture that no longer exist. A bit of background information on why things are they way they are, though. This site was started around 11 years ago by a bunch of, quite literally, children. As such it was never really a product to be sold, instead it was a passion about emulation and web. Over the years it grew and it turned into "omg this is getting expensive we need to make some money to keep it online" which then turned into "omg this is not selling we need to limit costs" which then turned into "omg there's a balance between download restrictions and sales, lets not mess with that now". So what does it actually take to get the site back to being amazing? Pretty much a complete rethinking of RomUlation as a product, which I really hate to think of it as. Unfortunately I have grown up now and have a great, but demanding, job so time is at a premium to me. I will do this eventually as my thoughts mirror yours exactly. So sincerely, thanks! I appreciate your suggestions as they reinforce what I already know and tells me that other people can see the value as well. I *will* get around to designing a much better system at some point.
Well Seph, I checked back in.... just because, and I am shocked and amazed by your response. It explains much about the site and its history, and also gave me some feels. Also, I want to help you on this, you guys seem to have a more thorough collection of Wii ISO's than EVERYWHERE else, including hard to find ISO's that are no longer seeded in torrents. So as a product, that immediately makes your product somewhat desirable. Now, aside from your website, who are the other competitors? WiiUIso.com (note 1) emuparadise.me (note 2) nitroroms.com (note 3) WiiIso (note 4) What is the standing? Romulation could be the #1 website for wii ISOs. You are the 2nd result on a google search for wii ISOs and 1st in a search for wii ROMS. (4) WiiIso.com is the only one to beat you in either search, and it relies on torrents. Most of which have little to no seeders. (1) WiiUIso.com is confusing AT BEST, it is riddled with ads that occupy the entire first page of scrolling, sometimes more depending on how good your adblocker is. It relies on a 3rd party file host that offers premium for $13, but not all the files may be hosted there. (2) Emuparadise probably has you beat on several fronts as far as roms, such as GBA, PSX, and NDS. However, their Wii selection is community upload based, and is either torrents that aren't seeded or 3rd party hosts. (3) Nitroroms confused the hell out of me from the start, and I don't understand their download system, which is probably either donation or payment oriented, and they are further down the list. Your website isn't as easy to navigate as emuparadise but has less ads. However, you have the easiest to understand website that offers wii rom downloads from a server. If you could make the roms as easy to navigate through (like maybe an alphabetical list) as emuparadise and the premium prices clear, then your website would become the #1 on the wii rom front. I cannot say for the others, as I've not done as much research on them as I have for the Wii. It might also be a good idea to look at your premium buyers for the past year and see how many utilize it for what, and look into your standings on those fronts.
You do know how search engines work right. course its going to do that site first, it has the words "wii roms" in it. Type "rom download" and see pops up what pops first. They also have a site that tell you what sites are banned from google search due to court order.
Blaze, the point is, this website isn't on page 9 of a search for Wii roms/iso's. It might as well be #1 under the search. Emuparadise has a page dedicated to wii ISOs but it is pretty far down the list. WiiUIso is about halfway down the page. Et-Cetera.
