Zelaron Gaming Forum

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- - I resign (http://zelaron.com/forum/showthread.php?t=43389)

Edit:

Well sad to see you go, even though I hardly ever agreed with you about anything. I think the Admins/Sup Mod(no s) need to have a sitdown to device a plan to get more activity, once again. There are alot of options out there that don't require that much though/work, just keep at it noobs.

And no, I wouldn't go to a new forum, these are fine just the way they are, just need more people.

Quote:

Originally Posted by D3V

I think the Admins/Sup Mod(no s) need to have a sitdown to device a plan to get more activity, once again. There are alot of options out there that don't require that much though/work, just keep at it noobs.

It's been done. We had a running thread in the staff forum for like a week to come up with all of the ideas we could. Also, I remember meeting with Grav/Chruser in chatrooms to discuss stuff.

It's not really the ideas we need, we just need someone to implement them. Not that more ideas would hurt anything.

Oh yeah I know ofcourse. How hard can it be to upload new programs and implement them on the forum? I'm no programmer by any means but it can't really be that impossible.

I don't think it's as easy as all that. We don't want to just add a bunch of crap that every other forum on the planet has. I think it would be best to actually have stuff that is somewhat unique to Zelaron, like the Activity hack. A lot of the ideas I had tied into the activity hack in some way if I remember right.

The store hack tie-in to the activity hack is simple. The activity hack only controls the generation of funds. The issue there is simply finding a store hack that is capable of doing advanced things without being a mess. Besides the issue of people exploiting to get things for free, there's the issue of, for example modifying other peoples' user titles. If I modify someone's title for a month, then they go and modify it for a day, the proper thing to happen after a day would be for it to go back to mine, but there's a lot of code involved in tracking stuff like that.

As far as the blog stuff, I know there is at least one 3rd party modification and there is an official Jellsoft blog product for vB. I don't think either of them allow the extent of customization as LiveJournal or MySpace, however. I told Grav that I'm against this, but my time is not needed for this. Especially if we go for the Jellsoft version, it should be an incredibly simple installation (requires the forum upgrade I'm working on on the test board, however).

The vBSEO stuff may not be as much trouble as I initially suspected, but I haven't really looked into it.

I still think guest posting is a huge mistake, as it will prevent most people from ever making accounts. A quick registration may be as simple as a form hack, but it may be complicated by the verification image.

I thought we almost came to an agreement at one point that we would be able to limit an IP to, say, 5 posts before locking them out and forcing them to Register? Maybe that is just my own genius idea though? ;)

Anyway, I read this thread, and although I can sympathize with Grav and the like, I don't agree. I mean, WW is my age (25 or so), and if his life is anything like mine, after 4-5 years on Zelaron (I honestly don't know how long Zelaron has existed...), you basically lost most of the luster that once existed. And once that "pizazz" is gone, the motivation to actually sit down and write/implement coding to temporarily please some members is all but gone. I'm not saying this is the case either, but I wouldn't blame WW for his lack of catering to everyone's need on a whim. He's done plenty for Zelaron, and continues to do so. I wouldn't mind having like 1 or 2 changes a year, because it's not like Zelaron is broke. There are still a lot of posts and activity. It's not growing exponentially, or even barely linearly for that matter, but it's not declining either, as far as I'm concerned.

Why try to fix something that's not broken? Sure we can try to make it better, but give the guy that has the power, resources, and intuition to do it some slack. Seriously.....

Oh, and farewell.

It's been broken for a while...

Not really. I can think of things that can improve, but I don't see anything that is clearly deficient that it would eventually turn Zelaron into non-existence.

It's been on a steady decline. We hardly ever get new members who post, and it's even rarer to find members who stick around. The old members are getting tired of this place. They are slowly leaving as well. Sure, we have spurts of activity, however I'm sure if we could find an activity chart we would certainly see decline over the last 3 years. It's only a matter of time until this place has 5 or 6 posts a day. After that, people won't bother checking this daily, and will eventually quit checking altogether. That trend needs to be reversed if we want to keep this place going for longer than a couple of years. Not steadied, reversed.

Ditto.

Change in activity tends to snowball, whether for the good or the bad. If people post less, there are less posts to respond to, which means people in essense post less and less.

If people post more, there are more posts to respond to, people post more.

It's not that hard to understand, and if you've been around fairly consistantly for a few years you should see this yourself. Luckily, we've been going upwards lately.

I never see this place as going away, it'll always have its ups and downs. The "medium" members are just going to transition into the old skool members sometime soon as newbies roll in. It's just the circle of life.

Yeah but the newbies have stopped rolling in.

Just the same, if there are less posts, there are less things for newbies to come here for. It really all comes down to posting more. You must have noticed the recent surge of activity since people started posting more. Everyone's activity has gone up, so it's not just more people, it's actually more activity.

I tried the Automotive aspect, but nobody really has lives outside of computeres and videogames, so it hasn't taken off at all. There are many things that can be talked about and posted about, but most of that would be daily news, which we don't even have a current stream on, maybe bring back News Poster and assign somebody that doesn't mind keeping us informed on top of things?

Just because no one is interested in cars means they do not have lives? Damn, you're a narrow-minded lune.

Oi, here we go again.

I'm gonna go ahead and call you both fags and get it over with.

Quote:

Originally Posted by HandOfHeaven

Just because no one is interested in cars means they do not have lives? Damn, you're a narrow-minded lune.

Lol, if you would've read it says that nobody has lives outside of computers and videogames.. Doesn't necessairily mean you have no life if you aren't into cars.

Glad we've got that sorted.

Right. News Poster. I think it would be an idea to bring it back for a few months, at least, just to see how it goes. Looking at the News Forum, though, lots of people post news, so we might end up with four or five News Posters.

That's how it used to be. I'd post news. I'm on MSN, CNN, and other related sites everyday. I like keeping up with current events.

Yeah I can vouch for that, I'm at work from 8-6 usually, varies with an hour or two most of the time, so I have plenty of time to catch up on CNN, MSNBC,NFL,Reuters,AssociatedPress,etc etc's Websites, i'm sure bringing back a news poster would atleast give pride to somebody that can take the time and somewhat dedication to bring the news to the people here :)

I would love to have another massive influx of threads and members roll through here.

Quote:

Originally Posted by Grav (Post 602196)

Just a few snippets from when my AIM logger actually works, which is rarely and only goes back a few months. This is going from most recent to older as you go down.

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Grаν¡tоnЅurgе: is there a reasonable way to make it happen? maybe you have to log in somewhere every session to see the forum?
Grаν¡tоnЅurgе: I dont know what php is capable of
146763477: Oh, you can do anything with PHP, but I don't want to build something from scratch
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Grаν¡tоnЅurgе: how feasible is a blog function? it is basically against everything I believe in, but members might like it. see example: http://forums.narutofan.com/blog.php?u=101654
Grаν¡tоnЅurgе: or here http://forums.narutofan.com/blog.php?u=33926
146763477: I just don't see a reason for it. If you want to blog, use Live Journal or myspace.
146763477: You can provide a link in your profile
Grаν¡tоnЅurgе: because for some of them zelaron is their main blog/outlet as it is
146763477: I still don't think it'd be very usefull
Grаν¡tоnЅurgе: well how hard would it be to install
Grаν¡tоnЅurgе: is it worth just trying
146763477: I don't think so.
Grаν¡tоnЅurgе: would someone else think so
146763477: I doubt it
146763477: Any of the members likely to use it would rather post in the appropriate forum is the feeling I have
Grаν¡tоnЅurgе: well, I tried! nevermind!
146763477: We're a close-knit group, so the separation of the blogs isn't really needed
146763477: It's not that I don't appreciate your suggestion, I just don't think it'll get used
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[I apologize in advance, Chruser, but they should know]

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[07:16] Zelaron: I want to attempt to install vBAdvanced, but I remember you said you've tinkered with it for a while, and it's incompatible with Synthesis
[07:17] WetWired: We've had a portal before; it wasn't all that useful
[07:18] Zelaron: Indeed, and yes, I agree. I am, however, confident that it can and will be useful now.
[07:19] Zelaron: The last one didn't have any board compatibility aside from the news, which you could read on the forum anyway. It was just eye candy that served no purpose, not to mention that it was search-engine incompatible
[07:22] Zelaron: vBAdvanced is significantly better, because not only does it let us add modular pages to it, everything is compatible with the forum and will remove some aspects of stagnation from the community.
[07:24] Zelaron: So it's not even worth a try?
[07:25] WetWired: I didn't say that, I'm just saying that if you don't have any plans for what you do with it once you have it, it's pretty stupid
Zelaron: if you didn't read what I said above, basically, I kind of convinced WW to add a zelaron portal "if its reasons are good enough"
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Zelaron: WW would likely disapprove. How dreadfully unfortunate.
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146763477: You there?
Grаν¡tоnЅurgе: yes
146763477: Why'd you temp ban all those people?
Grаν¡tоnЅurgе: so they could revel together
146763477: huh?
Zelaron: haha
Grаν¡tоnЅurgе: I feel like I'm at work talking to him
Grаν¡tоnЅurgе: talking to my boss
Grаν¡tоnЅurgе: except my boss is less of a PITA
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Grаν¡tоnЅurgе: I may leave zelaron soon
Zelaron: well
Zelaron: I believe you, k_a and I agree
Zelaron: we need to do something radical, asap
Zelaron: everything points toward the utmost demise of Zelaron
Zelaron: the visitor count is slowly declining, no new posts are made
Zelaron: old members are leaving
Zelaron: I am bored with the forum too
Zelaron: I have been bored with it for... a year?
Grаν¡tоnЅurgе: my main problem is I am not even interested in talking to the people that are on the forum
Zelaron: I have told WW of its evident demise
Grаν¡tоnЅurgе: the ones worth talking to, I talk to on AIM
Zelaron: I think the main purpose of the forum is to gather interesting people
Zelaron: and have the communicate
Zelaron: currently, we get pretty much all of our members from Google
Zelaron: and the content of the threads generally sucks
Zelaron: so we get visitors who search for stupid things
Zelaron: who sign up, and post more stupid things
Zelaron: and suddenly, we have a stupid forum
Zelaron: where morons go to post their hearts' contents
Grаν¡tоnЅurgе: lol
Grаν¡tоnЅurgе: interesting theory?
Zelaron: well, it works that way
Zelaron: if we have tons of threads about travel, people who search for "paradise vacation", "cruises" and "unabomber" will come to our forum
Grаν¡tоnЅurgе: lol.
Zelaron: you get what you put into it
Grаν¡tоnЅurgе: unabomber??
Zelaron: he did target at least one airplane during his career, didn't he?
Grаν¡tоnЅurgе: dunno
Zelaron: anyway.
Zelaron: we could as well un-trash most threads at this rate
Zelaron: it'd increase seach engine hits due to more content
Grаν¡tоnЅurgе: heh
Grаν¡tоnЅurgе: maybe those spambots will finally work FOR us!
Zelaron: rpgmaker has kind of faltered as well
Zelaron: either that, or we steal databases from other forums and inject the posts into Zelaron
Zelaron: personally, I'm in favor of doing some dramatic changes. It's just not particularly easy to find out what they are.
Zelaron: If that fails, I'm just going to leave the board running and hope it will by chance get interesting members, but I feel I've done just about everything for it then
Zelaron: unless, of course, we could get our own server
Zelaron: Perhaps we should get rid of all the hacks and start over?
Grаν¡tоnЅurgе: I think we've said that a few times
Grаν¡tоnЅurgе: so do it =p
Zelaron: unfortunately, there's no "DRASTIC CHANGE HACK" on vbulletin.org
Zelaron: getting that stupid store hack would be nice
Zelaron: but apparently WW... isn't doing it
Grаν¡tоnЅurgе: nobody is doing anything
Zelaron: I'm not sure why, but it appears that he's the only guy who can do it.
Zelaron: I don't even know why I have received that impression
Zelaron: oh yeah
Zelaron: IT HAS TO BE LINKED TO THE ACTIVITY HACK!
Zelaron: and guess who the ONLY PERSON IN THE WORLD is who understands how that works?
Grаν¡tоnЅurgе: ...? lol
Grаν¡tоnЅurgе: whatever, fuck WW
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Zelaron: nothing is happening to Zelaron right now
Zelaron: we have established this
Grаν¡tоnЅurgе: yes, so, zelaron is boring?
Zelaron: pretty much
Zelaron: in fact
Zelaron: I think it would be beneficial to delete all board hacks, keep the posts, and start over with the default vB theme.
Zelaron: why? Because it's a god damn change
Zelaron: NOTHING is happening right now
Zelaron: and now WW's laptop fried as well, so the few changes we did have on the way (such as a store hack) aren't happening either, at least not for a while
Zelaron: oh yeah, I'm in Stockholm, and I can't get a connection at my place any longer
Zelaron: so I won't be online much for a few weeks either
Grаν¡tоnЅurgе: I am sooooo tired of synthesis
Zelaron: well, we need... things
Zelaron: even if they're pointless, we need to show members that we are at least TRYING to change the board
Zelaron: "it works now; leave it be" makes it become about an interesting as a museum
Zelaron: but the visitor count has declined too
Zelaron: currently, we get around 700-800 unique visitors per day
Zelaron: which is... okay
Zelaron: but they're not posting
Zelaron: I say we enable anonymous (guest) posting for a while
Zelaron: although moderated.
Grаν¡tоnЅurgе: sure
Zelaron: [02:05] 146763477: If we allowed guests to post, we'd get 500 spam threads a day.
Zelaron: SURPRISE
Grаν¡tоnЅurgе: hahaha
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Zelaron: ugh, why must everything be so... hard?
Zelaron: [06:44] Zelaron: What do you think about vBSEO?
[06:45] 146763477: We don't have any new discussions about anything that anyone would be searching fore.
[06:46] Zelaron: Our 35,220 total discussions include things people are searching for.
[06:48] 146763477: Yeah, but they wouldn't join our community because we don't discuss them anymore. Besides, it may be a huge pain for us since we have to change the encoding of every URL, and we have huge ammounts of template customization
[06:48] Zelaron: Perhaps we don't discuss them because old threads get locked?
[06:49] 146763477: No, because people are no longer interested.
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Zelaron: [06:52] Zelaron: Why wouldn't they be? A majority of our unique visitors find us on search engines. It's still difficult to sign up and post.
[06:53] Zelaron: Why don't we allow guests to post as long as they fill in a six character alphanumeric sequence shown on an image? (Similarly to the search on vbulletin.org)?
[06:59] Zelaron: I want to purchase a vBSEO license for $149 and allow guests to post after confirming their "human nature". If it doesn't accomplish anything, too bad. At the moment, we're not taking enough action against the decline in new, active members.
[07:00] 146763477: I really don't want to deal with something as big as vBSEO right now.
[07:02] Zelaron: I don't know how to install Zend anyway, so I can't try it myself.
[07:04] Zelaron: I backed up the database an hour ago, so I'd try it myself and take responsibility for it if anything goes wrong, but I don't have the privileges to install Zend.
[07:07] Zelaron: Privileges would be nice.
[07:08] 146763477: Even I would not be confident installing Zend, especially considering that we are out of contact with our hosting providers if something were to go wrong.
[07:09] Zelaron: John is online.
[07:09] 146763477: I don't see him
[07:09] Zelaron: workjallen
[07:09] Zelaron: he's away
[07:10] 146763477: I have that one on my list. he's offline
[07:10] Zelaron: Maybe he blocked you?
Grаν¡tоnЅurgе: why is WW such a pain
Zelaron: I sent him a few of my thoughts
Grаν¡tоnЅurgе: hows that
Zelaron: [07:14] Zelaron: I've requested datacenter contact info from John.
[07:15] Zelaron: Anything else I should ask for? I'm heading to bed soon.
[07:15] 146763477: It'd be nice to know if dotsimple changed hands and who I should talk to.
[07:16] Zelaron: I'll let you know tomorrow if I hear anything.
[07:31] Zelaron: The good thing about "trying out risky, new things" is that members see that you make an effort to transcendentalize the community, or "bringing it to the next level" if you wish. Even if the changes fail to become popular enough, they initially draw a lot of attention from members, who know the staff isn't going to sit around and wait for things to happen on their own. When have they ever?

Nothing against your hacks and improvements, the activity hack rules, and the large avatar will definitely make the current members more active. I want one of those too, now. Sup. modding K_A and Lenny was likely a great call. But will new members sign up for any of that? No. Will they sign up if we get better search engine rankings? I don't know, maybe. I don't think there are any set-in-stone formulas for gaining new, active members. I just know we're not getting any.

We built a good member base in the past, and I don't see anything at all that keeps us from doing that now. Correct me if I'm wrong, but didn't we kind of... stop taking chances a year and a half ago or so, when the board seemed to "work on its own"? It's like, we have this machine which seems to work fine without any maintenance, but in reality, it is on a slow descent into a deep grave.
Zelaron: [07:34] Zelaron: It's not about "installing radical hacks", it's about making significant changes that WILL MOST LIKELY improve the community, bring members together, give them totally new features to try out and such.
[07:35] Zelaron: a new Zelaron Melee is a good start, and it's relatively simple to get it started.
[07:38] Zelaron: but it's not enough. We're the ones in power to change the community, and find out what it takes to make it "fucking awesome".
[07:38] Zelaron: Enough 7:40 am rambling for now.
[07:43] Zelaron: Sure, if the "change" formula I realize we've used for the first three years of the board's existence suddenly doesn't work any longer, let me know, but right now, I am convinced it is still the best chance we have got of getting anywhere.
[07:43] Zelaron: Thoughts?
[07:50] Zelaron: (The premise is obviously that anything like this would be done AFTER the proper contact information is obtained, so the server doesn't get unusable for weeks on end in the worst case scenario.)
Zelaron: there is probably a ton of grammatical flaws in there, I shouldn't stay up all night as often :-)
Zelaron: maybe he'll kick us off the server now or something, who knows?
Grаν¡tоnЅurgе: why?
Zelaron: because I get the feeling that he doesn't agree with me.
Grаν¡tоnЅurgе: i know he doesnt
Zelaron: I get the "it is futile to proceed any further. The board works flawlessly, and it shall continue to work this way forever, because I am an immortal robot" vibe from him.
Zelaron: I don't even have the administrative access to perform the changes I want.
Zelaron: I can't really touch the server.
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hi thar Gravitonsurge

D3V, stop bringing back these old forums for spam's sake....

Think of it this way: it keeps me from posting in new threads!

Just exploiting the srs bizness side of zelaron.

There's a srs bizness side? All I ever see are the side and mad side.

There was a span of about 2 years where rules were enforced and people we're crybabies about everything, including myself. Namely myself.

Zelaron is an anarchy. Other than the fact that Lenny is here. But he's more like an idle god than a government.

Idle gods suffer boredom every now and then and smite people. :)

Don't ban me! My "mother" lurvz u! :(

When it comes to Lenny, we all know its a straight monarchy.

Remember how annoying I used to be?

No, I don't. Tell me a story of back when.

Quote:

Originally Posted by kagomjack (Post 690320)

remember how annoying i am?

jk ;p

Quote:

Originally Posted by KagomJack (Post 690320)

Remember how annoying I used to be?

all I remember are the days of teh furry

Days of the furry? Link, pl0x?

Some of my best work.

The furrier side of Kagom Jack

It's probably worth mentioning that when Kagom first joined Zelaron, he claimed to be a straight catholic guy.

... an otter?
I'm a hyena. :3

Quote:

Originally Posted by !King_Amazon! (Post 690387)

Some of my best work.

The furrier side of Kagom Jack

It's probably worth mentioning that when Kagom first joined Zelaron, he claimed to be a straight catholic guy.

Agreed with the entire post. +1

That was some of K_A's best work.