Some tips to help you make a Gmod server.

Hello, I'm Ragnarok,
Thought I'd get in here and share my failed experience trying to make a Gmod server,
Hopefully my mistakes will help someone do a better job in the future, and succesfully start a good RP server,

Fair enough, my mistakes could be considered somewhat "rookie mistakes", and to an extent, they were,
Trusting people too much, rushing myself ahead of possibilites, hyping a community for stuff I couldn't give right away,
That kind of stuff.

Back around 2019, I decided that the RP server I was playing in, was no longer fun, and that it had lost what made it special,
Now looking back, it might have been that I simply had some difficulty letting go of the past, and embracing change, new things,

Regardless of that fact, I decided I was going to make a new server, on the same theme, same everything, except in era, I wanted
to bring back the "Golden Age" of that server, try to recreate what me and some friends thought was the best of the best that server
ever was, but, of course, as I would soon find out, I had no idea what I was doing lol,

I began by making a discord server, a community discord server, and began setting it up, granted it seemed easy at the time, I would
face many problems such as people talking in "Announcement channels" and whatnot, because I was still quite new with permissions
and roles, so here is a tip, if you wanna make a good community discord server, I highly recommend either:

a.) Learning how to set up a discord in it's entirely
b.) Having both aesthetic roles, and functional roles,
c.) Finding someone who is experienced on setting up discord servers, and having them do it for you,

I personally now a days prefer to go with option B, I like to separate certain permission across 5 levels of Discord Server Clearence Levels, the highest of which is a "Full Access" role, and the lowest of which is a "Guest Entry Access", anything in between, doesn't need their permissions set up, so long as everyone has an assigned Clearance Role, so just have fun smashing 1000 different coloured roles with funny names and whatever else you might find interesting,

On a side note, setting up permissions for different channels and categories works a lot better this way too,
But enough about Discord Set up,

With all that set, and the people being invited, I thought it was time for me to begin to learn, how was it that everything worked on discord servers. All I knew was that it worked on LUA Coding, and that I had no idea how to code in LUA,
I didn't know how to start my own dedicated server, or how to set up DarkRP base on my Gmod, it was... An interesting adventure,

There are some ways you can bypass this, namely, hiring developers who are experienced in LUA Coding, as well as buying a server host instead of going around trying to do it yourself, not only will it have more quality, it stays up 24/7, of course, having to be restarted every now and then,

Don't be a dumb dumb like myself and learn the thing scrathing surface of LUA Coding, and attempt to make a patchwork of templates and codes I found online to make a server, endgame... It didn't work at all lol.

Speaking of which, it reminds me,
Even if you trust someone to assume positions of "Co-Owner", or "Head Staff" or whatever other position you might have, always have a backup plan, during these phases of development for my server, I kinda overtrusted some people because I didn't know what I was doing, and they had a better understanding of things, so I just kinda gave them more permission than it was safe to,

So, I guess in terms of trust and safety, just make sure you have a backup plan in case everything goes wrong, be like Batman, trust no one, but work with them. Saves you a lot of headache.

If you manage to develop this far where you have a nice community, a well built discord server, and a functioning team of developers putting together a server in Gmod, it's time for the addons,

Tip number... I kinda forgot where we are at,
Make sure the addons don't have any conflicts, sure some minor conflicts are easy to get across on a singleplayer game where those thousand lua errors on our console are just a fun little reminder we are working with a fluster cuck of addons, on a multiplayer scale, it really breakes things,
The best way to make sure the content pack for a server is good, is to make 150% sure there are no conflicts, make 150% sure they are not heavy addons, because otherwise people will be waiting for hours to download the content, if they do at all, remember, not everyone can afford too much space in their harddrive being used with Gmod addons, and if you can, which I honestly recommend, compress them into "Server Content Addons", there are a myriad of different tutorials out there teaching you every way possible to do this, and if you manage to do a good job at it, the content will be small, easy to obtain, it will take little to no space on the community's computer space, and it doesn't clutter up the addon listing,

My personal attempt at this, was a total failure, I had 100+ addons smooched together in a Content Pack, safe to say, nobody downloaded it cuz it was a mess lol, so, if you follow the above, it should work out for you.

Conclusion,
I guess I'm not much of a storyteller, but... If you wanna make a good server, be it a MilitaryRP, DarkRP, or whatever other gamemode it is, remember each one has their own way of being built, remember to follow these steps,

- Have a proper Discord Server set up,
- Have a proper team of LUA Coding Devs,
- Have a proper Content Pack set up,
- Know who to trust,
- Understand it might not go as planned,
- Don't let one mistake disencourage you from moving forward,
- (Most important) Have passion for what you are trying to put together, if you work hard enough, and you wish to see your work blossom, keep working with a smile in your face, and love for what you have accomplished so far, and hope that the future holds even better results,

I guess, I'm not entirely good in a lot of stuff, but... For all it's worth,
I hope this thread helps people in some way or another, this is the only way I can see myself helping out in any way,
I hope that in a future, I can see people making success, where I found failure. Good luck people! <3 <3 <3

Hey man thanks for sharing your experience with us, im trying to create a server myself and its been tough to do it alone.
Its kinda hard but im learning a lot, starting with lua scripting soon too because i can't find a good lua dev ^^' but overall im enjoying the ride.

It's a high quality post you made, all this experience is worth a lot and ive learned a lot, thanks for the encouragements too :D

I understand where your coming from. I at one point had to teach myself LUA. One thing that I can recommend is if you can do the work yourself, do it yourself. Having a dev team is different from managing staff as said dev team would have access to your servers files. You don't need to be a master at coding lua to know what's happening. When I first starting making servers I used a lot of copy paste templates and YouTube tutorials to lead me in the right direction. Once you know templates, basic errors and the core functionality of your gamemode works in the code, your pretty much good to go. Csite was one of the most useful websites when I first starting making servers and TCB's youtube tutorials helped out quite a bit as well.