The topic isn't new, but since it was created after a successful EVO, might as well pick up it again.
On my own reason not to hang out here as much: I'm in Europe, and a lot of info seems USA-centric.
Orochinagi was supposed to cover that, but as of late it has felt a bit off:
* when nothingxs asked for opinions on players here and there, the difference in response was
quote in DC's favor.
* The site seems to be losing focus, covering such a variety of games beyond KoF that perhaps neither of them gets covered as well as it could
* the news posts there are getting pretty mixed, covering very different topic under a single title - as if the front page there wasn't turning into a mess lately, finding older stuff isn't very intuitive
* Twitter-wise, there's no distinction between Gunsmith the individual and ON.com the site, so you get a bit of unrelated silliness if you follow that, which would be fine if there was more and better stuff to be found there.
And it pains me to see and state this, because a site and forum that contains topic like
thi translation effort and
this critical bit of lore should live and thrive.
I'd rather not see DC go through similar troubles - the SNK/KoF scene is already pretty spread out as it is, and if it won't unify in some way, at least it's hubs should aim to be the best they can be.
Taking on the issues covered in the OP:
* Front page
My pet issue with practically every FG site is that it usually has only one blog-like news feed that treats actual news about the games and companies that make them the same way it does community-geneated stuff like tournaments, videos, poscasts, fanart, etc... So you you want to know when something was announced or released, you usually have to dig around the archives under piles of news about tournaments too far away from your area to be relevant to you.
Would it be very hard to have separate columns to separete these different typos of information? It would really be handy for posterity.
I found myself having to create something of the sort on Reddit mostly with plain news, as just about everywhere else it got buried under other stuff or entirely ignored:
http://www.reddit.com/r/SNKplaymoreOn a more specific note, it should be a bit embarrassing that
SRK.com lists the characters used in the KoF finals, even if incompletely, up to top 16, but
DC.com lists no characters and stops at top 8.
C'mon guys, is this how you want to be the KoF reference?...
* Other pages
When I check the site, I tend to stick with the front page and forum, but looking about a bit, you guys might want to revise the podcast page to put some dates on those shows - looking at it there's no way to tell how old or recent they are, which may be relevant to put the information in context (post-Climax/Steam? before or after collision box information was revealed?).
* Wiki
Now that collision box information is more accessible, that would be a good adition to the character pages - especially if it start with less-used characters, at least as far as tournament-visibility is concerned. That could encourage a bit more variety, as the predominance of Kim, EX Iori and Mr Karate at EVO does not give a good impression to the outside world.
Also, the wiki's front page's link to Mr Karate says "EX Mr Karate", when technically there's no such thing.
* Forums
There might be more sections than those the forum actually needs or uses - it might not be a bad idea to merge less-used section into more active ones. For example, the whole Tournaments section (which surprisingly contains no updated EVO topic...) into Offline Matchmaking.
That way you spend less time clicking around to find info, and from the outside everything looks a bit more active.
* Community
I can't really comment on the FB situation - I'm not in the group, as my expectation is that everything there is quite US-centric.
Finding out about that
When Boys Meet KoF topic here was great though, and
the Tumblr mentioned there to point people to was great as well (despite the background pic making it hard to read).
Above I mentioned separate main page columns for actual SNKP news and tournament stuff - maybe that's unlikely to implement, but if it turned out to be doable (each filtered by some tag-based system, for example?...), a 3rd, smaller column for fun stuff like that that also linked to corresponding forum topics would be great.
* Chat
I don't really use that, managing my Twitter feed is already tricky enough (I read everything and everyone I follow, so the volume gets kinda big some times).
I hope this helps, or at least encourages further discussion... I'm far from a good player, but I do love the games, and tend to carry around a stubborn "SNK(P) must live" mantra in my psyche, wondering what to do about that and occasionally putting effort into little things like the Reddit I mentioned above or
this topic at NeoGAF, neither of which require deep game knowledge or execution, which others already seem to cover decently.If the tournament scene is what gets them attention, I try and keep up, but there's only so much time and attention I can put into that when so much of it seems to happen so far away.