Reply To: [Cult Radio] Topic suggestion thread

[timchubbKeymaster 3166xp 2]

Heh as is always the way I work out how to express the point I try to make after the fact.

I’m not in favour of heavy moderation and keep it nice policing of threads, but there have been times when its been needed, and its been quite shocking when it has happened as its so against the grain of how the community here usually works.

A better way of expressing what I meant is to think of forums like a garden, they need cultivation. Sure you can set out borders and lawns and leave it at that, after a while it becomes a bit over grown and ill defined. You can leave it like that and it keeps on growing but the structure is lost, and certain plants take over areas, as its so overgrown you cant easily enter, and don’t know where to start. However with a bit of pruning, reseeding and clearance you create space and light and things grow again, now you can either leave it to own devices and have to prune it all over again in a few years or you maintain it.

Im a huge fan of the forums here, id sworn off any form of community interaction online after having run some forums in the past and generally spent to much time online, there is a massive chunk of my life which is only online and after 17 years of usenet and then forums i was done with them and way tooo invested where it caused for lack of a better term burnout, so i went cold turkey for a few years, but it was the community here which dragged me back into interacting online. That said the net has changed a lot in the last 10 or even 5 years.

Forum usage is declining across the board for many reasons, partially its a problem with delayed gratification, compared to the more “social” platforms for discussions its asynchronous, the threaded discussion paradigm doesn’t flow as well on mobile devices which have become the default method of browsing these days just look at the decline in laptop sales (desktops are basically games machines outside of the IT/Work world), compared to channel and group messaging. One other big change is communities have shifted from being based around sites, and instead have been aggregated by Facebook into groups, and for a lot of people the internet is Google, Facebook and YouTube, so actually getting them out of those silos and here is a challenge, why post here when you can cross post to several groups at once there.

For us internet crusties (if you dont remember the joys of modem screech or AT codes to get the bloody thing to take advantage of your UART enabled serial port, your not a crustie ;)) the record and collectiveness of forum posts is a feature, for digital natives they tend to operate in a more individual manner, its that which defines their content creation and interaction is based around reciprocal following, broadcast your opinion and get responses, and the discussion format of forums is an anachronism, and not how they generally want to express them selves or communicate online (its hard to make likes/popularity meaningful in a forum, which seems to be the overriding obsession these days). Forums prompt dialog, where as social prompts responses.

Where am I going with this waffle?

Simple I think to make forums effective they have to adapt to the evolution of browsing habits, while they can be viewed as an archive, that’s a reference and past tense view in my opinion (they can be both, but it more like flicking through a guestbook at a hotel or b+b seeing comments of those who were there before you, than historical archive). To make them live, we need things to trigger engagement, so i would propose some events, much like the blood thirster painting competition i ran, or the terrain challenges. Rather than make it complicated with prizes and things like that we can dish out awards and drive it by community led voting. Wouldn’t even have to organise anything more than a theme, i.e. word of the month, do something that fits the word e.g. “horror”, could encompass painting and conversion, terrain builds [graveyards, crypts, gallows, dioramas], battle reports of a survival horror game, fluff etc.

Something else i would like to see and wouldn’t be to hard to implement would be auto signatures as well, where it would pull in your projects and link back to them at the footer of your posts, make it dynamic so it always pulls in your latest 3 updates, and drives the community to your projects and hopefully increases engagement too…

throwback content, lets dig some of the gems out of the archives, this goes with @horus500 suggestion of how to get into the industry, its been covered there is a series in the archives of sitdowns with the designers and industry luminaries, but there are loads of things which would be great to dredge up and remind us who have forgotten and present to those who have never seen

Community games design and rules, used to be quite popular forum and topic not so much now, with forged in avalon could be a good starter framework or seed idea to grow from

Wider hobby, have a place or feature on non table top, trains, scale models, rc, gundam, comics, re-enactment things which feed into the hobby but are distinct

I dunno no solutions, just some ideas…