Hey everyone, I just wanted to provide an update on a bunch of things I’ve worked on in TMC recently. I know I made another update post a bit ago (linked below), but I’ve made so many changes since then because I’ve had some more free time recently (will be changing a later).
I’ve been working on a lot of things recently in TMC and I’m almost ready to dedicate more of my free time to developing TMC’s main website (including the mod workshop and server browser). While the main website is the most important thing for TMC, I just wanted to jump start some other things before devoting more of my free time into the main website’s development, especially since things like SEO can take a lot of time.
A lot of the changes I’m about to go over also changed my approach to developing the new website.
New Blog
TMC now has an official blog!
Ever since TMC started, I’ve created guides as topics on the forum. We’ve stored anything from small guides to resources and full-fledged guides on modding topics. We’ve only started creating more full guides last December (2024) and while we’ve received a bit of SEO traffic from them, I really believe they weren’t reaching their full potential. Obviously the content on the guide matter the most, but the layout and performance of the forum weren’t ideal as well.
Implementation
At first, I wanted to try to make a component for Discourse (our forum software) that modified the view for topics with the guide tag and made them look more like articles on a blog. When digging deeper into this possibility, I’ve realized it was going to be more work than I thought and that work just wasn’t worth it to me.
I eventually ended up stumbling across this post from Discourse. Basically what Discourse themselves do for their own blog is use the Ghost blog software for publishing posts/articles and then embed a topic from the Discourse forum to serve as the comments section for discussion. Thanks to Discourse, they also included a guide on how to do everything in the post linked earlier.
This is what I ended up implementing into TMC. It was a bit of work to implement everything, but it wasn’t hard at all compared to going through the pain of creating a Discourse component to alter the view which would probably not be worth it anyways.
Git Integration
Some people into tech may find this feature with the blog pretty cool. This feature is related to how we store and update the contents of guides.
I ended up making an open-source GitHub Action that updates a post (article) on the blog software via the Admin API with the contents of a file inside of the GitHub repository. Pair this with a GitHub repository and workflow, and you can make it so a post on the blog is kept up-to-date with the contents of a file inside the GitHub repository whenever pushing to the main branch via commits. All guides stored on our blog are also stored as public repositories inside of TMC’s GitHub organization linked below.
For example, take a look at the following repository for a guide on how to set up a Rust server I recently made.
This repository is linked to the following blog post. Whenever the repository is updated, the blog post is updated automatically!
Additionally, any users who see ways to improve the guide can create PRs through GitHub. If and once merged, the post will automatically update via the GitHub action I created 
This makes it a great system for community contributions which is perfect for our guides since I want to keep them up-to-date and improve them over time.
SEO Impact & Redirects
To be honest, I feel mapping the old topic URLs to the new blog posts was the most painful part of creating the new blog, lol (probably not, but still).
I’ve created 301 permanent redirects from the old forum topics to the blog articles. This should make impact to existing SEO minimal, but since the blog is on a new sub-domain (blog.moddingcommunity.com), we will most likely still see a dip temporarily.
I did end up converting many guides I recently made on the forum over though. That said, the blog software (Ghost) performs much better for article-like content than our forum software (Discourse). Other things like meta data, tags, descriptions, banners, and more are improved in Ghost as well. Public SEO rating websites I’ve used have ranked the blog posts noticably higher than the old forum topics which is a great sign already.
Wiki On Forum
After moving over full guides from the forum over to the blog, I noticed we have some topics that serve more as modding resources or smaller guides.
This gave me the idea to create a new Wiki category that stores resources and such across various games.
All topics in the wiki category are created as wiki entries by default. I also want to submit more wiki topics in the future to help modders.
Here’s an example of a post I made that I also moved to the Wiki section. I believe this is a good example of a Wiki topic.
Conclusion
So all-in-all, while we will most likely see a temporary dip in SEO traffic to the new blog even with the redirects, the better domain and software plus additional guides I’ve created recently should start bringing in more traffic to the blog (hopefully, lol). I’m going to continue creating guides as time goes on as well, especially since the deploy system is so nice now!
New Theme
With the introduction of the new blog, this led to concerns regarding the flow and theme of each individual web application for TMC. This is where things are always a pain because each software has their own method of designing things like headers where it makes it pretty hard to make themes global.
Implementation
With the new website, I initially spent a lot of time on making a package for global components that is shared between all websites and apps for TMC. However, I think I was putting way too much time into creating that and running into a lot of portability issues than I expected.
Therefore, I’ve decided to just wing it, create separate themes for each website, and try to match them as much as I can using the built-in tools in the web applications.
The themes still need a lot of work, but I do think it looks somewhat okay right now. I’d still really like to make all header and navbars identical in the future.
Other Small Changes
- Added a navbar with links to each website (landing page, forum, and blog).
- Made the header a bit bigger on the forum to match the blog software.
The Color Scheme
I’ve tried choosing the same exact background, header, and text colors for each website.
The colors may change in the future as there are branding changes and such.
New Branding
As some may have noticed, we have a new logo and icon. These are definitely temporary and to be honest I made them using AI image generation tools + basic Photoshop skills (to make small changes, etc.).
While I do think both the new icon and logo look kind of cool, I’d like to get them redesigned in the future by a graphic designer that we’ll pay when the time comes.
Towards the bright side, using AI to generate these images has given me some ideas on what our redesigned logo and icon can be.
Discord Server Revamp
I took some time and performed a basic Discord server revamp.
- Removed verification bots, roles, and altered everybody’s permissions (don’t believe they’re needed anymore).
- Users no longer need to verify with our previous verfication bots (which I believe were broken).
- Increased the minimum security level of the server.
- Finished Discord server on-boarding setup (welcome screen, role reactions, etc.).
- Added events and updates pingable roles and options.
- Reworked Discord text and voice channels.
- Removed all game-specific channels for now.
- Created a general Modding category and moved all general modding-related categories there including guides, support, and show and tell.
- Created an introductions channel for new users.
- Removed channels related to game development and device modding since they were unused.
Additionally, I’ve updated the server’s branding and descriptions on websites like Disboard.
I believe these changes simplified the Discord server and made it less cluttered. I believe using the Discord server for support is going to be a big focus point in the future, but I’d also like to do events as well (I’m just not great at hosting them lol).
Other Small Changes & Updates
Forum
- Changed category icons and colors.
- Merged all game series into one sub-category under the game modding forum category (e.g. CS:S and CS2 merged into the Counter-Strike category).
- Display sub-categories on index as columns instead of rows.
- Added social links to the left sidebar.
Top Mods
- New top mods topics created for the month of July!
- Left 4 Dead 2
- Counter-Strike 2
- Skyrim
- Find the rest on the forum!
- We’ve been receiving a lot of views from the initial topics our top mods system created.
- I’m excited to see how the newer top mods topics perform SEO-wise in the future!
Landing Page
- In the last update post I mentioned this page would be temporary, but we are going to transition the current open source repository into a permanent landing page that’ll also host other pages like About Us.
- Added blog button.
- Changed button colors and theme.
What’s To Come
New Website
- Re-analyze custom shared components package and auth system.
- Just scratch anything complex for now and focus on simplification.
- Work on server browser and mod workshop.
- Mod Workshop:
- Decide best way to handle file uploads and security.
- Start thinking on open source mod manager tool that’ll be important down the road.
- Server Browser:
- Can and should take a lot of code from the open source project Best Servers I worked on late last year.
- Put a priority on development since it is what I’m most familiar with and will be unique in the community.
- Work on releasing a basic version of the server browser (e.g. no advanced features like tracking player counts, banners, and such until later).
- Figure out resources needed to keep server information up-to-date with thousands of servers across multiple games.
- Mod Workshop:
- Figure out how we’re going to link accounts between forum and new website.
Blog
- Fix a small issue related to the GitHub Action I made that updates posts on the blog via Git integration.
- For some reason, sometimes the workflow fails when updating a post due to a malformed token generation which is weird.
- Already looked into it for a while, but was stumped on what the issue could be given code lined up with official API documentation.
- Try to figure out if it’s possible to automatically download external images locally and cache them using blog software.
- This is possible with the forum software which was really nice, but doesn’t appear to be possible with the blog software out of the box unfortunately.
- Add a feature where if a user clicks an image in the article, it displays it enlarged in a popup window.
- Add a feature that displays a Table of Contents section with all header names and links that is stickied to the page (follows as you scroll).
- This will remove the need to creating a Table of Contents inside of the article itself.
- This will also save space in the article’s contents resulting in a lower bounce-rate, etc.
- Continue creating guides via GitHub integration with blog.
Forum
- Continue adding smaller guides and resources to the Wiki to help retrieve traffic in the future and help other modders out.
Top Mods
- Add support for more games (e.g. Minecraft, Cyberpunk, and more).
- Look into improving ChatGPT prompt that retrieves descriptions for mods.
Discord Server
- Work on finding somebody who can improve the server further.
- Somebody who’d have an interest in hosting events would be a big plus.
- Not really a priority right now until main website is done which will take time.
- Find more Discord server listing websites to spread the word around.
- Also need to bump the Discord server listing bots more.
Landing Page
- Start brainstorming ideas on how to really polish the landing page.
- This will be easier once the main website is done and we’ll have actual services to describe.
Conclusion
That’s it! Whenever I make enough progress worth mentioning, I’ll make another update post!
Thank you for reading!