Web Dev/Team Management - Horizon Servers

Horizon actually began as a small passion project in 2014 that was just focused on my friends and I having a server to play on together. One day we decided to make our server public and people slowly started joining. The community slowly grew from just a few of us to dozens in a matter of days. As the player base grew we kept developing the server to make further improvements. 5 years later we are running multiple servers and still have 100s of unique players come onto our servers on a weekly basis. These days the server is mainly managed by my friend Aziz who was also one of the founders.

It was never our intention to run a huge server, but it turned out pretty well and we got to meet a lot of interesting individuals from all over the world. The server got to the size where we couldn’t manage it with our small friend group alone so we started bringing others onto the team. During the time I still worked on the server I managed our staff team which mainly consisted of admins and moderators. Both admins and moderators were responsible for keeping the servers clean and safe for the players. We knew there would always be people trying to break rules so we figured we should always have staff online to watch out for them. We would interview people for staff positions to make sure they were a fine fit and we did our best finding people from different time-zones so we could try to have the servers covered nearly 24/7.

After about a year of using an old forum board, we decided we need to build something better from scratch. Our new site was built utilizing Vue and we ended up with a much cleaner overall design. We obviously needed a login system for the forums as well which also had permissions attached to it as we had certain staff discussion threads that we only wanted staff to have access to. We also have section for ban appeals and bug reports that higher staff members could mark as either Accepted or Denied. There is also pages like the leaderboards that pull from our database and list off the top players. As of now it is only listing around the top 40,000 players because we need to trim off the low percentile players due to storage limitations.

Throughout the years of helping to manage a community I quickly learnt it was nearly impossible to keep everyone happy at once. We would always need to make compromises and we would always have people with differing opinions, which was fine because I think it helped us improve in the end. Eventually I left the team because I had other things to focus on in life, mainly college, however we had enough people on our team to keep the community going strong. The community is still up and running today and you can check out the site below. If you have any more questions about the community or my involvement/development of it please contact me.

You can view the full site here: https://www.horizonservers.net/