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#52 Aug 21 2013 at 8:56 AM Rating: Good
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Spoonless wrote:
NO U DESU DESU DESU
YOU'RE RUINING THE OOT!
#53 Aug 21 2013 at 12:13 PM Rating: Excellent
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His Excellency Aethien wrote:
lolgaxe wrote:
Dread Lörd Kaolian wrote:
You guys need more active topic starters.
Lure the XIVers. That'll be fun with how touchy feely they are.
We could use some good drama here.


But it won't even be good drama. It'll be boring drama that we don't care about and isn't actually interesting in any way.
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#54 Aug 21 2013 at 2:34 PM Rating: Good
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Still better than nothing.
#55 Aug 21 2013 at 2:42 PM Rating: Excellent
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I'll read it either way.

Smiley: popcorn
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#56 Aug 21 2013 at 3:00 PM Rating: Good
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Spoonless wrote:
Dread Lörd Kaolian wrote:
go recruit newbies from the FFXIV forum, they've got 1,000 peoples in there
No, thanks.


ha ha ha ha ha, yeah, no.
#57 Aug 21 2013 at 3:16 PM Rating: Good
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His Excellency Aethien wrote:
Still better than nothing.
Probably not.
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#58 Aug 21 2013 at 3:24 PM Rating: Excellent
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You're missing the oppertunity to recruit your own fleet of minions in training though! Think of it, a whole forum of inexperianced and likely extremely optomistic and easily led minds, whom you could convert to your own personality cult! All flamewar arguments would fall against your unstoppable army of legitimate raters and posters. Hoardes of eager wariors ready to fling themselves in the way of any ban button leveled against you. You could attain Trolling Nervana and become one with the forumverse, controlling our posts and actions through your will alone!

Thats how the Asylum did it back in the day anyways, well, before the whole Asylum thing and The Exhile...
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#59 Aug 21 2013 at 6:39 PM Rating: Good
WE HAD A WIKI SITE
#60 Aug 21 2013 at 6:41 PM Rating: Good
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Dread Lörd Kaolian wrote:
You're missing the oppertunity to recruit your own fleet of minions in training though! Think of it, a whole forum of inexperianced and likely extremely optomistic and easily led minds, whom you could convert to your own personality cult! All flamewar arguments would fall against your unstoppable army of legitimate raters and posters. Hoardes of eager wariors ready to fling themselves in the way of any ban button leveled against you. You could attain Trolling Nervana and become one with the forumverse, controlling our posts and actions through your will alone!

Thats how the Asylum did it back in the day anyways, well, before the whole Asylum thing and The Exhile...


Considering the number of spelling errors, I proclaim Kaolian "DRUNK".

That is all.
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#61 Aug 21 2013 at 8:22 PM Rating: Decent
Dread Lörd Kaolian wrote:
You guys need more active topic starters. There are enough OOT repliers to topics, but you don't end up with enough new topics to sustain the gestalt or attract new posters or bring back old lurkers. It may be the only "fix" is to merge the forums with Asylum to get enough people concentrated, but at this point Asylum doesn't also need that, since they have juuust enough people in there to keep it going. I'm hopeing a few of the new flood of ffxivers wanders in here and takes up residence. We'll see. Admins don't tend to work as topic starters, since it starts looking like we're taking over a forum, and it can't just be one or two others either. The trick isn't even really to post particularily good topics. They just have to be intriguing. People will post, it ups their post count, and if they dislike a topic they'll mold it to whatever they want. getting that starter in the first place is the tricky part, since only a fraction of forum posters start new topics regularily.


ITT: Kao encourages spamming new threads.


-NW
#62 Aug 21 2013 at 9:31 PM Rating: Excellent
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Professor stupidmonkey wrote:


Considering the number of spelling errors, I proclaim Kaolian "DRUNK".

That is all.


No, that's pretty much normal for me. you should be worried if I start spelling things correctly during a long post. Or if I start going on about imaginary llamas.

NaughtyWord wrote:

ITT: Kao encourages spamming new threads.
-NW


It's all about balance. One person can't make all the threads, it drives people away. You've got 50 posts to work with on a default page view, 3 of those will be stickies usually, and maybe another 3 will be spam or crap (though less now that I have the fun spammer hell tool!) Ideally there would be 40 different people posting 40 different threads within a 4 hour period. Slower than that, the gestalt doesn't continue to grow. faster than that and people can't keep up.

OOT even at it's busiest never was that fast, and likely never will be.

That being said, you need at least 5-10 new threads per day to grow a forum. Less than that, people don't feel enough of a compelling draw to return.It gets slow durring the summer months when all the college kids are away from their computers for a MMO related forum, and during the hollidays. You can pretty much tell how well a forum is doing based on the number of lurkers. It's a 20 lurker to 1 poster ratio on average, and mods don't count. OOT and asylum all have a higher poster to lurker ratio, but less overall numbers. Growth is possible at about 80 average viewers. Growth is likely at 150-200. The gestalt really kicks in at 400 users and can quickly grow to upwards of 2000 depending on the topic. Game specific forums are easier to grow, but die off quicker. People automatically have a connection and sense of belonging. People don't post in the OOT or Asylum usually until they are already established elsewhere, or have lurked long enough to see how people react to newbies (hint, in OOT's case, it isn't "good")

I can give you all the facts and statistics of a forum, tell you how the mechanics work out, but I haven't figured out a way to fix the slide. I'm certainly open to ideas. Alot of it's structureal. Corporate ownership issues, people annoyed at various forum changes over the years, the ads all over the place, etc. The quickest fix would be killing the ads off entirely in the forums, which would boost return viewers and use, and probably result in more people buying premium and actually using the site features, but that won't happen. I've tried. Socks don't work long, even if I didn't find them annoying. People find out and feel betrayed. plus no one is really good at splitting their writing style into majorly different styles on the fly in real time over a long period of time with consistancy. More threads helps, and even the occasional big admin thread can be a temporary draw (ask an admin day, etc) but overall admin threads, unless they are major drama, seem to hurt if there are too many of them. That could be my perception again. Maybe a forum consolidation?

I dunno. Maybe it can't be fixed, and this is the level of posting we experiance in here. I can't help but thinking there should be a mechanism to reward posting of new thread topics, but without encouraging spam, and without everyone feeling it was a cheat. Make 1st post in the thread count double on post count? assign a random post count + value to new threads, like a lottery? (annoying to time thread dings). Automatic positive karma boost for new thread start, but offsetable by downrates? /shrug. Maybe that's the wrong approach entirely.

Certanly more visibility would help. the Wow forums showing up on Wowhead, etc. I've been working on that for a while, but the official forums are large enough that ours won't take off as much as the FFXIV ones did. at their prime the Wow forums were never over 400 or so.

We'll keep tinkering.
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#63 Aug 22 2013 at 2:35 AM Rating: Decent
Dread Lörd Kaolian wrote:
People don't post in the OOT or Asylum usually until they are already established elsewhere, or have lurked long enough to see how people react to newbies (hint, in OOT's case, it isn't "good")



That is a symptom of all forums really, not just OoT or NHB forums. Well, in my opinion anyway. If a forum survives long enough to garner coveted "regs" distrust or even outright anger toward new posters is inevitable. Because they are clunky, they are blocks in a malleable pool of goo, and I think it is a right of passage of sorts, to get a bit roughed up when coming into an established posting community. Obviously those who have lurked for a while are a little less blocky and of course this theory doesn't apply to all new posters, some newbies get it right away.

As a moderator, you can't get too heavy-handed about it as your regular posters--which are the lifeblood of any forum--will grow tired and leave. But you can't be too light either so it's a difficult balancing act and I share in your struggle (on a different forum of course).

As a side note my posting here declined mostly because of the fact that I no longer play any of the games featured here. The fact that some of my more favorite posters no longer post here for whatever reason would be an alternate reason. Unless of course there is a StarCraft II or SimCity forum here I'm unaware of and even then there are far better sites for those two games. Not to hate on Zam.com but until you guys start hosting mods for the various SimCity games any hopes of getting the forum going is a dead stick.

Anyway I've digressed to a significant degree, I felt like speaking for a moment on the very issue you've raised as I'm also attempting to wrestle the same bear and I understand exactly where you are coming from Kao.

-NW
#64 Aug 22 2013 at 4:21 AM Rating: Good
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Hallertau wrote:
WE HAD A WIKI SITE
It's still there.
#65 Aug 22 2013 at 6:20 AM Rating: Good
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One of the issues I see is that whereas ZAM.com provides several network sites rolled into one, the various new sites that come out with new games, Guildhead, TORhead, etc. contain their own communities, segregated from the rest of the "ZAM Network". There's no clear connection to the other sites in the network, and people don't migrate. I guess XIVDB has a link to "ZAM Forums" on it, so I suppose that's an improvement. At least it won't result in split communities within the same network like with Wowhead, TORhead, etc.
#66 Aug 22 2013 at 8:08 AM Rating: Good
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Dread Lörd Kaolian wrote:

I can't help but thinking there should be a mechanism to reward posting of new thread topics,

Karma points.

With the karma points you can buy custom colors to frame your name. At this point I'd not be satisfied with simply getting green or red. I want cerise or chestnut or burnt sienna.



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#67 Aug 22 2013 at 8:13 AM Rating: Good
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NaughtyWord wrote:
As a side note my posting here declined mostly because of the fact that I no longer play any of the games featured here.
Neither do most of the people here, snowflake.
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#68 Aug 22 2013 at 9:10 AM Rating: Good
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lolgaxe wrote:
NaughtyWord wrote:
As a side note my posting here declined mostly because of the fact that I no longer play any of the games featured here.
Neither do most of the people here, snowflake.
Games? What games?
#69 Aug 22 2013 at 9:19 AM Rating: Excellent
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I play games.

No one posts in the SWTOR forum though, and I'm not sure I really have much to add anyway.
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#70 Aug 22 2013 at 9:23 AM Rating: Good
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Yeah, I'm not currently playing anything. I'll be playing FFXIV come Saturday, but no chance in hell I'm becoming a regular in that forum.
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#71 Aug 22 2013 at 9:36 AM Rating: Good
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idiggory, King of Bards wrote:
Yeah, I'm not currently playing anything. I'll be playing FFXIV come Saturday, but no chance in hell I'm becoming a regular in that forum.
Smiley: nod
#72 Aug 22 2013 at 9:46 AM Rating: Good
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someproteinguy wrote:
I play games.

No one posts in the SWTOR forum though, and I'm not sure I really have much to add anyway.
This is what I was talking about earlier. There's not a huge amount of activity there, but TORhead has its own TOR General and TOR Class forums. So, anyone who is using the database service is more likely to post there. Of course, there's no organic way for those users to ever interact or become aware of the community on ZAM Prime, and so you end up with two communities for the same game using the same site network.

I understand why they do it, but I really dislike all the separate network sites with their separate forums. I started coming to ZAM because of FFXI. I ended up in the OOT and Asylum forums and made some friends, and later ended up playing WoW with some of them. I later played SWTOR with people from the site, and learned about tons of other games that people were playing. Had it been just a dedicated FFXI site, I would have likely never branched out and tried these other games, and if I had, I might not have ended up using the ZAM database offerings for them. The nice thing about ZAM was that it had information for a ton of games, all in one convenient location.
#73 Aug 22 2013 at 9:49 AM Rating: Good
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FFXI was my introduction as well, since alla was one of the best resources for it. Then again, there were no o-boards, and people mainly came to the site to use its maps and item databases. Class guides were probably a selling point, too, but perhaps not the rest of the forums.
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IDrownFish wrote:
Anyways, you all are horrible, @#%^ed up people

lolgaxe wrote:
Never underestimate the healing power of a massive dong.
#74 Aug 22 2013 at 10:31 AM Rating: Good
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idiggory, King of Bards wrote:
FFXI was my introduction as well, since alla was one of the best resources for it. Then again, there were no o-boards, and people mainly came to the site to use its maps and item databases. Class guides were probably a selling point, too, but perhaps not the rest of the forums.
I migrated to Zam when Somepage was having all their security issues. I eventually stayed on Zam for the forums, and ended up using FFXIclopedia as my main information resource.
#75 Aug 22 2013 at 10:38 AM Rating: Excellent
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Spoonless wrote:
The nice thing about ZAM was that it had information for a ton of games, all in one convenient location.
Yeah I miss the depth of information, especially user-generated stuff like class stickies and what not. That was the big drawing and staying power for me initially. As sad as it was to see that dry up, I have to admit I don't have the kind of time I used to have to make that kind of stuff. Old people are old.

Oh and I assume they kept the forums separate to keep us away from normal people.
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#76 Aug 22 2013 at 10:51 AM Rating: Excellent
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Quote:
The fact that some of my more favorite posters no longer post here for whatever reason would be an alternate reason.


Yeah, there are quite a few people who were good at starting and sustaining content that are now gone.

I believe management should have taken the long view on some of them and let them stick around.
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