Reply To: [unofficial weekender] Cutting budgets, adjusting consumation of content.

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@sundancer – as the one guy who’s probably kept the (forum-side) of the community limping along for literally years now, I don’t think anyone could take your comments as anything but constructive!

I’m not sure what Wayland thought they were getting when they “bought the OTT community”, but this website *used to be* an important part of OnTableTop and now it just feels like a legacy thing, tolerated as long as it doesn’t require any resources, while all the focus is on making videos and snippets “for the socials”.

The guys have made it clear their preference is to just make videos of Zoom calls (I’ll be honest, in their position, I probably would too – I’ve been working from home for nearly 20 years and the idea of having to go into an office every day to work is horrible!). But the videos aren’t – for me  – as interesting (as the studio-based stuff).

But I’ve said before – I came for the videos, and stayed for the community.
And much of the community has migrated away from where I’m comfortable (I really, really dislike Discord). So I thought I’d claim my corner of OTT and use the projects system as a personal blog (I tried running my own personal wordpress based blog site for a while but with no engagement, it gets pretty lonely and boring). But projects is unusable here.

So to stay involved, I try to join in with these weekly threads – and am super-grateful to @sundancer for keeping them going. But even that can be problematic now, as the whole site is so slow and the forums are drying up. Maybe that’s because other users are finding the same issues – losing project posts means you give up on that, then you’ve nothing to show when you talk about this weeks’ progress… so you stop dropping into the forums to show off your project posts….

Splitting projects off would be a great start. And trying to get more engagement on these forums would be good – but when a discussion boils down to “I’m just repeating what most of you already know because we talked about it on Discord” then post quantity tends to dry up too!
It’s the kind of task that ten years ago, I’d have jumped at – making a new website, hosting it, building clever functionality for users to make the most of, adding functionality over time; these days I just want someone else to have built it and to be a user!
I may still yet be tempted; but, like my own recent personal blog, without engagement from other community members, it’s a bit like shouting into the void. (fwiw, I used to run a blog with around 30,000 visitors a month which was a big time sink, but also a lot of fun – so I know how rewarding it *can* be too!)