My personal rant. (Long post warning!)
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http://ssntails.sepwich.com/mb/viewtopic.php?t=2982BlueZero4 said:
I'll Begin
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I'm speechless right now, all I can do is agree.
Yes, it is rants like this that makes me feel unwelcome for arriving in the time of 1.09.2
I've said it twice, and I'd be more than happy to say it again: put SRB2 Wiki on srb2.org. Since the stickies about it were put up and the FAQ for srb2JTE, questions srb2JTE decreased by at least 200%.
I think what we need to do is just make some of the information a little more noticeable. You know how all the newbies have problems hosting netgames simply because they don't realize they need to forward their ports? Why not create a large tutorial about it so nobody will keep struggling with it? Redundant questions about it will decrease entirely, and there will be a lot less people waiting for an hour and a half for people to join when they haven't set up their ports right.
Quite the contrary from some people's perspectives *cough*Bigboi*cough*, we can clean up the forums. How about we all make the community effort and turn that "can" into a "will"?
I think what we need to do is just make some of the information a little more noticeable. You know how all the newbies have problems hosting netgames simply because they don't realize they need to forward their ports? Why not create a large tutorial about it so nobody will keep struggling with it? Redundant questions about it will decrease entirely, and there will be a lot less people waiting for an hour and a half for people to join when they haven't set up their ports right.
Quite the contrary from some people's perspectives *cough*Bigboi*cough*, we can clean up the forums. How about we all make the community effort and turn that "can" into a "will"?
I'm going to have to disagree a little. I think your perception of the MB is due to your away-time. The change came gradually, and it probably wouldn't have been as drastic for you if you hadn't "vacationed".
I don't stop by IRC much, but I still know the names of a LOT of people that go there, so I'm not sure what you mean when you say mostly new faces populate the channel.
Or maybe you feel the way you do because nobody's paying attention to you anymore.
I don't stop by IRC much, but I still know the names of a LOT of people that go there, so I'm not sure what you mean when you say mostly new faces populate the channel.
Or maybe you feel the way you do because nobody's paying attention to you anymore.
Omega the Hedgehog
Member
That's because a project of this magnitude and nature truly cannot sustain a stable fanbase for such a long period of time without dramatic side-effects that are associated with such growth. That much should be fairly obvious to everyone here.
As word of the game spreads, newcomers come; a good handful of said newcomers have levels of intelligence that don't appeal to the old members, and lacking any significant reason to stay (new official SRB2 material around here comes around once in every five blue moons, and more often than not the unofficial content is severely lacking in regards to quality), the old members move on to more intellectually-inclined communities. As this happens, the community begins to shift towards a much more nonsensical atmostphere, due in part to the fact that all these new (read: less intelligent) members are pouring in at once. To keep up with this, the administration entacts new, much stricter rules that do nothing aside from chase away more of the old members the community had to begin with (who want the forum to be more of an open, free-spirited but still-intelligent general discussion board).
Repeat cycle as new members continue to flood in and old members get fed up with the general state of stupidity around the boards caused by the aforementioned newbies, and you've got yourself a genuine problem that honestly cannot be ignored, and fixing it would be damn near impossible.
You guys are saying that this forum will be around as long as SRB2 is popular? You may want to re-evaluate that statement. What happens in a hypothetical (read: bound to happen) situation where there are no intelligent users left to "defend" the board? Stupidity will be rampant and Administration will be essentially left powerless to act against it because banning stupidity in this hypothetical situation would be like banning organisms off of the planet; the planet itself would lose all traces of activity and cease to be of any importance whatsoever. What am I getting at here? That eventually, everyone smart will have moved on to more valuable uses of time and energy (however much energy typing out posts on a public message board really takes, anyway). And SRB2 will die. Guess what, guys? We're already nearing this point.
Nearly all of the SRB2 "oldbies" (which I believe to be users from 1.08 down) have already left us. Bigboi is gone. JTE has all but left the board. a441 found better things to do with his time. Digiku is in a god damned hospital for attempted suicide. Ritz's appearances here are brief and rare at best and it would be unusual if his posts had any conveyable point aside from making some sort of joke at a newbie's expense. All of our old key members have abandoned this mess of a forum and honestly I don't blame them for it. How often do you see me on here? Admittedly I do come here to check up from time to time but it's not very often to be sure. To be truthful? I don't know about you guys, but looking at the boards and seeing a list of topics that essentially consist of "HELP ME WITH MI SHADOW201 WAD", "POST YOUR [insert useless media here]" and "LOOK AT MY AMAZING WEBSITE (locked)" isn't too appealing to me and if it is to you then you're probably the kind of user who's mere presence hurts the forum more than it helps. Hence I broke off and now I've got the Death By Pixel community on my hands, which has evolved into something special and honestly something I can really enjoy myself browsing through.
Eventually, we'll all be gone here. But I digress. I'm rambling.
Simple rule additions and generic "crackdown" announcements around the board will do little to solve this situation. The old members are gone. The magic is lost. SRB2 has lost it's value.
This board has truly died in the eyes of many. I know I'm part of that group. And you guys can take your theories of "well, if we entact rule so-and-so, that should kill off half of the idiocity around here" and shove them up your ass, because it won't do a thing. Nothing will. SRB2 has reached it's breaking point. Time to stop wishing for your old community back, guys. Because as much as I hate to admit it, it's nothing more than wishful thinking.
Sorry. If it's any consolation, our IRC channel is still salvagable. Maybe we should shift our efforts into trying to keep that alive, instead. Maybe that'd be the more worthwhile path to take...?
As word of the game spreads, newcomers come; a good handful of said newcomers have levels of intelligence that don't appeal to the old members, and lacking any significant reason to stay (new official SRB2 material around here comes around once in every five blue moons, and more often than not the unofficial content is severely lacking in regards to quality), the old members move on to more intellectually-inclined communities. As this happens, the community begins to shift towards a much more nonsensical atmostphere, due in part to the fact that all these new (read: less intelligent) members are pouring in at once. To keep up with this, the administration entacts new, much stricter rules that do nothing aside from chase away more of the old members the community had to begin with (who want the forum to be more of an open, free-spirited but still-intelligent general discussion board).
Repeat cycle as new members continue to flood in and old members get fed up with the general state of stupidity around the boards caused by the aforementioned newbies, and you've got yourself a genuine problem that honestly cannot be ignored, and fixing it would be damn near impossible.
You guys are saying that this forum will be around as long as SRB2 is popular? You may want to re-evaluate that statement. What happens in a hypothetical (read: bound to happen) situation where there are no intelligent users left to "defend" the board? Stupidity will be rampant and Administration will be essentially left powerless to act against it because banning stupidity in this hypothetical situation would be like banning organisms off of the planet; the planet itself would lose all traces of activity and cease to be of any importance whatsoever. What am I getting at here? That eventually, everyone smart will have moved on to more valuable uses of time and energy (however much energy typing out posts on a public message board really takes, anyway). And SRB2 will die. Guess what, guys? We're already nearing this point.
Nearly all of the SRB2 "oldbies" (which I believe to be users from 1.08 down) have already left us. Bigboi is gone. JTE has all but left the board. a441 found better things to do with his time. Digiku is in a god damned hospital for attempted suicide. Ritz's appearances here are brief and rare at best and it would be unusual if his posts had any conveyable point aside from making some sort of joke at a newbie's expense. All of our old key members have abandoned this mess of a forum and honestly I don't blame them for it. How often do you see me on here? Admittedly I do come here to check up from time to time but it's not very often to be sure. To be truthful? I don't know about you guys, but looking at the boards and seeing a list of topics that essentially consist of "HELP ME WITH MI SHADOW201 WAD", "POST YOUR [insert useless media here]" and "LOOK AT MY AMAZING WEBSITE (locked)" isn't too appealing to me and if it is to you then you're probably the kind of user who's mere presence hurts the forum more than it helps. Hence I broke off and now I've got the Death By Pixel community on my hands, which has evolved into something special and honestly something I can really enjoy myself browsing through.
Eventually, we'll all be gone here. But I digress. I'm rambling.
Simple rule additions and generic "crackdown" announcements around the board will do little to solve this situation. The old members are gone. The magic is lost. SRB2 has lost it's value.
This board has truly died in the eyes of many. I know I'm part of that group. And you guys can take your theories of "well, if we entact rule so-and-so, that should kill off half of the idiocity around here" and shove them up your ass, because it won't do a thing. Nothing will. SRB2 has reached it's breaking point. Time to stop wishing for your old community back, guys. Because as much as I hate to admit it, it's nothing more than wishful thinking.
Sorry. If it's any consolation, our IRC channel is still salvagable. Maybe we should shift our efforts into trying to keep that alive, instead. Maybe that'd be the more worthwhile path to take...?
Omega the Hedgehog
Member
I do try.furyhunter600 said:
Quoted. For truth.SSNTails said:
You people seem to be under the impression that any change whatsoever is bad. Whoever believes the community is changing for the worse hasn't been around since the beginning. Honestly I don't see what the point is to complaining about an internet community supposedly dying.
Lemme explain something. It's a very simple concept. It's called "exponential growth".
The SRB2 community used to be very, very small. Tiny, in fact. We had an EZBoard and Sonikku created an IRC room, #srb2, to set up netgames on the net-enabled Demo 2. This is when I joined the SRB2 community. There were like, 20 people, tops. There wasn't really a "community" as much as "people from SFGHQ that play SRB2".
As time went on, some people left, some people joined. However, because of what I can only assume is positive word of mouth, and greater and greater number of people started to find SRB2. The amount of people coming to SRB2 became a larger and larger number.
The period you talk of, when 1.08 was out, was just the same as the current era with one exception. Scale. It's been 3 years. Let's just do a simple model.
There are three types of users in this community: Creators, Posters, and Lurkers.
Creators create the content. Sonic Team Jr., me, and anyone who makes a WAD, updates the Wiki, or does anything that adds more content to the community falls in this group.
Posters visit the community and respond to it. They are the people you see on the message board replying to topics, and generally giving the forum and IRC room their life.
Lurkers visit the community and only watch. They download SRB2, play it, and do not post on the forums or interact with the community at all.
Now, obviously, there are more lurkers than there are posters, and there are more posters than there are creators. However, all three groups do something simple. They spread information about the game to other people. I'm sure most everyone here has told their friends about SRB2 or even gotten them to play it. Now, remember that a lot of the lurkers are doing that too. If every person simply tells only 2 of their friends, you quickly end up with gigantic exponential growth, especially in the lurkers category, since a vast majority of people who come are lurkers. Our bandwidth counter is a sure sign of that.
Now, look at the people in charge of the place and the creators. That, honestly, hasn't changed in 8-9 years. A few people leave, and a few people replace the people who left. We haven't actually gotten any new CONTENT, despite the gigantic influx of new users.
So, the result is pretty obvious. As time goes by, we get exponentially more people using the same forum resources. The admins get overloaded, and it simply becomes impossible to keep control over the gigantic forum we currently have. I agree that the forums have definitely gone downhill, but it's more a matter of scale than a matter of "the forums have gone to hell".
Back in 1.08, we simply had a lot less PEOPLE. The bad apples were definitely there, but it was a smaller quantity, and henceforth easily managable.
Back in Demo 2, you could count the number of bad apples on one hand.
However, now that I have pointed out the obvious problem, there is a simple statement I give you:
So you think the forums have gone to hell. What are you going to do about it?
If it's simply to complain and rant on the message board, we don't need that kind of garbage here. I see a ton of people agreeing for no reason and basically saying "seconded", "thirded", and other useless things. I don't see any suggestions. I, personally, do not want the forum to go to hell, and am perfectly willing to implement any good ideas of how to deal with our arch-enemy, exponential growth.
Should we add new forums to attempt to spread the gigantic influx of posts to new areas?
Should we institute even stricter rules enforcement to lead to quicker and more efficient bans?
Should we deltree the entire forum directory and get it over with?
Honestly, I've run out of particularly good ideas on how to try and deal with exponential growth, and I'm burned out. Hence, I don't post here much because I honestly don't like dealing with this forum much anymore.
You want a better forum? Come up with a solution. Don't just state the problem. The last thing we need is another person running around saying the sky is falling, thanks.
The SRB2 community used to be very, very small. Tiny, in fact. We had an EZBoard and Sonikku created an IRC room, #srb2, to set up netgames on the net-enabled Demo 2. This is when I joined the SRB2 community. There were like, 20 people, tops. There wasn't really a "community" as much as "people from SFGHQ that play SRB2".
As time went on, some people left, some people joined. However, because of what I can only assume is positive word of mouth, and greater and greater number of people started to find SRB2. The amount of people coming to SRB2 became a larger and larger number.
The period you talk of, when 1.08 was out, was just the same as the current era with one exception. Scale. It's been 3 years. Let's just do a simple model.
There are three types of users in this community: Creators, Posters, and Lurkers.
Creators create the content. Sonic Team Jr., me, and anyone who makes a WAD, updates the Wiki, or does anything that adds more content to the community falls in this group.
Posters visit the community and respond to it. They are the people you see on the message board replying to topics, and generally giving the forum and IRC room their life.
Lurkers visit the community and only watch. They download SRB2, play it, and do not post on the forums or interact with the community at all.
Now, obviously, there are more lurkers than there are posters, and there are more posters than there are creators. However, all three groups do something simple. They spread information about the game to other people. I'm sure most everyone here has told their friends about SRB2 or even gotten them to play it. Now, remember that a lot of the lurkers are doing that too. If every person simply tells only 2 of their friends, you quickly end up with gigantic exponential growth, especially in the lurkers category, since a vast majority of people who come are lurkers. Our bandwidth counter is a sure sign of that.
Now, look at the people in charge of the place and the creators. That, honestly, hasn't changed in 8-9 years. A few people leave, and a few people replace the people who left. We haven't actually gotten any new CONTENT, despite the gigantic influx of new users.
So, the result is pretty obvious. As time goes by, we get exponentially more people using the same forum resources. The admins get overloaded, and it simply becomes impossible to keep control over the gigantic forum we currently have. I agree that the forums have definitely gone downhill, but it's more a matter of scale than a matter of "the forums have gone to hell".
Back in 1.08, we simply had a lot less PEOPLE. The bad apples were definitely there, but it was a smaller quantity, and henceforth easily managable.
Back in Demo 2, you could count the number of bad apples on one hand.
However, now that I have pointed out the obvious problem, there is a simple statement I give you:
So you think the forums have gone to hell. What are you going to do about it?
If it's simply to complain and rant on the message board, we don't need that kind of garbage here. I see a ton of people agreeing for no reason and basically saying "seconded", "thirded", and other useless things. I don't see any suggestions. I, personally, do not want the forum to go to hell, and am perfectly willing to implement any good ideas of how to deal with our arch-enemy, exponential growth.
Should we add new forums to attempt to spread the gigantic influx of posts to new areas?
Should we institute even stricter rules enforcement to lead to quicker and more efficient bans?
Should we deltree the entire forum directory and get it over with?
Honestly, I've run out of particularly good ideas on how to try and deal with exponential growth, and I'm burned out. Hence, I don't post here much because I honestly don't like dealing with this forum much anymore.
You want a better forum? Come up with a solution. Don't just state the problem. The last thing we need is another person running around saying the sky is falling, thanks.
I'll Begin
🐑✨
THE SKY IS FALLING!
On a side note, I think we seriously need to make the SRB2 Wiki more known, and we should also make articles with answers to common problems.
I don't know how we could bring the forum "out of hell", though.
On a side note, I think we seriously need to make the SRB2 Wiki more known, and we should also make articles with answers to common problems.
I don't know how we could bring the forum "out of hell", though.
Omega the Hedgehog said:
Wishful thinking my ass. Have you read the book "You Can if You Think You Can"?
Exactly. Why can't we put our heads together and think of something to solve the problem - or avoid it, if no more? Maybe we can think of a way to attract more intelligent members than we do morons? Or perhaps I could create a forum on my website solely for the purpose of being just like the SRB2 message board, but where noobs are too stupid to even notice it? I've got lots of spare bandwidth, you know; I could even let us upload files on there with absolutely no hassle of downloading them if I wanted to.Mystic said:
FlavoredLoli
Tastefully Twisted
Well, I wanted to try to stay out of this one but here goes nothing...
Okay Spazzo, You really to stop complaining if you think this MB is going down the tubes, which it could be so much worse, Spazzo don't take this the wrong way but you are wasting this boards time with your constant complaining. First about the Mods Seen here.
http://ssntails.sepwich.com/mb/viewtopic.php?t=5532&start=0&postdays=0&postorder=asc&highlight=
Now about the MB in general. This doesn't really help things you know.
If you want the boards to be what they used to be, you should help instead of complaining.
Sorry, if I sounded like an asshole but I'm getting kind of sick of it.
Okay Spazzo, You really to stop complaining if you think this MB is going down the tubes, which it could be so much worse, Spazzo don't take this the wrong way but you are wasting this boards time with your constant complaining. First about the Mods Seen here.
http://ssntails.sepwich.com/mb/viewtopic.php?t=5532&start=0&postdays=0&postorder=asc&highlight=
Now about the MB in general. This doesn't really help things you know.
If you want the boards to be what they used to be, you should help instead of complaining.
Sorry, if I sounded like an asshole but I'm getting kind of sick of it.
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