re: How I think the forums might be fixed

I must say before I continue: this is no longer really my gig. I’m not the one making final decisions any more, so all this amounts to is my two cents on the various things you’ve said as opposed to “this will happen”.

In the many, many years I’ve been here, I’ve noticed there have been different phases of activity that can go from really active to really quiet. The last few weeks have been an exception to the rule in being a complete wasteland. I pin this down to that obnoxious posting glitch we’ve been having; I personally haven’t bothered because I’ve had a hell of a lot of other projects I’m involved in to work on and didn’t feel like taking time out of those to fight with myBB. I think once this is sorted proper we’ll be back to the comfortable average between the hills.

Whenever we’ve had these discussions before people have always mentioned the progress on the game as the cause, and as legitimate curiosity, is it the game that keeps everyone around?

I ask because personally, I’ve always seen the primary reason I’m here as being because I like everyone here, with the game being just a thing that a good few members of this community are working on.

If there’s one section I would particularly really like to give my input on, it’s the idea of enforcing more professional moderation. I personally think this would be a step backward in making the forum accessible and approachable, really.

I’ve had a distaste towards formal moderation for a while because I feel it creates an atmosphere where you don’t feel comfortable to just chat and become overly cautious about anything you say, and subconsciously make moderation staff seek out broken rules when no actual harm is being done. Obviously there should be a degree of input if someone is clearly overstepping boundaries, and a user who is harassing another member, being abusive, inciting arguments etc. should either be called aside by a staff member or be banned, dependent on the severity of the incident, but I feel written rules and monitored warning systems could ~criminalise~ those who weren’t being too much of a real bother.

A good example is, in retrospect, the way me and Afti handled the signature size problem a while back. By giving specific sizes we wanted met (with signature suspensions being thrown out to those who didn’t comply), we were causing conflict which could easily have avoided by just messaging anyone with a particularly obnoxious signature saying “hey dude, do you mind not posting [x] in your signature? Thanks.” etc..

That kinda ties in with the swearing point too. If there’s someone using swear words to amplify an insult towards another person they should be dealt with, but to have it written in the rules you’d kinda have to still warn a harmless member who happens to have a potty mouth here and there.
It wouldn’t hurt to lose some of the general silliness/Afti-isms in the forum’s layout, descriptions etc., if that’s desired.

I have to say I hugely disagree with the idea of wanting more professional-seeming staff members. Personally, when I join a forum, I (and I assume others, but naturally I can’t speak for other people) don’t want these people to be my bosses, teachers, parents etc.. I want them to be my friends who are like me, who just happen to have extra jobs allocated to them.

Ultimately the final decision for whether to reboot the forums, lock these ones and make new ones or whatever is down to Lorem, and what is practical with the disk space available, but timing should be heavily considered more than anything. I’ve yet to play the current release myself, but from what I’m hearing it’s a very early build. Taking measures to bring people in when an early, unrepresentative build is all we have to show would be extremely counterproductive - people won’t see it for the vision; they’ll see just another buggy, unfinished fangame from the ocean of the millions of others out there.

The front page desperately needs fixing up. I believe Lorem’s working on a proper site right now, but for the time being the current splash should be updated just to encourage people to join the forums while mentioning there’s a build of the game available.

I’m not sure what to really suggest re: content on the forums. If people feel there’s something they want to talk about they’ll make a thread, but I’m not sure if forcing new threads’d work. We tried that before during the Revolution but even things like the One A Day Pokémon thread died off eventually.

I’m sorry this has come out sounding so cynical, and I do respect that you’re trying to improve this place, but I’m just worried that the push for certain things will just restart the Acanthite cycle once more.

What I will do, however, is demote myself. I still retain technical powers so I can intervene if needed (removing spambots from the main forums and such), but it doesn’t really make sense for me to still have a blue name given I haven’t actually contributed anything in a very long time.

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