1) HAVE A THEME BEFORE YOU START
If you just have a whole bunch of people drawing whatever they want, it's just going to be some random stupid track!
Pick what you want to do, and make sure everyone understands.
Nobody wants to play some detailed smooth downhill track that turns into a Star Wars space travel trial. That's just too random!..
2) DRAW OUT WHAT YOU WANT THE TRACK TO LOOK LIKE ROUGHLY
A few lines on MS paint or scanning a scribbled up drawing of the track will give most people an idea of what you want to do.
It's also easier to tell people what part they are doing if you can show them on a picture.
3) DO NOT START WITH A CHARACTER COUNT GOAL
A whole lot of you are posting things like 1M, 500k or 250k characters goals. Those are BIG numbers to get to!
Most people making these massive tracks never started with a character goal: they usually just start making something randomly and it just happens.
Keep in mind that it's not easy to get to high numbers, especially if you haven't even made it over 100k before.
4) FINISH DATES ARE A BAD IDEA
99.9% of the time you will finish later than you said!
Finish dates may also cause you to start to rush thinking you have to get to that date or else you fail miserably.
Time is key, if you're rushing 2 hours work into a half hour its going to look like crap.
Like above, character count doesn't mean its a good track. Nobody I've ever talked to wants to play a crap track just because it is massive.
5) OPEN COLLABS RARELY WORK
Don't post a little piece of code and expect it to grow into some massive track: it will probably die in the first week.
Newbies could ruin the track; other people's work could get deleted causing arguments etc. You don't want that to happen.
6) DON'T START A COLLAB WITH THE FIRST TWO OR THREE PEOPLE WHO POST
99.9% of the time they just want in on your over sized collab so they can have that 500k track in their gallery...
If anything, PM people you would like to collab with, or wait untill someone trustworthy and talented wants to build with you.
7) PICK PEOPLE WITH THE SAME SKILL LEVEL AS YOU
If you let someone horrible in on your collab because they promise to try hard, it will usually end up with you or another person with skills having to go over there work. Then that person could get angry that you went over his work. That will usually cause someone to leave the collab, then the other person is going to leave because it's too big of a job for two people. Then you're left with the code, which usually ends up sitting in a folder on your computer untill your sister deletes it.
8) PASSING THE CODE THROUGH THE FORUMS IS A HORRIBLE IDEA
One, because someone could easily steal it.
Two, because it causes confusion. Someone not even in the collab could decide to add too it, it will just end up with confusion and code being lost.
9) ADDING THE OTHER PEOPLE ON MSN IS PROBABLY THE ONLY GOOD WAY TO DO IT
That way it's easy to ask who's working on what and who has the code right there.
There is pretty much no way anyone can try to jump into the collab or steal the code.
Email can work too, but i suggest only emailing the code itself, and communicating through MSN.
10) BE AWARE THAT A COLLAB TRACK WILL END UP TAKING MORE TIME THAN JUST GOING SOLO
It might be someones week to work on the track, and something happens and they can't...
Also, there usually will always be a time were two people are working on the track at the same time, so code is lost there.
So consider if you would rather just do it on your own than having to go threw all the pains of collaborating, even though it's usually worth it
Edited and sticked by Maxime
