08/30/2022
TLDR; I’m rebuilding LanHUB, looking for ideas for the next big version!
10 years of LanHUB - So what's next?
Around 10 years ago I started a little app called LanHUB that helped people run Lan Parties. And it was pretty good, I think. I used it as a way to contribute to the LAN Party community, and gain some hands-on experience with new technologies that I use in my day-to-day job too. For years I have granted free unlimited premium licenses to any event when they ask, no matter the size, as my way of giving back to the community.
Over the past few months I've been pondering "What's next for LanHUB?" Well, here are a few things I've come to realize:
· Players don’t like to use lan party software if they don’t need to. It doesn’t matter if it’s a download, or in the cloud. Another thing is another pain for them. They prefer to get in, register for a tournament/match result, and get back to their own activities, and maybe to keep the tournament brackets open. Any player features designed to keep them engaged on the site has been an exercise in futility. (But I will always want my caffeine counter leaderboard!)
· Conversely, Staff appreciate the tooling in LanHUB gives to manage players, registrations, tournaments, and seatmap features. They always have a LanHUB tab open.
· E-Sports software dominates the landscape. Tournament software is dime a dozen and get bought out all the time, but outside of that narrow scope it’s a barren landscape of any large capital-based solutions.
· LanHUB, LanReg and others are serving a niche of a niche very well – Registrations with seat maps. Others use Eventbrite (for whatever reason. LanReg is very affordable and LanHUB has been free for years).
· LanHUB is long in the tooth - built on the ageing .NET Framework, started on 3.5 and now 4.8. There’s tons of disabled old features from over the years.
With the above being said, LanHUB is undergoing a redesign from the ground up. The following are confirmed:
· Acknowledging the prevalence of discord and its player engagement, there will be full Discord integration with built-in Lan Party features, like tournament player assistance (ex: automatic channel threads, tournament registration, match result submission)
· Most player-engagement features will be removed (Ex: “Vote for games” board, Straw Polls, realtime chat, player bulletin board).
· Player notices will be retained (Announcements, Schedule, etc)
· Most event management functionality will be retained (Tournaments, Seat Maps, Registrations, Vouchers, post-event surveys)
So, on that note, I have a few questions for the community:
What is missing?
What doesn’t line up, what wouldn't you use? (I'm looking at you, those who use eventbrite!)
Do you prefer using LAN Party software in the cloud? Or do you prefer downloading from Steam or Docker and running it on your own servers?
This is literally the best time to speak up, while the development is early. Your feedback will have a strong influence on the direction of LanHUB for the next 10 years!
Of course, I'm always looking for crazy people alike to join me on this crazy development ride. If you know .NET and are looking for a volunteer project to help with the workload, PM me! There's lots to do!
