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General Category => PKMN.NET => Topic started by: That Girl in the 'Roo Suit on December 23, 2015, 16:26

Title: Rules
Post by: That Girl in the 'Roo Suit on December 23, 2015, 16:26
There has been a huge increase in people breaking the rules lately. In particular, this includes double posting, the three word minimum, unnecessary topics, reviving or bumping dead topics, and general ill will against members.

Now while I hate to put a damper on everyone's Christmas, please remember that the staff are only human too. There is only so much we can do and let's face it, we're pretty busy people ourselves. The last thing we want to do is spend our time cleaning up the boards.

This is a general reminder to all of you, and I will be getting much stricter if this continues. If you need them, the rules are here (http://pkmn.net/rules) should they need reiterating.

In other news, merry Christmas!
Title: Re: Rules
Post by: Petzbreeder on December 23, 2015, 20:17
There is only so much we can do and let's face it, we're pretty busy people ourselves.

This is why I asked about being a mod before, I have more than enough time on my hands to take over from you if you ever need me to!

I'm offline mostly when I'm at my hostel, the internet isn't very good there. I still try to connect to the site and check up on others whenever I can though.
Title: Re: Rules
Post by: SirBlaziken on December 23, 2015, 20:24
To be honest, I thought we all would take time to read those or at least use some common sense, myself included in this. Thanks for the reminder.
Title: Re: Rules
Post by: Lord Raven on December 24, 2015, 09:02
This is why I asked about being a mod before, I have more than enough time on my hands to take over from you if you ever need me to!
I think your PM to me about how you really cannot process a large amount of text (really though, i sent you like 2-3 sentences at best) and your general ability to both ignore PMs and trying to making statements that you later do not claim responsibility for would give me some discomfort if you were made a moderator.

It's less about addressing rule breakers as interpreting rules properly as well as keeping things in line.  At what point do you enforce a rule such as "off-topic discussion" and what constitutes off topic discussion?  Debates vs flamewars seems to be really touchy on this forum and I've seen a few debates lately that have gotten ire from people yet did not devolve into name calling fests that would actually constitute flamewars, and stuff that was a slight divergence from the thread but still generally on topic called out by people (namely you, Petzbreeder).

I do not mean any offense, I'm just saying what I feel.  I understand I am somewhat abrasive but i do not try to start arguments, I just happened to not be easy to agree with.

At any rate, I don't think very many people are breaking basic rules, only a select few over and over again, but alas it's irritating as hell to see them being broken repeatedly.  I'm reporting all I can at any rate.
Title: Re: Rules
Post by: Kerou 犠牲 on December 24, 2015, 09:28
This is actually being blown way out of proportion. Granted I don't know about if it's happening in Pokémon specific boards but in the likes of RR and Gaming where I have seen rule breaks, I think in terms of the site there's more pressing issues than just overcreation of threads (which given our circumstances isn't even a terrible thing, even if the discussions aren't exactly thought provoking)

Double posting and all caps is a quick fix, just point posters who do it in the direction of the rules and then add warnings (I presume that function still exists), and go further if necessary. It's literally not that bad. It could be a whole lot worse. It is a little frustrating, nothing more.

Haven't seen ill will towards members really, especially due to how bad it has been in the past. Again though, this might be happening in boards where I haven't ventured into.
Title: Re: Rules
Post by: Ya-Yah on December 24, 2015, 11:39
I agree with Kerou - I've seen the double posting/unnecessary topics etc on the increase but I do think that may be partially down to having some younger members join recently. I doubt they've taken then time to go and read the rules so reminding them of the rules as the need arises should do the trick. Of course if they have been reminded and then nothing improves, then I guess it's up to the mods to decide how best to deal with them. But cleaning up the boards kind of comes with the job because you're moderating the use of the forum.
Title: Re: Rules
Post by: Turner on December 25, 2015, 04:01
I think everyone is getting slightly too familiar with everyone else and it's causing threads to become more like extended conversations which is breeding shorter, sometimes terse replies and that's where the rule breaking is happening.

I've been lurking and not posting because it's hard to join those threads without feeling like you're impeding on the conversation somehow, and even if I do post I'm mainly talking to people I've seen around for nearly a decade (in some cases) who I'm not really friends with anyway.

There's also been some personal attacks, which have been dealt with swiftly by the moderators but has overall made for a bad forum experience and generally put me off posting anything. There's no point being an active member if it stops being fun.
Title: Re: Rules
Post by: lets all go out for some frosty chocolate milkshakes on December 25, 2015, 07:50
This is why I asked about being a mod before, I have more than enough time on my hands to take over from you if you ever need me to!

no i want to be mod pick me

im like the comedy prez trump option but plot twist i usher in a new Golden Age Revival of puk in my asanine diktat. and everyone will be scratching their heads "why didnt we believe in beth earlier?????? shame on us"

vote for me i'll get that lazy freeloading slugabed name rater back to work //works on my whip cracking skills as i whip a cigar out of a blindfolded persons mouth// //looks at screen all grizzly-like as i Von Karma my whip// ur next, name rater. //backlog MYSTERIOUSLY disappears overnight//
Title: Re: Rules
Post by: the bread dragon on December 25, 2015, 13:42
you can't be a mod when you're ⚠ BANNED 4EVA though
Title: Re: Rules
Post by: sylar on December 25, 2015, 14:38
the ban was coming from inside the mod!!!!!!
Title: Re: Rules
Post by: lets all go out for some frosty chocolate milkshakes on December 25, 2015, 17:32
see thats my grand plan

when they go to knight me with the Crystal Moon Modding Sword (aka the source of their power, its what allows them Mod Powers) for my inauguration they wont realise im ⚠ BANNED 4EVA until its too late!!!!! and once the sword makes contact with my skin it is instantly contaminated. it goes all black n bubbly and they're all "何????" and "こ........これは悪BANNED⚠エネルギーであります!!!!!"

u should never touch the sacred Modding Sword to someone who is banned. their evil wiles and malevonant spirit will curse the Modding Blade and also curse those who were modded with it. and i laff evilly as all the mods and admins collapse all goin all black n bubbly too for my wicked and vengeful coup d'etat has begun. "aaaaaahahahaha あなたのすべて、愚かな道化師!!!!!" i cackle.  ♪dun dun dun dun dun dun dun dun DUN DUN DUN DUN♪

TO BE CONTINUED...................


spoilers: in the next episode The Name Master of all puk users transforms into his super form and puts up a fair fight and puk is Regretful that they yelled at him for too many topics because he ends up as puks unlikely last hope against my tyrannical Shadow Puk Empire
Title: Re: Rules
Post by: Lord Raven on December 25, 2015, 20:39
I think everyone is getting slightly too familiar with everyone else and it's causing threads to become more like extended conversations which is breeding shorter, sometimes terse replies and that's where the rule breaking is happening.  being fun.
Nope, it's just a select few newbies who for some reason cannot read the rules properly
Title: Re: Rules
Post by: The Shrub Dragon on December 25, 2015, 22:05
i mean at this point we could basically be namedropping
Title: Re: Rules
Post by: Lord Raven on December 26, 2015, 02:52
ok

the name master and random people in say hello

there we go
Title: Re: Rules
Post by: lets all go out for some frosty chocolate milkshakes on December 26, 2015, 17:07
idk if this comes under the weirdly enforced "no backseat modding" rule and idk why it aint been suggested yet but im just gonna reccommend actually just blocking/ignoring users. maybe try like one guy did elsewhere and bring the forums crashin down by putting literally every user on the forums on an ignore list


it sounds like the Marge Simpson Advice quitters option and me of all people suggesting this is laughable but the Scare Users Off Thru Being Mean unfortunetly dont go in line with the way puk is run. theres two types of forums ive seen regardin new and troublesome members "you get trolled off if you suck" and "play nice everyone" and both have their ups and downs. and this forum is deffo the latter type and awkward transition implementations of the former always go wrong. at least the one time i saw a Play Nice forum try it but then one of the mods got done for Illegal Bad Touching not long after so idk what was even going on there

but back when i was a lot more Barmy and Undealt Autismo than i am now it helped keep me moderately sane on here to just throw people in my blocklist as a kind of private passive aggressive motion when i wasn't as cool and chill as i am now. and im still here and members i harboured dislike for aren't so ¯\_(ツ)_/¯



also if this is the "whatever shall we do with this name master" Star Chambers like honestly??????? he's an eager lad with his heart in the right place but his forum posting slightly hyperactive and scaring him off would be a bit of a shame i guess. i can't say i haven't posted in his topics lately is all and he is basically like a younger me (http://i.imgur.com/SK1Yh0l.gif)


(next five posts

"well why dont you just MARRY the name master then beth if u love him so much!!!"
"fine maybe i will!!!!!!!!!!!"

everyone invited to marriage between LOOK AROUND YOG  & The Name Rater.

i give him a big smooch on the lips after our vows despite the probable nerd halitosis assualt and go SEE I LOVE HIM SO MUCH WE'RE SO HAPPY while i contract a virulent form of orally transmitted microflorae that gives me raunchy gingivitis and BO. i am then found dead all asphyxiated inside a honchkrow fursuit four months later with a leather whip tied around my neck, sick and pee inside the fursuit. while Name Master is nowhere to be found, his clothes discarded throughout town. detectives scratch their heads for months and the case goes down as permenantly unsolved )
Title: Re: Rules
Post by: Lord Raven on December 26, 2015, 17:32
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also if this is the "whatever shall we do with this name master" Star Chambers like honestly??????? he's an eager lad with his heart in the right place but his forum posting slightly hyperactive and scaring him off would be a bit of a shame i guess. i can't say i haven't posted in his topics lately is all and he is basically like a younger me

I wouldn't say that.  I've offered him some advice, and it was basically what Rex said when he closed that thread about Nidorina, although I have a hard time being nice about it when I'm at a point where I couldn't care less.  But to compare you and him, I highly doubt you tried to be all ~*badass*~ and say that you had an insult in store for me that was so bad that he'd get reported and banned instantly.  Furthermore, you were also pretty good about responding to people in threads and you rarely started threads yourself unless you were gonna properly follow up on people who responded.  And truth be told, the issue I have with him isn't too different from the main issue I've felt this forum has always had but it's exacerbated as of late.  People (and it's not just him) on this forum don't seem to be interested in some sort of discussion in general and are more interested in these status update threads which is literally all that's keeping this place afloat.

When any attempt at discussion is started (see the stupid questions thread) it's either not followed up on or someone just declares it off-topic (when it's clearly not) and ignores it.  See the Paris Attacks thread, where the only person willing to even follow up on things was Turner and somehow our debate was...  a vicious argument that needed to stop?  No personal insults were made at any point, aside from stuff that was directed towards me (which was irritating either way when someone has and states a preconception of the crap you're about to say).  See any of the older threads over the past year or two, where someone like Richard and Blaziken said "i'm glad you have an opinion" to an argument that could be proven or disproven on a factual basis (re:  issues in smash 4).  And somehow Captain Jigglypuff can get away with saying absolutely inane crap that's extremely creepy and he doesn't respond to a single person who calls him out on it - nor does he really improve his posting habits as a result.  If people want examples when I state points, then I've provided them here with no intent to personally insult these people, and I'd like to give a shout out to Turner for actually taking time to challenge me on my viewpoints when I brought something up, because I wish people were more open to doing things like that and having things like that done to them.

It's been a problem, and arguably it's been an issue for the entire time I've been here but I've always been too young and immature and most importantly not confident enough to criticize it (or criticize it properly) until now, when I still don't think I'm too great at it.

Now, re: that user in particular, whether or not he's a hyperactive kid doesn't mean there is no room for improvement, but I only called his name out because I reported him for minor infractions more than a few times.  Basic things like double posting and three word rule.  Some people posting in Say Hello have not been any different - it's been only newbies not following the rules, which are the kind of people that are most likely to break them anyway.  Which is kinda why I found this announcement unnecessary, but I guess it was a springboard for some kind of talk about the actual issues on the forum - which basically boils down to "we only have like 15 active users and basically most of them are incompatible with one another."




Now, I'm neither a nice guy nor am I someone trolling someone off a forum unless they're a cancer.  As far as I know, as inane as someone like Captain Jigglypuff gets, he's not really a cancer cause the worst is gets is me saying that he makes me extremely uncomfortable because the stuff he posts is off-kilter and borderline disturbing.
Title: Re: Rules
Post by: The name master on December 26, 2015, 18:14
Can we start talking about rules again? Stop talking about me (unless it's nice things!)  I have certain disorders that makes it hard to interact with other people (Lord Raven knows this better than anyone!)

I have recently tried to interact with other people, but it ends up backfiring in my face like Rayquaza's hyper beam.
Title: Re: Rules
Post by: Turner on December 26, 2015, 18:50
Can we start talking about rules again? Stop talking about me (unless it's nice things!)  I have certain disorders that makes it hard to interact with other people (Lord Raven knows this better than anyone!)

I have recently tried to interact with other people, but it ends up backfiring in my face like Rayquaza's hyper beam.

Just follow the rules and you'll be fine. Read them before you post something, and if you get your post deleted or thread locked for breaking them then just look up or ask someone where you broke them and they'll be happy to let you know.

This forum has a long history of people with varying issues, whether it's ADD, ADHD, AS, Bi-Polar, anxiety, depression etc. or all of the above. Many moderators and ex-moderators have had issues like this and it never caused them to break the rules, in the heyday of the forum I'd say way over 50% of active members had some kind of personality disorder or were just outright too young/hyperactive to know better and everything worked out fine.

Just don't worry about it. You're not the first person to have trouble following the rules (Let's face it, they're stricter than most other forums) and unless the forum crawls to a standstill you probably won't be the last either.
Title: Re: Rules
Post by: Lord Raven on December 26, 2015, 19:11
Can we start talking about rules again? Stop talking about me (unless it's nice things!)
Someone asked for examples so I brought it up.

Don't expect a hugbox from me.
Title: Re: Rules
Post by: SirBlaziken on December 26, 2015, 19:16
Basically what Turner said.

Don't expect a hugbox from me.

I don't think anyone would quite honestly.
Title: Re: Rules
Post by: lets all go out for some frosty chocolate milkshakes on December 26, 2015, 19:26
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But to compare you and him, I highly doubt you tried to be all ~*badass*~ and say that you had an insult in store for me that was so bad that he'd get reported and banned instantly.

?

im not sure what you mean here exactly

if you're talking about people being Scared Off it usually is a "they keep getting yelled at and dont understand actually why, and they eventually leave cos to them everyone keeps yelling at them for no reason" and im worried The Name Master is gonna go this way cos on a forum like this it's a big activity killer.


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Furthermore, you were also pretty good about responding to people in threads and you rarely started threads yourself unless you were gonna properly follow up on people who responded.  And truth be told, the issue I have with him isn't too different from the main issue I've felt this forum has always had but it's exacerbated as of late.  People (and it's not just him) on this forum don't seem to be interested in some sort of discussion in general and are more interested in these status update threads which is literally all that's keeping this place afloat.

puk currently has no real USP or mission statement atm except for the Name Rater Hater (according to the amount of newbies who are like 'why the backlog???? i signed up cos of the name rater but.....') so really the Banter Topics are kind of the natural way and p much the only thing keepin this place afloat. if anyone wants to start up a New Topic for Increased Activity/Variety they're more than welcome, surely?

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When any attempt at discussion is started (see the stupid questions thread) it's either not followed up on or someone just declares it off-topic (when it's clearly not) and ignores it.  See the Paris Attacks thread, where the only person willing to even follow up on things was Turner and somehow our debate was...  a vicious argument that needed to stop?  No personal insults were made at any point, aside from stuff that was directed towards me (which was irritating either way when someone has and states a preconception of the crap you're about to say).

uh......ok if you're talkin bout the france thread and why i was so "agghghghhuhgh" then that seems weird to bring up but if you want me to be blunt + honest its cos a multipage "is it islams fault or not" discussion was starting up in a topic meant to be for, like, honouring the people who just died. it felt like it was in poor taste and probably shoulda been taken elsewhere, i.e. the debate forum? idk about the religious denomination of the forum here but how do you think actual muslims woulda taken the Discussion going on in that topic?

also yes i too am guilty of this in my time but multi-page arguments between two users are kind of a topic-killer and are extremely boring for those except the two involved. on various forums i was on if that sort of thing started happening everyone would just groan and stop posting and the modship would usually knock their heads together like coconuts and go "cut it out you two or take it to the debate forum" cos things would inevitably get out of hand if left long enough. idk maybe its Different Forum Ways but thats usually when the "take it to PMs you two" is meant to come in.

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And somehow Captain Jigglypuff can get away with saying absolutely inane crap that's extremely creepy and he doesn't respond to a single person who calls him out on it - nor does he really improve his posting habits as a result.  If people want examples when I state points, then I've provided them here with no intent to personally insult these people, and I'd like to give a shout out to Turner for actually taking time to challenge me on my viewpoints when I brought something up, because I wish people were more open to doing things like that and having things like that done to them.

so what you're saying is that you want people to be Honest and Frank with each other? or that you want them to be more honest with you? im havin a bit of a r****d time here

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It's been a problem, and arguably it's been an issue for the entire time I've been here but I've always been too young and immature and most importantly not confident enough to criticize it (or criticize it properly) until now, when I still don't think I'm too great at it.

having Opinions on forums stuff anywhere on the internet is always risky ground tbh universally. there's no worry in feeling vaguely Awkward about it 

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Now, I'm neither a nice guy nor am I someone trolling someone off a forum unless they're a cancer.  As far as I know, as inane as someone like Captain Jigglypuff gets, he's not really a cancer cause the worst is gets is me saying that he makes me extremely uncomfortable because the stuff he posts is off-kilter and borderline disturbing.


honestly im not trying to appear cool here but captain jigglypuff's hate crusade is p tame and easily ignorable?????? just put him on your ignore list, apart from the natalie portman snuff fantasies the dude is kind of harmless and keeps to himself for the most part and if he eventually tries to make a hit on the lady (lmfao) then it wont be cos of this place.

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Don't expect a hugbox from me.

this is a fake edit cos it came up when i was typing but uh even for me you're being a little Personally Nasty to the dude rn imo



ADD, ADHD, AS, Bi-Polar, anxiety, depression etc.

psst outdated terms, its ASD now, AS dont exist anymore as of DSM-V due to Reclassification
Title: Re: Rules
Post by: The Shrub Dragon on December 26, 2015, 19:46
tl;dr we are all sinners.  some people are more sinner than others.  are people born sinners or do they have sin thrust upon them?  who knows?  certainly not me, but the residents of pee kay emm enn dot net are all sinners and must learn to put up with one another's sin in a civil and learn virtue through the process of other sinners telling them not to be sinful.  will it work? who knows? sinners.
Title: Re: Rules
Post by: Lord Raven on December 26, 2015, 19:48
?

im not sure what you mean here exactly

if you're talking about people being Scared Off it usually is a "they keep getting yelled at and dont understand actually why, and they eventually leave cos to them everyone keeps yelling at them for no reason" and im worried The Name Master is gonna go this way cos on a forum like this it's a big activity killer.
Welp, as far as I know, I've talked to him and he doesn't get it, and Rex just posted something about it so time will tell if he understands it.

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puk currently has no real USP or mission statement atm except for the Name Rater Hater (according to the amount of newbies who are like 'why the backlog???? i signed up cos of the name rater but.....') so really the Banter Topics are kind of the natural way and p much the only thing keepin this place afloat. if anyone wants to start up a New Topic for Increased Activity/Variety they're more than welcome, surely?
They tend to go nowhere, i've given up on a lot of things here, in some ways I'm really unnecessarily acting entitled here (when I'm just as unentitled as everyone else here) because I've tried and in all honesty I can't do anything but try to facilitate things as opposed to starting things up myself.  I am really not great at starting threads, I'm better at responding to things and I'm better at managing things, because I've tried and I didn't get replies (and in some cases I begged for feedback and criticism and got nothing, which ties into something you said later about people being more honest with me.)

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uh......ok if you're talkin bout the france thread and why i was so "agghghghhuhgh" then that seems weird to bring up but if you want me to be blunt + honest its cos a multipage "is it islams fault or not" discussion was starting up in a topic meant to be for, like, honouring the people who just died. it felt like it was in poor taste and probably shoulda been taken elsewhere, i.e. the debate forum? idk about the religious denomination of the forum here but how do you think actual muslims woulda taken the Discussion going on in that topic?
I'm from an Islamic family, but I don't see why discussion on the probable causes of things is in poor taste but that's just me.  It was still fairly civil and in my opinion it's unproductive to "honor" things without really understanding why they happened in the first place.

It's not an easy thing to discuss in any way.

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also yes i too am guilty of this in my time but multi-page arguments between two users are kind of a topic-killer and are extremely boring for those except the two involved. on various forums i was on if that sort of thing started happening everyone would just groan and stop posting and the modship would usually knock their heads together like coconuts and go "cut it out you two or take it to the debate forum" cos things would inevitably get out of hand if left long enough. idk maybe its Different Forum Ways but thats usually when the "take it to PMs you two" is meant to come in.
Well, I've never been on a forum that's said "take it to PMs" unless it was hostile or something, and as it stands that particular thread was not even hostile.  Maybe "Debates" can be changed to like "News and Discussion" so it can encompass stuff like this, or maybe we can get combine some forums together so stuff isn't as spaced out.

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so what you're saying is that you want people to be Honest and Frank with each other? or that you want them to be more honest with you? im havin a bit of a r****d time here cos the alternative of what you're saying here is that People Should Challenge Each Other More and thats incredibly risky on The Internet
Yes to all, and I don't think it's that risky on here if people take things much more in stride.

I mean you're doing that to me now and I'm glad because right now it's helping me say what I'm trying to get at a bit better.

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having Opinions on forums stuff anywhere on the internet is always risky ground tbh universally. there's no worry in feeling vaguely Awkward about it
I don't what you're saying at the end of this but having opinions is only really risky if the kind of person who you're talking to has more an interest in winning an argument than actually discussing a topic.  I don't think anyone here has the cigaro syndrome anymore.  (ok so side note i'm trying to make a system of a down reference there)

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honestly im not trying to appear cool here but captain jigglypuff's hate crusade is p tame and easily ignorable?????? just put him on your ignore list, apart from the natalie portman snuff fantasies the dude is kind of harmless and keeps to himself for the most part and if he eventually tries to make a hit on the lady (lmfao) then it wont be cos of this place.
That is generally freaky but he has said some really stupid crap and clearly has more an interest in soap boxing than like actively participating on here.  Everyone else seems to at least participate especially when the thread calls for it.

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this is a fake edit cos it came up when i was typing but uh even for me you're being a little Personally Nasty to the dude rn imo
So "don't talk about me (unless you're nice)" gives me the impression of the kind of guy who won't take much out of any sort of criticism even if it's told to him in a way like how Rex posted.  I don't think it's being personal at all, but in general I'm not gonna treat him any different than I treat just about everyone else.
Title: Re: Rules
Post by: lets all go out for some frosty chocolate milkshakes on December 26, 2015, 21:17
im wary of being a massive hypocrite re: my own posts and pagelong debates so im going to try to not be as comatose lachrymose as i usually am (my problem is poor Expression) but

I'm from an Islamic family, but I don't see why discussion on the probable causes of things is in poor taste but that's just me.  It was still fairly civil and in my opinion it's unproductive to "honor" things without really understanding why they happened in the first place.

It's not an easy thing to discuss in any way.

(disclaimer: im a religious mess and part wiccan/buddhist/agnostic pantheist but i also half believe in some incredibly dumb after life resurrection order which im writin some dumb sci fi anime type crap about so religiously idk what to declare lmao)

i think its more an Agree To Disagree here with how that went but i just personally thought it was the wrong place for that kind of thing. it was "a debate outside the debate forum" kind of thing if that helps clarify my standing on it any better? anyone who's brought up Reasons and Debates in the topics expressly meant for "wow this is a shame" is usually booed out as being a bit insensitive, ive found.

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Yes to all, and I don't think it's that risky on here if people take things much more in stride.

I mean you're doing that to me now and I'm glad because right now it's helping me say what I'm trying to get at a bit better.

"people taking things in stride" is the hard step esp. when the place is sort of filled with depressed nerds who legitimately struggle with taking anything in stride due to various reasons. also when people do try to take things ironically and try to banter about it its seen/misinterpreted as Sincere and usually topics get closed for Fighting or Being Uncivil or w/e

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I don't what you're saying at the end of this but having opinions is only really risky if the kind of person who you're talking to has more an interest in winning an argument than actually discussing a topic.  I don't think anyone here has the cigaro syndrome anymore.  (ok so side note i'm trying to make a system of a down reference there)

nah its nothing to do with that sort of thing and maybe im expressing myself badly here but its more Opinions About The Forum And How Its Run Itself being the risky thing

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That is generally freaky but he has said some really stupid crap and clearly has more an interest in soap boxing than like actively participating on here.  Everyone else seems to at least participate especially when the thread calls for it.

these days i tend to see it as a thermodynamics thing re: is it enthalpically worth it to do anything about it and try to change that process??? or would it just be better to just leave them to it and it be a massive waste of ones time?

i mean re Forums Activity i still post here lmao so the odd outlier to Productive Forums Activity is inevitable lmao

tl;dr we are all sinners.  some people are more sinner than others.  are people born sinners or do they have sin thrust upon them?  who knows?  certainly not me, but the residents of pee kay emm enn dot net are all sinners and must learn to put up with one another's sin in a civil and learn virtue through the process of other sinners telling them not to be sinful.  will it work? who knows? sinners.

(above but spoken as a gravelly game intro voice)

(pukmun dot net appears on screen with cool logo)

//deldleldldldleld cool anime intro all Dramatical Murder style and we've all got cool Sinner outfits, except mine is a giant emoji turd. we all have posting Skills like big elaborate sailor moon attacks//

me all  "BAD POOOOOOOOOOOOOST.........SHAKING!!!!!" //big purple orb of terrible posts storms @ the enemy//


we had a shipping topic once n all so we might as well just stop resisting and turn puk into an anime at long last. i'll write the wiki
Title: Re: Rules
Post by: SirBlaziken on December 26, 2015, 21:23
If we really are turning PUK into an anime, i'd actually be on board with that.  And I will admit to the nerd part. Depressed? Not me.
Title: Re: Rules
Post by: Spriter on December 26, 2015, 21:35
^nerd was probably meant more casually anyways, just as a way to refer to us lot.

Tbh maybe we could expect one or two newer members to break rules ala double-posting / three-word rule. We don't need to be necessarily *harsh* on them, but instead just point them in the right direction. Of course when it's consistent rule-breaking, then it'll obviously be punishable. Just a good reminder to check the rules and if necessary, a more informal sort of warning...?

Title: Re: Rules
Post by: SirBlaziken on December 26, 2015, 21:39
That sounds decent imo. It gives them time to correct their own errors but it won't let them run amok.
Title: Re: Rules
Post by: The Shrub Dragon on December 27, 2015, 01:08
we had a shipping topic once n all so we might as well just stop resisting and turn puk into an anime at long last. i'll write the wiki
If we really are turning PUK into an anime, i'd actually be on board with that.
*stands with a large board in front of number 10 downing street* PUK ANIME PUK ANIME PUK ANIME PUK ANI


in all seriousness, what about the kind of points system you sometimes see on forums thats like... 1 point for breaking the three word rule, dual posting that escalates etc and then u get to like 10 points for a 48 hour ban, 20 for a week long ban, 30 for a month, 40 a year and 50 lifetime (i think we'd shrink that down someone committing that many offences probably shouldn't be about past the 30 point idk)


i also remember back when i was Wee And Worse At Reading Comprehension (i literally had no idea abt the three word rule like?? three word rule??? i should be able to make posts with three words then??? but no it was four words) and the thing that really helped was when iceduck dropped me a wee correcting message and because he'd initiated and it was private and amicable i felt like i was able to go 'what does that actually mean???' and get some clarification.  i think there's something to be said for everyone kind of being split a little like good cop bad cop so like u have a few people being harsh and showing u how it's done and another few being welcoming and indulgent bc in my case that was really helpful for integrating me.
Title: Re: Rules
Post by: Kpyna on December 27, 2015, 01:12
Dude I joined this forum when I was 9 and broke the rules like it was my job. People called me annoying and one person legitimately told me to "crawl in a corner and die in the nicest way possible", it just wasn't under such a microscope like it is now. I don't even think anyone took action against people saying those things. I don't think we should be THAT mean (like it's legit been 10 years and I haven't forgotten the exact phrasing of what username Glenwing said), but I'm kind of with Muhed that we shouldn't be stepping on eggshells all the time.

Also... people make mistakes and I don't lose sleep at night over minor rule infringements. Also I scroll past topics I don't care about.
Title: Re: Rules
Post by: Turner on December 27, 2015, 01:54
psst outdated terms, its ASD now, AS dont exist anymore as of DSM-V due to Reclassification

Well I've learned something here today. I bet the forums would have been a blast back in 2006 if the Autism spectrum was the trendy thing, people would have been bragging about being at a higher quotient than everyone else.

To be honest, this place practically romanticizes personality disorders so don't let yours hold you back, the name master.

I actually sort of agree or empathize with some of the things LOOK AROUND YOG and others have said regarding post quality and activity. It's only natural that as activity declines the remaining posters are familiar enough with each other that the rules go slightly out of the window and the tone becomes more conversational. All it takes is for a new member to come along and assume it's the norm and end up breaking the rules and not understand why.

They should definitely read and understand the rules but it's indicative of a bigger problem here that we're not going to solve by hammering the rules into people. I'd go as far as to say this site needs to radically change as a priority if we want to stop this happening. This wouldn't be as big of a deal if the site and community was bigger and stronger.
Title: Re: Rules
Post by: SirBlaziken on December 27, 2015, 02:00
To be honest, this place practically romanticizes personality disorders so don't let yours hold you back, the name master.


Not from what i've seen, no it doesn't. He shouldn't let them hold him back, however the site doesn't really romanticize personality disorders, otherwise I need that new pair of glasses more than I thought.
Title: Re: Rules
Post by: sylar on December 27, 2015, 02:24
I always feel a little awkward when people use mental illness as an excuse for being rowdy but I suppose that's my own internalised ableism or what have you. I have ASD and a few personality disorders that made me pretty goddamn terrible around here for years. Like Liz said I'd break rules like it was my job; I still talk to mods now who outright go "yeah man you were one of the worst members for a long time" and I can't take offence to it because yeah I was a mess. I think the thing is I grew up? And also people learned how to deal with me. I have an odd way of joking around and I'm generally pretty abrasive and I guess "intimidating" but the thing is like...

Even though I am a massive autist and I do have hella personality disorders and generally I am still A Big Mess, I still try to be accommodating so I'm easier to deal with? I don't expect everyone to have a degree in Dealing With The Mentally Ill Jerks Online. I dunno what I'm trying to say here I am tired.

Just try? To work with people? Using mental illness as a reason to break rules is all fine and good but honestly you'd have an easier time not using it as a reason to be weird about everything. Work with people and have people work with you so we know how to make things easier for you and you don't frustrate people and end up getting a bad rep.

Like, it's a Pokemon forum. We have dealt with more autistic kids than the average bear, let's be real here. We can do it and it is made 100x easier for everyone if instead of going "HEY IVE GOT AUTISM SO I CANT DO THESE THINGS DEAL WITH IT" you go "hey I've got autism but I'm willing to try and work on my issues if you're willing to be patient in knowing I'm trying"

Because people don't like talking to brick walls. That's how some people appear. That's where awkwardness stems from. You know.

And like I'm not saying STOP BEING MENTALLY ILL SO YOU CAN MAKE FRIENDS (although sadly that's how the world works it seems) because God knows I'm still a mess with the big Mental Illness Flare Ups here but again people just seem to know me well enough to go "ah there's that sylar being a sperg again! He will tire himself out eventually :)" and that's all it takes I guess?

Idk... Just... Work with people is my main point. Instead of using it as an excuse to be frustrating.
Title: Re: Rules
Post by: Turner on December 27, 2015, 05:38
Not from what i've seen, no it doesn't. He shouldn't let them hold him back, however the site doesn't really romanticize personality disorders, otherwise I need that new pair of glasses more than I thought.

You only joined in 2011, so it was way before your time. You missed the AS | Fad and everything else that brought with it when people got bored and decided Aspergers was just too mainstream and moved on to bigger, better things to have wrong with them and went ahead and glorified those too, milking the sympathy cow for all it was worth.
Title: Re: Rules
Post by: lets all go out for some frosty chocolate milkshakes on December 27, 2015, 06:07
Well I've learned something here today. I bet the forums would have been a blast back in 2006 if the Autism spectrum was the trendy thing, people would have been bragging about being at a higher quotient than everyone else.

everyone has that Awkward Teenage Phase where you try to be something Cool and Unique, it takes the whole of the 20s to shrug it off at least for most people. also Aspergers was only cool cos it was like "cool smart people autism", just being a straight up autist back then was Bad cos being acutally autistic was Weird and Not Cool and Err I Dunno This Wont Get Me Much Followers On DeviantArt

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They should definitely read and understand the rules but it's indicative of a bigger problem here that we're not going to solve by hammering the rules into people. I'd go as far as to say this site needs to radically change as a priority if we want to stop this happening. This wouldn't be as big of a deal if the site and community was bigger and stronger.

how do you go about changing this, logistically though? this is the Unspoken Problem im hedging around.

Not from what i've seen, no it doesn't. He shouldn't let them hold him back, however the site doesn't really romanticize personality disorders, otherwise I need that new pair of glasses more than I thought.

lmao same, compared to some places this place is p easygoing, if a bit weird sometimes? apparently im a newcomer too cos i missed out all the Earlier stuff it seems and a few years ago i got p het up a bout a few things but these days????? eh

idk if former-day puk was anything like this but i was raised on forums similar to SA's Helldump and it was good to shock me out of my more Embarassing habits but it kinda "lived too long in NYC"'d me up a bit? where u end up a bit of a dick for a good while and just yell "hey im WALKIN here!!!" to everyone who even dares walk within 20 yards of you and then sulk in front of anime over why you have no friends for some reason cos you keep being nasty to them all.

and sometimes its just nice to be on a forum where you can actually be a bit of a huge dork y'know?????

I always feel a little awkward when people use mental illness as an excuse for being rowdy but I suppose that's my own internalised ableism or what have you. I have ASD and a few personality disorders that made me pretty goddamn terrible around here for years. Like Liz said I'd break rules like it was my job; I still talk to mods now who outright go "yeah man you were one of the worst members for a long time" and I can't take offence to it because yeah I was a mess. I think the thing is I grew up? And also people learned how to deal with me. I have an odd way of joking around and I'm generally pretty abrasive and I guess "intimidating" but the thing is like...

Even though I am a massive autist and I do have hella personality disorders and generally I am still A Big Mess, I still try to be accommodating so I'm easier to deal with? I don't expect everyone to have a degree in Dealing With The Mentally Ill Jerks Online. I dunno what I'm trying to say here I am tired.

Just try? To work with people? Using mental illness as a reason to break rules is all fine and good but honestly you'd have an easier time not using it as a reason to be weird about everything. Work with people and have people work with you so we know how to make things easier for you and you don't frustrate people and end up getting a bad rep.

i know this was directed more at The Name Master but the tricky step for some is understanding why and how the steps from "mental disorder out of control and screwing things up" to "getting it in a headlock and under some form of control and it not being an excuse". im sure ive rambled about it elsewhere but theres a whole bunch of stuff re: The Current Sad State Of Autism Care esp. regarding latent adult autism self-advocacy sadly which means a lot of people got left in the dark, specially since a lot of it is learning the Invisible Rules of social interaction that no-one overtly tells each other

like im not disagreeing with u tho, its No Excuse For Actions entirely and given im Fightin Hard against it to end up as part of the Effort (given up with most other lines of work that require you to be a lot more Socially Savvy to survive, given i got a lot of the autismo/dysautonomia/spazmo problems i might as well work with my own kind) so i can be Living Proof to people unconfident in themselves and their future that giving up is not an option cos how im a spazmo yet i made it n all etc etc yada yada

but yeh sometimes some people need a small step onto the bits between "dont yell at me im disabled!!!!!!" and "my disability does not define me //flexes strongly//", its a tricky one cos like in mental health problems it always takes people a while to "get it" and start to fight back against it.

not everyone does and ive known people who will frustratingly threaten to literally kill themselves if they dont get social support so they can kink it up all day long and tweet about it (still get Caremad thinking about them even now) but the Social Skills Machine sorts out those who won't listen rather than dunno how to listen eventually


*stands with a large board in front of number 10 downing street* PUK ANIME PUK ANIME PUK ANIME PUK ANI


in all seriousness, what about the kind of points system you sometimes see on forums thats like... 1 point for breaking the three word rule, dual posting that escalates etc and then u get to like 10 points for a 48 hour ban, 20 for a week long ban, 30 for a month, 40 a year and 50 lifetime (i think we'd shrink that down someone committing that many offences probably shouldn't be about past the 30 point idk)


i also remember back when i was Wee And Worse At Reading Comprehension (i literally had no idea abt the three word rule like?? three word rule??? i should be able to make posts with three words then??? but no it was four words) and the thing that really helped was when iceduck dropped me a wee correcting message and because he'd initiated and it was private and amicable i felt like i was able to go 'what does that actually mean???' and get some clarification.  i think there's something to be said for everyone kind of being split a little like good cop bad cop so like u have a few people being harsh and showing u how it's done and another few being welcoming and indulgent bc in my case that was really helpful for integrating me.

//joins u with placard// PUK ANIME PUK ANIME


ideologically this is kind of the thing im sorta badly trying to express, mods/people sometimes dropping a line in some way and going "yo i dont wanna be a dick but ____________, so watch out" when people keep Slipping Up and kinda trying to Sperg!explain why. its happened to me before when regular users have even gone "yo uh......" to which ive anime bowed and gone all GOMEN NASAI cos if ur an autist you kind of need a bit of Help in that regard sometimes. i kinda wanna do that thing maybe but i feel a little Arrogant telling other people stuff like that

ofc you'll have the troublemakers and the people who Wont Listen but they'll eventually decide this aint the place for them and ditch. a couple of proven transphobes dont post here anymore which is Good.

a sorta Points System might be a thing? kind of a Softer version of the Watched percentage maybe? as a kind of Profile Visible Reminder not to Double Post or whatever and it'd be a Warning to not engage depending on the type of w/e they had.  with some sort of Apt Theme to the clientele of the forum. i.e. 3-5 posting "uh ohs" and when u fail it u have to wear the Posting Diapers all visible on ur profile. everyone point at the posting baby.

(inb4 the "its u, beth. ur the bad posting baby!" and me all going "hey give over! its neurologi-....uh i mean yeh of course!!! its totes me haha uh")
Title: Re: Rules
Post by: The name master on December 27, 2015, 17:46
They eventually leave cos to them everyone keeps yelling at them for no reason" and im worried The Name Master is gonna go this way.
Maybe I might.... I wouldn't have to rate terrible nicknames anymore....

PS: When you talk to me in a post and use my name, please just call me name master. It's like doctor who, nobody calls him the doctor when saying his name to him they just call him doctor.
Title: Re: Rules
Post by: Turner on December 27, 2015, 20:18
how do you go about changing this, logistically though? this is the Unspoken Problem im hedging around.

This is precisely the elephant-in-the-room million dollar question and yes, it will keep coming up until something is done about it. I've tried to gather people to discuss this a few times with mixed results. I've tried speaking to Joeno and made very little progress. In the past year or two we managed to get the content's comment section open to community moderation; me and Del elected ourselves to do this. Before us, the content mods had basically given up on allowing comments altogether as there was too much spam, so a captcha was put in place so people could actually comment again.

Aside from this, I don't think there has been any other major change in the last 2 years; if there has - we haven't been told about it.

This forum's activity problem reminds me of the global warming issue in that the warning signs are constantly appearing with increased frequency yet people either just assume that it'll all blow over if they ignore it or they convince themselves that nothing has really changed and so nothing should be done.

The forum community here is strong and willing, but it's power is limited and its growth is dependent on the content of the main site. The most the forum can do is to expand and make inroads into other areas of the internet, but we can't make official PKMN.NET tumblrs, subreddits, twitters or Twitch accounts because it goes against the site rules (I believe there's already an inactive official twitter anyway).

I'm sure if we were to set up unofficial accounts and proved we could be responsible with them, we could convince Joeno to make them official; but why the hell would we do that, really? Being an LPer or YouTuber worth watching takes a lot of effort and skill. It isn't easy and you can easily make some money out of it, nobody in their right mind would hand it over to PKMN.NET as an entity after building up an audience and their viewers wouldn't be too happy about it either. If you have the skill to be an LPer worth watching with a decent audience, you wouldn't jeopardize your future by handing your successful channel over to someone else for nothing.

This site needs to be completely re-hauled and restructured so that the community actually drives the content of the site instead of generating it FOR the site. If you have a great guide on EV training, are you really going to post it on a website that looks fresh out of 2007, is awful to navigate on a mobile or tablet and nobody will read anyway because the navigation is so clumsy? Or are you going to post it on Reddit where you have a likelihood it will end up on a well-visted subreddit's wiki, viewed by thousands, maintained by others and referenced all over related subreddits in future threads where you can be quickly and properly credited for your work directly to your Reddit account?

Joeno has said before that if users want the site to change then they should do the work creating the content, but who's site is this really?

Either:

1) Update the main site completely so that it actually makes some sense in 2015; rethink the layout, make it encouraging to use on mobiles and tablets, get rid of these old school philosophies on only using home-grown content. Elect a handful of active individuals to approve inbound content and let the community generate the rest, get a familiar, well-documented CMS in place so the moderators don't need to think about what's happening in the background; make the job easy for them so they will stay active and can juggle it around their work/school life (This is why I suggested Wordpress a few months ago). Set boundaries on what content we are and aren't going to bother with; there are plenty of RESTful Pokedex APIs out there; do we really need users to waste time manually scraping together datasheets of stats and hold items just so it officially belongs to whoever is in charge of PKMN.NET?

Or:

2) Get active and start maintaining and updating this site yourself. Take charge of this site again and do with it whatever suits your vision of a 21st Century Pokemon website. Whether you turn it into something completely different or merge it with a facebook community and keep it as just a social media presence is your choice. If you're bored and want to shut it down because it's too expensive, too much work or takes up too much of your time then release the domain and pass the responsibility on to someone else who can build something out of the ashes.

We're going to keep going around in circles and coming back to this issue until the forum slows to a crawl and becomes inactive enough that Joeno decides to retire it. If that is the plan, then at least let us know so we know not to waste our time thinking about strategies to revive the site and can prepare ourselves for the big closure. The community is not going to be able to come up with a miracle solution to this inactivity; we're not Reddit, 4chan, tumblr or any other site completely driven by users, we're just posters on a forum.
Title: Re: Rules
Post by: Clairefable on December 27, 2015, 21:01
^

Once again Turner has managed to articulate exactly what I've been wanting to say.

The general feeling is that no one can really be bothered. Many (if not most) formerly prominent members of staff are all but anonymous these days. That isn't a criticism; people grow up and grow away. That's life. But if the people who wield any sort of power to change anything aren't interested anymore then what chance do the rest of us have?

The thing that this place has/had going for it over other similar sites was/are the forums. Forget about the content. Do away with it. Keep the boards, and give the community more freedom to post and share content from elsewhere. (like Smogon or Reddit or whatever; not advertising "other" sites obviously). This need to have everything done "in house" by a select group is, in my opinion, a massive part of the problem. It might have been okay years ago when people were still at school and whatnot and had infinite free time to do these things but it simply isn't practical anymore. People see a website with minimal content and move on without even looking at the forums. And why would they?

These boards are the only thing keeping this site alive and as someone who's spend a good decade (at least!) here I'd be sad to see them go. But to be honest watching it slowly die like this is even more sad. It's time to either put it out of it's misery or give it a kick up the arse.
Title: Re: Rules
Post by: Lord Raven on December 27, 2015, 21:39
And make the name rater thing a sub board that allows users to rate the nicknames without getting too crazy.  Keep cards, make more of an incentive to get cards but make them less clique-ish.
Title: Re: Rules
Post by: Joeno on December 27, 2015, 22:08
This site needs to be completely re-hauled and restructured so that the community actually drives the content of the site instead of generating it FOR the site.

Can you explain what you mean by this? Content of the site is what goes up on the site, it seems like semantics.

For what it's worth, most of the tools are there, but nobody has ever really come to me with a reasonable attempt to learn how things work and what to do.

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Or are you going to post it on Reddit where you have a likelihood it will end up on a well-visted subreddit's wiki, viewed by thousands, maintained by others and referenced all over related subreddits in future threads where you can be quickly and properly credited for your work directly to your Reddit account?

But with that argument, there's no point putting anything on the site in the first place, so why go on about content on here?

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Joeno has said before that if users want the site to change then they should do the work creating the content, but who's site is this really?

A complicated mix of me (paying for/keeping things running/tech work) and other admins (such as Typhlosion) who don't want to put the time in.

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Elect a handful of active individuals to approve inbound content and let the community generate the rest, get a familiar, well-documented CMS in place so the moderators don't need to think about what's happening in the background;

Get me the right people (and excuse me for having doubts about some due to past experiences) and this is a matter of me changing some numbers around.

The CMS is all handwritten (and the database near-impossible to port) and support most of these things already. Otherwise I can edit them in, I'd be happy to.

And Wordpress? Biggest security hole on the internet at the moment. Absolute, complete no way to that, ever.

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do we really need users to waste time manually scraping together datasheets of stats and hold items just so it officially belongs to whoever is in charge of PKMN.NET?

I enjoy doing this stuff, and have been doing most of it, more on that in a bit.

Forget about the content. Do away with it.

Never going to happen. If we were to do that, we might as well close up shop. Why come here for just forums when there's plenty of others out there? Without the Name Rater (and I acknowledge that needs to be taken care of) we probably wouldn't have gotten any new members for years. This is probably going to sound pathetic to most of you, but I'd also feel I'd be betraying everyone who'd put the work into the site, not to mention throwing away their work. At best, it'd be the situation you're saying now - having it archived for people to do whatever they want to do with it.

For me then - to be honest, first of all, when these topics come up and the arguments occur about sometimes the flimsier things, and the tendency of the discussion usually feels like "throw away everything you've done and worked on", my instinct is to close the forums. It's a hassle to keep up, most of what comes out of it is a problem and when I need to deal with it, it's mostly a headache. I'd hand it over, but I can't say that's an option. I am, at least, considering having a stripped down forums mostly to serve the site bits that need it. After all, there are plenty of other places online to talk about these things, most more active than others.

For content, I'm not the right person to be writing it for various reasons. I've been meaning to give the pages an overhaul, but there hasn't been time. Nobody else has stepped up - those who have, usually didn't get very far before giving up. Still, it's there, no point in removing it and all that.

The fun part for me is in the tech work - getting things running and fixing things. I probably should do a layout overhaul at some point (but without a decent UX designer, it's difficult to get that right). Saying it's a 2007 layout... sort of doesn't match the feeling I get from every other site out there, but there's some changes we can make for mobile friendliness. I have to balance multiple needs there, though, so it's not as easily done.
Beyond that, this is a small portfolio piece for me, and something I want to expand. We have our own Pokedex because that's where a lot of the interest is for me, tracking data and expanding it. I've been working on a rewrite - years in the making because my time has been limited (and other events often make me not want to bother with it anymore), but it's something I want to work on. I'd continue working on that regardless of anything else that would happen, for my own entertainment, even if nobody else cared. For the same reason, the site isn't going to be taken down either. I enjoy the work too much and it's good practice for other projects and work. And it's also why I'm not just going to hand everything over to someone else - there's some pride involved here, and the feeling that if anything is going to happen, it has to be done well and fit in with what I want out of it.

Pushing more on that is useful though. For various reasons, I don't think a 'Name Rater' forum is going to do as well as the current anonymous setup we've got. Feel free to PM me suggestions for people who you think could do it - I'll handle it anonymously so nobody will learn for sure, but it should get it going again.

Beyond that, I'm willing to entertain plans on how to change things. More than just "We need to get people to have their own content", but actual steps to take, volunteers to do the work, and so on. It's always easier to say someone should do something than actually figuring out how to do it and where the time comes from.
Title: Re: Rules
Post by: Clairefable on December 27, 2015, 22:24
Never going to happen. If we were to do that, we might as well close up shop. Why come here for just forums when there's plenty of others out there? Without the Name Rater (and I acknowledge that needs to be taken care of) we probably wouldn't have gotten any new members for years. This is probably going to sound pathetic to most of you, but I'd also feel I'd be betraying everyone who'd put the work into the site, not to mention throwing away their work. At best, it'd be the situation you're saying now - having it archived for people to do whatever they want to do with it.

For me then - to be honest, first of all, when these topics come up and the arguments occur about sometimes the flimsier things, and the tendency of the discussion usually feels like "throw away everything you've done and worked on", my instinct is to close the forums. It's a hassle to keep up, most of what comes out of it is a problem and when I need to deal with it, it's mostly a headache. I'd hand it over, but I can't say that's an option. I am, at least, considering having a stripped down forums mostly to serve the site bits that need it. After all, there are plenty of other places online to talk about these things, most more active than others.

That doesn't sound pathetic at all, and I suppose I never really thought about it from that point of view. I get what you're saying though, it's easy to forget that people have invested a lot of time and energy into what content we do have and I apologise if I sounded flippant. But what I'm getting at is if the content we do have is being neglected for whatever reason then is it adding anything? Perhaps rather than doing away with it altogether is it worth looking at perhaps "specialising" in a specific area of the fandom? For example, Smogon is best known for competitive battling. I suppose whatever this hypothetical field of expertise would be is up for debate. I'm just throwing ideas about at this point.

It seems obvious that everyone wants the same thing here; for the site to continue on and grow. What can we as a community to do help that?
Title: Re: Rules
Post by: Joeno on December 27, 2015, 23:02
Thank you. It honestly helps to read that :)

As for what can be done - the problem is that we can't really hope to compete on content directly - we're too far behind and we'll never have people take a week or two off around a game's release to update content, as happens in other places. I believe it can help - a well positioned page that gives that bit more information can help get people in and give them a first place to check things, but it won't fundamentally change things.

The lead we had was 'community', but that doesn't necessarily come down to 'a better community' (which is vague and not something people will see straight away). It mostly manifests in interactive features. The name rater is one of them - and as I said, I'm willing to take ideas in PM, so we can put something in place there while still preserving the core anonimity. Other features could work as well - Ask Sentret never became as big, but could use some love. Cards could work, but that's something where I think we need to think of a bigger redesign to make that work. Having that be discoverable is tough, but it's the one unique edge we've got.

To expand on that, disregarding any comments on the site's layout being stuck in 2007, for technology we still are (or feel) ahead of most other sites, and that's something that can be used. It takes time to write things, but that can be made easier by knowing what to do, and some careful thinking can often make that easier. That still doesn't say what to do, though - but might give a direction on what I see as what to go for.
Title: Re: Rules
Post by: Kpyna on December 27, 2015, 23:30
Cards could work, but that's something where I think we need to think of a bigger redesign to make that work. Having that be discoverable is tough, but it's the one unique edge we've got.

Would it be possible to maybe tie in cards to the forums a bit more? Like I just read that and had the idea that maybe we could create another member group for people who have collected a certain amount or a certain group of cards. Like, let's not lie, the pokeballs are SUPER snazzy and I'm sure if we made it so people with a significant collection got Luxury Balls or something else cool below their name people on the forums would immediately start paying more attention to cards.
Title: Re: Rules
Post by: Turner on December 27, 2015, 23:47
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Can you explain what you mean by this? Content of the site is what goes up on the site, it seems like semantics.

What I mean by this is that there's a difference between a site that relies on its users by approving content that they submit (Comparable to being a freelance writer and submitting articles to a newspaper, think Slashdot) and a site that is actively built on users submitting content (Reddit, tumblr, 4chan etc.)

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For what it's worth, most of the tools are there, but nobody has ever really come to me with a reasonable attempt to learn how things work and what to do.

Why would they? You're acting like the site that YOU made is someone else's responsibility to maintain. It's your job to engage users, not for the users to have to learn how you do things and take time out of their day to keep your website running. Are you going to be paying them for this?

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But with that argument, there's no point putting anything on the site in the first place, so why go on about content on here?

You're absolutely right, which is why we need to rethink the content we have. What kinds of content should we have and what kind of content should we focus on in the future - if any. We're wasting our time regurgitating what other sites already have.


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Get me the right people (and excuse me for having doubts about some due to past experiences) and this is a matter of me changing some numbers around.

The CMS is all handwritten (and the database near-impossible to port) and support most of these things already. Otherwise I can edit them in, I'd be happy to.

With all due respect to your coding skill, is your handwritten CMS something that people will actually want to use to publish content to the site after a hard day at work/schoo? Remember that these people will likely be younger than yourself and will have been brought up learning to use the internet using apps and sites that may be wildly different to what you have back there.

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And Wordpress? Biggest security hole on the internet at the moment. Absolute, complete no way to that, ever.

Regardless of whether you use Wordpress or not, there are far bigger security holes on the internet than Wordpress; what you really mean is that Wordpress is the most widely used CMS with the potential to be a security risk in the event of mismanagement and even then, I would say Joomla is far worse in this regard.
At work we have 4 UNIX shared hosting servers hosting about 1000 sites each; all of which are only open for enterprise customers - no personal sites, mainly SMEs who pay clueless developers large amounts of money to deploy Wordpress/Bootstrap. Most of the time they get attacked is when they've used a vulnerable theme, extension or set file permissions wide open to the whole internet. Cleaning it up, working out what went wrong and securing them going forward is trivial and it happens a lot less than you'd think. Joomla and Magento on the other hand are endless uphill struggles that normally end up in a migration to Wordpress anyway. It's okay if you don't use Wordpress, but you can do a lot worse.

That was kind of a massive tangent.

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Never going to happen. If we were to do that, we might as well close up shop. Why come here for just forums when there's plenty of others out there? Without the Name Rater (and I acknowledge that needs to be taken care of) we probably wouldn't have gotten any new members for years.


There are plenty of forums out there, but there are also plenty of sites out there better maintained, better organized and better updated. Communities are flexible, they can afford to be duplicates of each other. Every few years a new 4chan alternative comes along and gets mildly successful due to old 4chan members getting bored with their current community. Nobody is going to 'get bored' of getting their content from blocked, Bulbapedia or anywhere else unless that data stops being updated or becomes difficult to access. Content is content, you just show up to the one that is most accurate, most easy to use and most convinient. Communities can be different or the same and people will still check them out. People will be a part of different communities at the same time because they all offer something different that can't be replicated.

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This is probably going to sound pathetic to most of you, but I'd also feel I'd be betraying everyone who'd put the work into the site, not to mention throwing away their work. At best, it'd be the situation you're saying now - having it archived for people to do whatever they want to do with it.

It's not pathetic, and I understand it but that way of thinking just leaves us stuck without being able to move forward. Our only options with existing content is

1) Be ruthless and ditch it all together.
2) Keep it in place and have old, outdated content for nostalgia purposes
3) Revitilise it and port it across somewhere else.

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For me then - to be honest, first of all, when these topics come up and the arguments occur about sometimes the flimsier things, and the tendency of the discussion usually feels like "throw away everything you've done and worked on", my instinct is to close the forums. It's a hassle to keep up, most of what comes out of it is a problem and when I need to deal with it, it's mostly a headache. I'd hand it over, but I can't say that's an option. I am, at least, considering having a stripped down forums mostly to serve the site bits that need it. After all, there are plenty of other places online to talk about these things, most more active than others.

Are you able to detail these plans at all? I don't blame you for wanting to close the forums or strip them back. The fact is, they're a shell of their former self and the most activity comes from the "I remember when I used to post here". I would rather see the place revitilised and have it evolve into something new and fresh than to have it completely closed down, but I'd rather have it closed than slowly die. I want some kind of progress or development, as do many others here.

We've got a legacy built on years of memories and a community who genuinely want something new. No emerging Pokemon website has that, so we're not just fighting against the inevitible here; there's definite potential, but I feel like any solution we come to is always going to be too little, too late if it isn't radically different.

Can I ask why you can't hand it over to someone else?

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The fun part for me is in the tech work - getting things running and fixing things. I probably should do a layout overhaul at some point (but without a decent UX designer, it's difficult to get that right). Saying it's a 2007 layout... sort of doesn't match the feeling I get from every other site out there, but there's some changes we can make for mobile friendliness. I have to balance multiple needs there, though, so it's not as easily done.
Beyond that, this is a small portfolio piece for me, and something I want to expand. We have our own Pokedex because that's where a lot of the interest is for me, tracking data and expanding it.

It sounds to me like we may have a conflict in interests here.

I've seen videogame fansites with working forums pop up overnight days after a game is announced on places like Reddit and 4chan. These sites are normally deployed using some kind of new, experimental JavaScript framework on top of an LAMP stack hosted on AWS or something with the admin only having a marginal technical skills; but because it's new, flashy and built with web 2.0 design principles in mind, people flock to it and use it until something else comes along.

I'm not saying that this is a good idea at all for a number of reasons (Security and stability first and foremost), but this is basically our competition. The users of these sites don't care about the backend stuff; they see a flashy, minimally designed site with the bare minimum of content and functionality they need and flock to it because it's the first and looks the best.

Obviously if you were to do any of this, unless you wrote it all yourself it would remove the point of it being a portfolio.

If we're going to keep up with other sites, maybe we need to acknowledge that using this place as a portfolio versus keeping it modernised and active are two separate goals. Maybe we can split the site, keep this one and also work on a beta.pkmn.net for a new site until we're at a stage where it might be a good idea to merge the two sites into something new?

On top of this Joeno, I'd like to know what you think the future of this place is or what plans you have. If you share your vision for the site then maybe we can work with it.
Title: Re: Rules
Post by: Joeno on December 28, 2015, 00:07
You're acting like the site that YOU made is someone else's responsibility to maintain. It's your job to engage users, not for the users to have to learn how you do things and take time out of their day to keep your website running.

You're saying these things need to happen. I don't feel that way. I'm speaking from your position that this should happen. I'm happy for things to stay the way they are.

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With all due respect to your coding skill, is your handwritten CMS something that people will actually want to use to publish content to the site after a hard day at work/schoo?

Yes

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Are you able to detail these plans at all?

None beyond possibly having only a handful of forums left, possibly mostly focus on site questions.

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Can I ask why you can't hand it over to someone else?

Because I'm still involved, still doing the work, and don't want to lose that work.

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I've seen videogame fansites with working forums pop up overnight days after a game is announced on places like Reddit and 4chan. These sites are normally deployed using some kind of new, experimental JavaScript framework on top of an LAMP stack hosted on AWS or something with the admin only having a marginal technical skills; but because it's new, flashy and built with web 2.0 design principles in mind, people flock to it and use it until something else comes along.

I'm not saying that this is a good idea at all for a number of reasons (Security and stability first and foremost), but this is basically our competition. The users of these sites don't care about the backend stuff; they see a flashy, minimally designed site with the bare minimum of content and functionality they need and flock to it because it's the first and looks the best.

So what would it do. It's all very nice to go 'flashy' and 'Javascript' and web 2.0, but what would you do with it?

It's really, really easy to say "This is wrong", but it would be far more constructive to give some actual ideas that can be worked with. I've not seen anything concrete from you, and that makes it really difficult to say anything about.

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On top of this Joeno, I'd like to know what you think the future of this place is or what plans you have. If you share your vision for the site then maybe we can work with it.

At this point, for me a focus on more data-oriented content, making use of the large database we've got to give more specialized and searchable information. There's a lot of information that could be derived from that and it's the sort of thing that gets me motivated. Beyond that - it would depend on what else would be happening beyond me. But while it's just me, that's all you're likely to get.
Title: Re: Rules
Post by: The Shrub Dragon on December 28, 2015, 00:38
im not letting this site be closed until we see the puk anime reach fruition
Title: Re: Rules
Post by: Turner on December 28, 2015, 01:07
You're saying these things need to happen. I don't feel that way. I'm speaking from your position that this should happen. I'm happy for things to stay the way they are.

What I'm saying this that so long as this site has an inactivity problem, threads like this will continue to be made and we'll keep having these same discussions until we end up driving everyone away, new and old. Every time the forums have a problem, you can always trace the reasoning back to the fact that the forums just aren't active enough.

The community wants this place to be a Pokemon fansite they can be proud of, we want to be up there with the other big fansites because we love Pokemon and we want our community to grow. We need your help as the site admin to do that.

yes

Fine, if it's functional and can be prettied up enough to be inviting to newbies then that's all I care about.

So what would it do. It's all very nice to go 'flashy' and 'Javascript' and web 2.0, but what would you do with it?

I already said, I'm not suggesting that we should do this. But the fact is, our competition - other fansites are created within the blink of an eye and sustain communities just fine. They don't bother trying to reinvent the wheel by having the users provide them with a hand crafted Pokedex, they just grab it from PokeAPI and have done with. Boom, operational Pokedex imported within an afternoon.

The internet has changed. The way this website is run is slow and clumsy. If it doesn't make sense to me and many other people here, you can bet it won't make sense to the under-13s who've grown up on phones and tablets without desktop PCs and forums. We need to make this site as attractive to those people as possible; to show them that this is a better alternative for their Pokemon fill than Reddit, blocked or Facebook. Focus more on the 'why' rather than the 'how' and you begin to see things from our perspective.

It's really, really easy to say "This is wrong", but it would be far more constructive to give some actual ideas that can be worked with. I've not seen anything concrete from you, and that makes it really difficult to say anything about.

I constantly give you concrete ideas Joeno and they either get rubbished or scaled down to such a point that it makes absolutely no difference to the site itself. You managed to turn 'Lets have the users freely submit news articles and content by letting selected moderators proofread it' into "We'll let people comment on content pages". Neither of these are even big changes to begin with, we need something bigger.

I don't know how your handwritten CMS works, so I'm limited in how 'concrete' I can be here with my suggestions and I'd much rather provide ideas at this stage so we can decide on whether or not they're good ideas before we look at their implementation. The strength of any changes is going to come from the community, so I'd rather have everyone on-ball and enthusiastic about the plans. There's also a danger in losing the forest to the trees if we focus too much on specifics at this stage.

Let's list some problems and break things into smaller chunks, shall we? I encourage anyone else who has ideas about the site/forum to also use this or a similar template so we're all on the same page. The more you ask yourself 'Why' the closer you get to the root of the issue and spend less time on small changes that won't make any differences.

Problem: The news on the front page is never updated.
Details: Nobody ever submits news to the front page. Nobody has the time or motivation to be a regular poster of news.
Why?: Submitting a news article to the website is time consuming and not transparent. If I'm a new user looking at the news page, I have no idea how to go about submitting news, it's not immediately apparent. I have to speak to a third party or send my article to an email address. I have no idea if my article has been read, if it will be posted and if the formatting I've made to the article will be maintained. I don't know if I will be credited or if my words will be paraphrased. I don't know how much of this article belongs to me.
Proposed solution: First, we make sure there is a link on every news article to a /submit page. Because we want as much community involvement as possible to keep the content coming in. We make this fairly big and inviting, not tucked away in the footer. Next, on that page we implement some kind of basic WYSIWYG form for submitting news pieces - we don't throw overblown content rules and style guides at them (we want this part of the process to be quick and painless so they don't mind doing it regularly) and then we use CSS to style every submitted article in the same way so nobody has to make sure the formatting matches the rest of the site. The news article is either quickly approved or not based on its written content by a volunteer moderator and ends up on the site, all well within 24 hours hopefully.

So this works on a sort of submit -> approve -> publish model without being selective over who is allowed to write the articles. Does this sound like a good idea or not?

We can tackle the other problems too, but I'm going to focus on the updating of the site first.

Title: Re: Rules
Post by: SirBlaziken on December 28, 2015, 01:25
I have said in the past that I would love to help, but I don't have the time to learn coding and stuff like that, and I don't know how to do so now. As for writing about the latest details on stuff, I can possibly research some stuff and write out some articles if people would help with that too. However, what it takes to submit an article hasn't been outlined, plus I am bad with coding and stuff like that, as I stated before.

im not letting this site be closed until we see the puk anime reach fruition

That and the roleplaying board being revived. I (or we if people want to send me ideas) need to start thinking and organizing some possibly. If anyone has any decently workable ideas for an rp, feel free to PM me. I'm willing to listen and I don't bite (hard).

Title: Re: Rules
Post by: Joeno on December 28, 2015, 01:27
What you suggest is already there. People don't use it.

The forum not being active enough goes back a lot further, and comes from a toxic and argumentative group that was very active. That caused a number of notable contributors to be driven away. And on some level, that same attitude is still there. It's why I'm not inclined to do more here. Too much of a negative cycle to make the community work for the group that has been doing that work.

To be honest, Turner, looking at what you want out of the site, it seems like what you are looking for is simply not what PKMN.NET will ever offer or was ever going to. That's fine, I think part of the point here is that we can't be everything for everyone. But maybe it would help everyone if we can accept this.
Title: Re: Rules
Post by: Turner on December 28, 2015, 01:41
What you suggest is already there. People don't use it.

Where? Where is it? I made sure I looked before I visited the page but I couldn't find it in any immediately accessible location, so it's no surprise to me that nobody submits anything if they can't find it.

The forum not being active enough goes back a lot further, and comes from a toxic and argumentative group that was very active. That caused a number of notable contributors to be driven away. And on some level, that same attitude is still there. It's why I'm not inclined to do more here. Too much of a negative cycle to make the community work for the group that has been doing that work.

So that's what this is really about? You don't like the community? PKMN.NET has had it's ups and downs, people have gotten angry over various things, but hardly any of those people are active anymore and if they are, I don't see them causing any problems. We've all been involved in drama but at this stage I think most of us are committed to getting some kind of meaningful change out of the site so we can finally move on. The active userbase has completely changed and is unrecognizable from what it was just 3 years ago. Can you tell us who this group is so we can try and identify the problem with them? I'm guessing there has to be some kind of issue stopping you from just banning them. I don't care about old drama being dragged up, I just want some progress so we can move past this and face the future.

To be honest, Turner, looking at what you want out of the site, it seems like what you are looking for is simply not what PKMN.NET will ever offer or was ever going to. That's fine, I think part of the point here is that we can't be everything for everyone. But maybe it would help everyone if we can accept this.

Why? I've just given you one suggestion that apparently we already have. If we already have it, then why won't we offer it? Surely if it already exists then all we need to do is to promote it more? If the process of user-generated news isn't something you want to do then let me know and I'll think up something else. Tell me the boundaries of how you're happy for this site to evolve and I'll come up with ideas that fit inside it, I'm more than happy to work with you on this.
Title: Re: Rules
Post by: Joeno on December 28, 2015, 01:48
The vision mentioned before is one where I admit we won't have the latest content, because there is no way to win there at this point. User submitted content is too slow for that. The focus, for us, would be more community and interactivity based features. Again, the Name Rater is the big one there. Focusing on content is missing the point.

And if you want that honesty - your posts feel as aggressive as ever and are making me wonder why I bother. You have your own ideas, nothing posted here is changing them and O feel you would be better off implementing them on a site of your own.
Title: Re: Rules
Post by: SirBlaziken on December 28, 2015, 01:50
@Turner: There's actually the topic right above this one on this exact board for that, which I literally just found.

If you're going to try to rebuild everything here based on interactive and community based features, what are some ideas you have, because i'd like to possibly hear some of them.
Title: Re: Rules
Post by: lets all go out for some frosty chocolate milkshakes on December 28, 2015, 02:03
USP ideas:

- its a british site so we could have a site refresh based around misanthropy and tea but pokemon themed, design based around pokeball with union jack colours and we all sit around a virtual pot of tea and complain about whoever isn't currently in the room like real british people
- admit place as a second-rate forum on the internet and make it a tourney place where its ok to lose and our team have obvious exploits which ur meant to figure out. everyone likes it cos you dont have to be the best ever and a huge annoying bleeding-edge nerd about it. revisiting the old times of "havin a friendly"
- spriting resource???? we had a p deece spriting community and idk if any other websites teach u much about that
- pokemon crafts, even if its just a kind of Pinterest affair in the end, prefaced with knitting/sewing/crochet tutorials n support. i roll around on ravelry quite a lot so if nothing else it'd make a good 10 minutes of wasting time
- brocks donuts, our entire site draw would be a recipe for brocks legendary donuts made in his trusty frying/drying pan

The internet has changed. The way this website is run is slow and clumsy. If it doesn't make sense to me and many other people here, you can bet it won't make sense to the under-13s who've grown up on phones and tablets without desktop PCs and forums.

how does the current site design scale up on mobiles/tablets? i hear fluid & responsive bootstrap and the weird flat design look is all the rage these days

im not letting this site be closed until we see the puk anime reach fruition

kickstarter to get vic magniolia (idk how to spell it) to voice one of us in the anime

we will keep the viewers and the active draw until all of us have revealed our puk bankais at which point everyone will get bored and desert us \(;´□`)/
Title: Re: Rules
Post by: Del on December 28, 2015, 02:25
alright, so we focus on community stuff. Name Rater, Ask Sentret, that's cool, i like it.

- spriting resource???? we had a p deece spriting community and idk if any other websites teach u much about that
- pokemon crafts, even if its just a kind of Pinterest affair in the end, prefaced with knitting/sewing/crochet tutorials n support. i roll around on ravelry quite a lot so if nothing else it'd make a good 10 minutes of wasting time
these are cool ideas too, I dunno if we have many active spriters left at this point though? might be worth looking at.

what about featured art of the week or featured fanfic and stuff like that? could help promote more art posting and fanfic posting and stuff?

maybe monthly Official PKMN.NET™ tournaments? maybe appoint someone who knows what's up as a head of the project, we can advertise them elsewhere (where allowed), maybe get some interest drummed up for the site

streams are the hip cool thing right now, we discussed a Twitch stream a while back, maybe that could be cool? i think Turner mentioned "why bother if you can make money off it doing it yourself" but let's be real I don't know if it'd be popular enough to make money off of and if it ever does get to that point we can discuss it then

a bigger social media presence, which we could tie into the "featured art/fanfic/whatever" maybe? start like a tumblr blog and feature an artist or writer every week and just post a piece of art once a day or something, maybe see if someone good at the tumblrs wants to take that up, could advertise potential events/tournaments whatever there too

those are the ideas i've got for now anyway.
Title: Re: Rules
Post by: SirBlaziken on December 28, 2015, 02:32
Some of the people to do art, some tournaments sometimes, and writing are already here. The big thing in my eyes is trying to get people to look at it and be like "wow this is cool, this site is probably full of cool people who can teach me more on this thing". I would write and battle some more, however, with the former, i've hit an idea wall, which is why the rp board has dried up (no, seriously, pm me if you have ideas), and with the latter, I need to learn the current metagame in order to relay it to you guys, but I just haven't had the motivation or the time to do so. If someone else would learn how the current metagame works and teaches it to me, I would be more than happy to help show people the way. Same goes with roleplaying/writing, if people can help with ideas and etc. i'd be more than happy to help other people improve and possibly recruit them for that kind of stuff.
Title: Re: Rules
Post by: the bread dragon on December 28, 2015, 02:38
i personally see no major issues with it on mobile and that's what ive been with for a while, but that's just me

i play competitive a lot but im really bad lol, i don't know if that means anything
Title: Re: Rules
Post by: SirBlaziken on December 28, 2015, 02:39
If you pick on anything, let me know because i'd love to know.
Title: Re: Rules
Post by: Turner on December 28, 2015, 02:57
The vision mentioned before is one where I admit we won't have the latest content, because there is no way to win there at this point. User submitted content is too slow for that. The focus, for us, would be more community and interactivity based features. Again, the Name Rater is the big one there. Focusing on content is missing the point.

And if you want that honesty - your posts feel as aggressive as ever and are making me wonder why I bother. You have your own ideas, nothing posted here is changing them and O feel you would be better off implementing them on a site of your own.

I've already said, if you tell me the boundaries you're willing to work within, I will come up with ideas that fit inside them. I'm not being aggressive, I'm just trying to get some definite answers. This topic is going to keep coming up constantly over the months so we need to know how much is worth discussing here. If you set us guidelines on what absolutely isn't going to change, then we know what kind of suggestions we can and can't make.

Is the site news ever going to be updated or is that basically out of the question now? Should we bother thinking about ways to improve the site news or can we consider that completely out of bounds?

You say you want to expand the community, okay fair enough let's focus on that. How much are you willing to work with us or give us permission in creating PKMN.NET presences over the internet? Can we get someone in control of the PKMN.NET twitter account posting news there? What about an official tumblr or subreddit? I can't speak for facebook as I'm not on there and don't know what the situation is but I'd like to raise the idea of a PKMN.NET twitch or YouTube stream. Is this doable?
Title: Re: Rules
Post by: Lord Raven on December 28, 2015, 04:12
I'm dropping the argument with xhanatos, because I don't think I was being at any point productive.  I'm looking around and seeing less of what I'm talking about so I was just making an mountain out of a molehill.

snip
The issue is, I like all of these ideas, but nobody's stepped up and made anything consistent.  I feel like people have been either passive or some of these streams and things like this don't get the attention, care, or support for the organizer to keep on going.  I dunno, it's just an uphill battle to implement some of these.

I was trying to plug the IRC but I'm really exhausted and I don't want to be the only one plugging it.  The only people we've even got lately are some random 10 year old kid and a few others who came in and left because nobody was coming into IRC.

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None beyond possibly having only a handful of forums left, possibly mostly focus on site questions.
You mean like consolidating a bunch of forums then having a few left for site questions?  Or something else?

As for the aggressive tone; I really don't see how Turner was being aggressive, just disagreeing about certain things and questioning things here and there.

I'm going to put out there that all of us are appreciative of the time and effort put into the site yet at the same time I don't think Turner is trying to be toxic or kill it or anything.  I'm kind of baffled that you think that some of this attitude is toxic - maybe mine you could argue but Turner's is not.  I don't even see the aggressive tone in there anywhere.



Also, while I don't really agree with wiping out the site, if we're going to suggest an overhaul why not just make an "archives" section for a bunch of pages if our focus is shifted away from content?  Just a form of consolidation.  That way we can still keep the pages and refer to them and prevent clutter or shifting from the interactive focus.
Title: Re: Rules
Post by: Joeno on December 28, 2015, 09:25
Is the site news ever going to be updated or is that basically out of the question now? Should we bother thinking about ways to improve the site news or can we consider that completely out of bounds?

Improving site news does not feel like the way to go at this point, as other places get there faster, any submission feature could help but would slow it down, and this page (http://pkmn.net/?action=news&page=submitnews) doesn't seem to stand out anyway. It feels less productive to focus on that anyway.

In general, based on the past seven or eight years struggling with that (and with news and content it's been at least that long), things that rely on people doing a lot of work are less likely to make it. Crowd source in a sustainable way - which is hard for news when there's nobody who feels you can provide it.

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How much are you willing to work with us or give us permission in creating PKMN.NET presences over the internet?

I'd like two things: First, a plan. What are you going to do with it and how are you going to do it.
Second, the right person. I don't really want to hand it over to the first person who comes along and I'd want to make sure some cohesion can be maintained. We'd ideally form a new team around it (we have the custom CMS, my permission management can be insanely granular), but it needs the right people to do it who'll keep them up.

I hope IRC is a decent enough example of that. Muhed stepped up to register it and keep that running, we had a conversation about it and it has been running fine ever since. It hasn't happened for these others though.

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an official tumblr or subreddit?

On these two:

Tumblr looks easy enough to integrate, so could be worthwhile to add if there's a further plan for it (what, why etc)

A subreddit is one I am less sure about. To be honest - I'm not sure what the point is. It seems to me that a second discussion forum is redundant and possibly damaging when you're trying to grow it. If there are good reasons the other way I'm willing to listen to them.

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a PKMN.NET twitch or YouTube stream. Is this doable?

I don't see an issue with these.

For some of these, if you're not sure what to do with them quite yet, try making an unofficial <thing> and we can switch it to be official when it becomes clearer. Not to say it can't be official straight away, but it might help ramp things up.

The issue is, I like all of these ideas, but nobody's stepped up and made anything consistent.

This is, by the way, the main reason 'more content' (in whatever way) doesn't feel like the best way to go, and feature that can bypass some of that (crowd sourced without needing moderation) is a better direction to look into.

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You mean like consolidating a bunch of forums then having a few left for site questions?  Or something else?

Possibly. I haven't decided on anything yet. At least reduce the number. Perhaps a set of three (Pokemon - site - other stuff). Perhaps a few more (Pokemon games - anime - other pokemon - site - other stuff). The nuclear option would be site questions/updates only, without any community support.
Title: Re: Rules
Post by: The name master on December 28, 2015, 10:39
And make the name rater thing a sub board that allows users to rate the nicknames without getting too crazy.
That's exactly what I'm doing now I rate loads of terrible nicknames and say they're terrible
without getting too crazy.
That's impossible when I'm around!
Title: Re: Rules
Post by: Joeno on December 28, 2015, 11:04
This bit needed some thinking...

As for the aggressive tone; I really don't see how Turner was being aggressive, just disagreeing about certain things and questioning things here and there.

Then that's your entire reason the site died.

I don't think I need to say much to remind you of the long discussions/debates/arguments/flame wars we've had here before. I think you know just as well that you and Turner were on the other side to us on a lot of the issues there.

That caused a lot of struggle. We care enough about the site that it affected us personally and got into other things. Even now, when Mulholland saw Turner posting, he sighed and wished I just ignored everything. I don't want to, because it won't make things better, but I'm certainly still getting anxious about it. Even now, seeing those posts brings back the attacks.

The other admins lost interest and didn't want to deal with the s**tfest that's this part of the community anymore - the part that sometimes feels like it's dominating now. My thought was to f**k it all, ignore the community and leave it to do whatever - die or become one I don't want to engage with too much - and focus on my own things. It seems like I've become the only one to persevere and step in occasionally.

This isn't just admins, by the way. A more recent-ish (few years ago) popular feature ended as well because the person doing it thought the community had gotten toxic and didn't want anything to do with it anymore.

You may see the posting styles as normal, for me they come across as very abrasive and somewhat trolling. They're not a tone I care to engage in when I'm trying to have fun with a hobby. And while I don't want to kill off the community, if I feel apprehensive interacting with something I enjoy doing, then I won't do much at all.

It is also not the tone the other people who helped create the site will like. It's not a site for trolling or long arguments. We want to be a friendlier place than that. And my choice here is to let a community be that I don't like, but won't do much to support either, or remove the community and let it at least accomplish some of the goals for me. Or try to change things, but I feel too much resistance to that right now.

You may not like this. You may disagree this is the wrong response. You may feel I need to grow a thicker skin or anything. The very real effect is that I want to just say "screw it, we'll close the forums and let them sort out what else they do.". That would be the bad decision to take, but it's still one I'm considering.

But in short, you may feel the tone is fine and acceptable, and should be allowed. For the site, it would have been better if we'd seen less of it five years ago and a bit more support instead.

Until then, I need something precise and workable to do things, as I honestly don't feel there are people I would happily hand over responsibilities to without being really careful. IRC was the one recently succesful change, but it's going to take time.
Title: Re: Rules
Post by: Turner on December 28, 2015, 16:47
Right, first of all lets not start breaking the rules in a thread about not breaking the rules, there's only so much irony I can take in one day.

Then that's your entire reason the site died.

I don't think I need to say much to remind you of the long discussions/debates/arguments/flame wars we've had here before. I think you know just as well that you and Turner were on the other side to us on a lot of the issues there.

That caused a lot of struggle. We care enough about the site that it affected us personally and got into other things. Even now, when Mulholland saw Turner posting, he sighed and wished I just ignored everything. I don't want to, because it won't make things better, but I'm certainly still getting anxious about it. Even now, seeing those posts brings back the attacks.

The other admins lost interest and didn't want to deal with the redacted that's this part of the community anymore - the part that sometimes feels like it's dominating now. My thought was to redacted it all, ignore the community and leave it to do whatever - die or become one I don't want to engage with too much - and focus on my own things. It seems like I've become the only one to persevere and step in occasionally.

This isn't just admins, by the way. A more recent-ish (few years ago) popular feature ended as well because the person doing it thought the community had gotten toxic and didn't want anything to do with it anymore.

I already said before, everyone on this site has been involved with drama. You can throw the blame at the community for the site's inactivity if you want, but you're forgetting that a lot of the most active members of the community equally quit because of your toxic attitude and I still have the screenshots of the posts (Many of which you deleted) to prove it.

People in glass forums shouldn't throw stones, so let's not start now shall we? I don't care if you don't like me, you're not the first and you won't be the last. I just want this place to be better and more active - I want change and I don't care what form it takes, you can't threaten me with closing the forum - I accept that as change too. But if you want this place to turn over a new leaf and for the community to evolve into something new and fresh then we have the same goal. On with the show:


First of all, PKMN.NET subreddit. I'm inclined to agree, seems pointless and will only pull discussion away from the forums. We can throw that idea away.

PKMN.NET tumblr. If you're looking for a specific point, you probably won't find one. Unless you're a business, tumblr is generally a pointless platform. However, we have a lot of active members here who use tumblr who I'm sure would be more than happy to run a Pokemon related sideblog (If they don't already). tumblr would be a good place to feature fanart posted on the forum and works both ways at getting people to get involved on the forum.

The most important thing to keep in mind with a PKMN.NET tumblr is that it fits with the general tone of tumblr. It will have to be ran in very much a humorous vein with a lot of freedom to reblog anything Pokemon or PKMN.NET related. What that means is no hard rules on only posting content from PKMN.NET. As a rule I would say as long as it's Pokemon or PKMN.NET related and not NSFW it should be allowed. Nobody wants to follow a sterile, humourless tumblr ran like a business, give it to sylar, xhanatos, Shaymin or any of those active tumblr users and let them run free with it.

PKMN.NET YouTube. As much as I would love to see this be a reality, I'm going to strongly advise against doing this for the sake of future arguments and upkeep of the channel. Editing videos and getting a format going for YouTube is extremely difficult. I have my own channel and I do stuff for other people's channels and I'm certainly not going to spend more time on another channel.

To answer Del's question earlier, yes you can make money from YouTube. 1 Million views is equal to £300-£1000 depending on who you're partnered with and how you're monetizing your videos. I don't expect any PKMN.NET videos to ever reach a million views, but if the videos are monetized then the question of who gets the money will come up and it will most likely get ugly.

PKMN.NET Twitch in my opinion is a much better option, at least to test the water. There are a bunch of consoles on the market that can stream directly into Twitch and the sharing of the stream key is a pretty decent way of managing who streams where. It also means that if someone goes astray then whoever has the login for the main PKMN.NET account (Probably Joeno and someone else, I nominate Del) can revoke/change the key. It's a lot easier to stream through Twitch and also doesn't require post-production. Twitch is also a lot more difficult to monetize, so that should keep those issues to a minimum.

PKMN.NET twitter in my opinion has great potential. Firstly because it already exists, secondly because almost everyone knows how to use it and can manage it from their phone and thirdly because it's a good place for someone to test their mettle at keeping up to date with Pokemon news if they think they've got what it takes to update the news on the main site. Not only that, it shouldn't be too difficult to put the feed directly on the homepage to make the site look a bit more active on first visit.

Socially speaking, every other fansite has its own twitter. It'd be nice to use it as an opportunity to get on good terms with some of them, I don't think we should shy away from reblogging the odd blocked or Pokebeach tweet.

Does anyone else have any suggestions to add to this or nominations as to who would be best for each of them?
Title: Re: Rules
Post by: Lord Raven on December 28, 2015, 21:26
I wouldn't mind consolidating the boards myself.  Just a rough outline of what could work I guess;

This subsection would be titled "Site Discussion"
- At the top is Updates/Announcements
- PKMN.NET Questions/Suggestions would be the current board titled PKMN.NET.
- Say Hello would be next

This subsection of the forum could just be called "General Pokemon"
- General Pokemon Discussion stays, could call it General Discussion and have it focus more on discussion that doesn't fit with Pokemon gaming or anime.
- Merge all Pokemon anime boards into a single board.
- Merge Gens 1-5 with Games General and just about every other game.  This could just be called "Games General" and would discuss every game outside of it.  That way it's also less hassle to move threads around.
EDIT:  Alternative idea is to that Gens 1-5 are kept as is right now ("older main games" is the current title), and include a category for spinoffs.  The issue is that stuff like Colo/XD/PBR have...  2 topics in them and don't seem to deserve their own board.
- Keep a board titled "Generation 6" and keep that specific to X/Y/OR/AS (with Z included) just so we can have more specific discussion with the most recent games.
EDIT:
- Team Building and instead calling it "Competitive Battling"
- Online stuff (we don't need a sub board for this)

This section would be titled "Miscellaneous."
- Role Play and Forum Games could stay where they are, and we could stop having Forum Games as a subforum of Role Play.
- Merge Art together.
- Keep Gaming on its own
- Merge all the media boards to be one single media board instead of a bunch of subforums.
- Random Randomness
- Serious Discussion/Debates, and I think Serious Discussion would be better because you could post something serious in there that isn't necessarily a debate.  Just a forum where there's less quantity.

I don't think Miscellaneous really needs much consolidation.

Re:  most recent post about tone.

I honestly believe that all sides were at fault there, our side (well mine) from not stating the problem very well and trying to attack other things and the other side for not really addressing it.  All of us have also done and said things we regret a bit.

Now that I've gotten that out of the way, I'm going to say that I don't really look at things you post and see this whole thing of "Joeno is a cold and stubborn asshole" anymore, I see more of a "Joeno is a decent guy." I also think 6 years ago was a long chain of misunderstandings that became volatile because we all had something we wanted and didn't feel there was listening - just the guy who wants to get the last word or get the louder voice in.  At the risk of psychoanalysis I feel like it's really easy to get anxious when it's reminiscent of those times, because while we all wanted something to change we also basically kept it at wanting what we wanted, and not wanting what was good for the community.  That was toxic from all sides, including mine, and I really wish I could go back to my 15-17 year old self and strangle him for more than a few reasons but I'm 23 now and that isn't gonna help anything.  At the same time I also wish that there was more acknowledgement that there were issues behind how the admins did things, but I really don't wanna go into those issues because I want to bury the hatchet with all that, because that won't help us at all moving forward.

In some ways I feel like you're remembering that more than anything.  Everything I've read from Turner isn't him trying intentionally to be contrarian, it's just the way he words things, and everything I've read from him wasn't particularly abrasive unless you had some preconception of him.  He's not really personally attacking you and he's just trying to get a clearer idea of what is going on, and he's also listening to you as well.  We've all got an open mind here and the same goal, and yeah everyone's got tone issues, but I Turner's isn't really line crossingly abrasive and he's being relatively constructive.  I just feel like parts of your post read as "groan, Turner and Raven are malcontented again" but you also said you're trying to grin and bear it to help this place out so I can guarantee you that all of us are in perfect understanding that you're agreeing with us.

That's all I gotta say.  Sorry if it's incoherent.
Title: Re: Rules
Post by: SirBlaziken on December 28, 2015, 23:00
Joeno, may I comment that while I was not on the site to see the less than great parts of your history with Muhed and Turner, that I can see how you think Turner is in a way attacking, and the obvious with Muhed that has sparked many arguments (me being in the middle of several), I don't think that Turner is intentionally trying to attack you and Muhed the same way. This is just the opinion of an outsider and feel free to take it with a grain of salt, but they really are just trying to help how they can from how I see it. Once again, you don't have to agree with me, just want to give my opinion on that.

Muhed, the way you want to regroup the boards seems fine to me, but we'll have to come up with a tag or something to tell forum games from the roleplaying threads. That's my only gripe on that matter.

Turner, I could play some games like Smash (DS only here), XY, and ORAS over streams with people, I just can't actually show my face because I don't have the equipment to do so. Say Muhed wanted to fight people in Smash (DS) and stream the battle(s), I could fight and be a part of that, I just can't actually be on the stream i.e. talking and showing my face and stuff like that.

There's my opinion, do with it what you wish.
Title: Re: Rules
Post by: Lord Raven on December 28, 2015, 23:26
Quote
tag or something to tell forum games from the roleplaying threads.
By making it its own forum as opposed to a subforum?  It's pretty straightforward.
Title: Re: Rules
Post by: SirBlaziken on December 28, 2015, 23:29
Right, I misread that. So if the forums are reorganized like that, I have no complaints.
Title: Re: Rules
Post by: The Shrub Dragon on December 28, 2015, 23:39
honestly i'm not massive on the idea of a pkmn dot net tumblr.  if i'm understanding right we're trying to promote the site as a community as opposed to a content hub and i just don't think anyone on tumblr would care if that makes any sense?? like, sure, we could post fanart and be funny and add a link to pkmn dot net at the bottom of every post but i just don't think we could do anything with it; other people already have news etc covered and what could we do as a community?? pick on people's posts and make fun of them??? i mean sure i'd be up for doing that but i don't think too many other people would love it.


twitter feels like it could do everything we'd use tumblr for without all the excess baggage and certainly more professionally and succinctly



twitch feels like a very good idea, especially considering the fact that we've already got a few users who are fairly well established on twitch and could advertise etc
Title: Re: Rules
Post by: Turner on December 29, 2015, 00:40
Turner, I could play some games like Smash (DS only here), XY, and ORAS over streams with people, I just can't actually show my face because I don't have the equipment to do so. Say Muhed wanted to fight people in Smash (DS) and stream the battle(s), I could fight and be a part of that, I just can't actually be on the stream i.e. talking and showing my face and stuff like that.

Talking isn't really necessary, showing your face is definitely not necessary. One thing you need to know if you're streaming DS/3DS games is that buying a capture card is pretty much your only way of doing it if you want it to look good. I haven't looked into the normal DS, but the 3DS basically requires a hardware mod to be able to do it. There's an American company who can fit your 3DS with a built-in capture device so you can directly record the screen (This will remove some other features from the 3DS too) for a price.

Aside from that, the only other option is either emulation or recording the screen directly with a tripod and various other mounts, though this ends up looking pretty bad almost all of the time because it's very hard to play whilst keeping everything still and getting a good enough amount of light on the screen without it reflecting off and distorting the image. A good YouTube video on how to do this can be found Here (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wDANuERULRc).

It does kind of suck, especially as the PS4 has twitch streaming built directly in. It's easier on the Wii U, you just need to buy an HDMI capture card for your computer.

honestly i'm not massive on the idea of a pkmn dot net tumblr.  if i'm understanding right we're trying to promote the site as a community as opposed to a content hub and i just don't think anyone on tumblr would care if that makes any sense?? like, sure, we could post fanart and be funny and add a link to pkmn dot net at the bottom of every post but i just don't think we could do anything with it; other people already have news etc covered and what could we do as a community?? pick on people's posts and make fun of them??? i mean sure i'd be up for doing that but i don't think too many other people would love it.

twitter feels like it could do everything we'd use tumblr for without all the excess baggage and certainly more professionally and succinctly

Well, when it comes to tumblr - that's kind of the point. We're not trying to professionally market a brand, we're just trying to stretch the community more. I'm not really into the idea of watermarking posts with 'PKMN.NET' or anything like that, it wouldn't feel natural for it to be a kind of corporate "Let's make this viral!" deal, nobody wants that on their dash.

It's just social media 101 really; know your platform. The way you're going to engage and the tone of voice you're going to use on twitter will be completely different from how you do it on tumblr, which is why I'd personally recommend separate people managing either one. Give them the freedom to do what they want with it (within reason) - reblog other people's art, post gifs, make gifsets...whatever. As long as it's called something like pkmndotnet.tumblr.com and has a link on the main page people will get curious and check it out, especially if you reblog their art.

Look at the tumblr accounts of people on here who have posted it in their signature and compare it to say, James (Psythor)'s twitter (https://twitter.com/Psythor). That difference in content, direction and tone of voice is pretty much what I'm getting at. We shouldn't pretend to be anything that we're not, just a handful of forum people trying to stretch the community in different directions.

PS I actually kind of like the idea of featuring forum posts on the tumblr account, as long as whoever is running it picks the posts carefully as to not invoke a flamewar. I think it could be pretty funny.
Title: Re: Rules
Post by: Kpyna on December 29, 2015, 01:07
Just wanted to say I DEFINITELY agree with consolidating the boards. It looks pretty bad when you go through the main forums and there's very little activity, and I think making it short and sweet would help since there's a lot of pokemon games and almost nobody is interested in the older ones still.
Title: Re: Rules
Post by: SirBlaziken on December 29, 2015, 01:15
My thing is I also don't have money or the knowhow to be able to stream, i'd prefer that others run it and I just make appearances on it sometimes if it's all the same to everyone. As for what you want with the tumblr about Turner, that seems about right, and a poking a little fun should be allowed as long as it's not meant to be just downright cruel or start a flamewar between members.
Title: Re: Rules
Post by: Del on December 29, 2015, 02:15
On the topic of the stream, are we going to limit it to just Pokémon content? Would we restrict emulated content? All of this would factor in pretty heavily to who could/would be involved. I'd be able to stream absolutely nothing if we went Pokémon only/no emu, for example.

3DS Capture Cards are prohibitively expensive for a casual streamer, I don't think DS is much better, and most of the older games run on consoles that don't use HDMI I think? I'm pretty sure my Capture Card is HDMI only.

Opening it up to non-Pokémon content makes the range of content streamable much higher because it makes it possible for pretty much anyone to stream random PC games, whether they're high spec or low spec and such.

Without emulation, I think we'd see a really really low turnout for Pokémon content though. Someone who's careful can make it pretty easy to hide that they're emulating stuff on streams, but I understand if you'd still be hesitant to allow it I guess.

Beyond that I'd be happy to help organise it and help people get up and running if they wanted to be involved, I've streamed as a primary hobby since like 2009 so I have a fairly decent understanding of it and the software involved and what not. I've not got any sure fire tips or anything for making the stream popular, I've always just streamed to a small community so I've never had to try and market myself or anything, but there are a few things I've picked up from watching people over the years. Consistent schedule, good chat interaction, that kind of stuff.
Title: Re: Rules
Post by: Turner on December 29, 2015, 02:26
I definitely agree we should open up the streaming to non-Pokemon games too. There are so many games where Pokemon feature anyway, like Smash and it's super easy to stream through the PS4 so it'd be wasted potential not to stream FF or Persona or something. I think as long as we're not streaming 18+ games like GTA I don't see an issue with it.

I would say it's probably better to avoid streaming ROM hacks though, as the forums prohibit their discussion and it could give new people the wrong idea.

Not that I think anyone would do it, but don't stream any kind of video either. No anime streams and especially no Pokemon episodes for obvious copyright reasons.
Title: Re: Rules
Post by: Lord Raven on December 29, 2015, 02:26
I have a PS4 to stream off of; sadly there's no Pokemon games there.

It'll encourage me to mess around with the FF15 demo, FF Type-0 and maybe some other games that you guys can watch me suck at.


Also even with GTA if we have some sort of advisory warning we could get away with it.  Although, GTAV isn't particularly lewd after the beginning.  We can still talk about GTAV on the forums anyway..
Title: Re: Rules
Post by: Del on December 29, 2015, 02:29
I would say it's probably better to avoid streaming ROM hacks though, as the forums prohibit their discussion and it could give new people the wrong idea.
ROM hacks specifically, or all emulation? Again, without emulation altogether I expect there to be very little Pokémon content. But I understand and agree with what you've said. It's up to Joeno at the end of the day I guess.

Not that I think anyone would do it, but don't stream any kind of video either. No anime streams and especially no Pokemon episodes for obvious copyright reasons.
This is against Twitch terms of service anyway I'm pretty sure so the channel would just end up closed if people did this, so yeah, please don't do this.
Title: Re: Rules
Post by: lets all go out for some frosty chocolate milkshakes on December 29, 2015, 04:22
re: puk tumblr

- tumblr accounts can be run by more than one person, you can get like a bunch of accounts able to share it so to speak? im not too particular on the details but i do know there is some thing where multiple people can run one so choosing one person for it aint neccessary. maybe just for getting it off the ground but yeh
- yahoo (who owns tumblr currently, altho david karp still has a stake in it afaik) has been doing a bit badly lately and they like to randomly cull things they own sometimes. so treat it as a transient thing. im not doomsaying here but given that yahoo is struggling to decide what to do with its stake in alibaba and how marissa mayer is looking like she's gonna be gettin the Steve Ballmer Boot soon just dont be Massively Shocked if tumblr evaporates in about a year.



THAT SAID given how ive seen Tumblrs Of Sites, what the tumblr should be for i reckon more a kind of Showcase of stuff going on the forums, art by users, tourney results/video links, stream clips (with click thru to go to topics or w/e). Representative Tumblrs are often meant to be eye-candy bait to clickthru to further links or elsewhere. while representing the community or w/e is good its also important for a bit of Intrigue to catch newcomers imo.

im a bit iffy on the "showcase a post" cos "funy post" may cause a bit of awkwardness specially if its at the expense of a kind of vunerable user emotionally/socially due to how you can't undelete someone elses reblog once its done. idk im just bein hippy counsellor here a bit i guess and also given people brought up Past Beefs as a reason for why stuff has gone a bit stale its probably best to steer away from progenitors of that sort of thing??? idk i might be blowing it out of proportion but i think its just a bit Risky is all. just me 2 centimos   


tumblrs representing sites presences are often Submission Driven which fits in well with this, there could also be a (with their permission, like i wouldn't want mine on there cos i would have a sperg meltdown, given previous tumblr events im just laying low for now) blogroll of users from puk with their tumblrs. 





also idk about others but i kinda see the twitter acting as a more fluid/snippy Puk News kind of thing????? like "quick shout out remember the UU tournament is this thursday" "sprite fart clap club this week" "we're all going to pick marth and force shinyblaziken to main with kirby" kind of thing. kind of like stock ticker tape but for puk events, if the community ever gets to the point where there are Regular Things going on

i dont care for streams and lets plays are the worst thing ever personally but given all the Kids are into it these days it seems like the More Activity Orientated Central idea with the "puk brand" stamped onto it. with the social media accounts acting as auxilliary and occasional newscaster to them, eye em haich oh.


well that was my carepost about puk tumblrs, thanks for reading.
Title: Re: Rules
Post by: the bread dragon on December 29, 2015, 04:34
its worth mentioning you can do the whole deal with multiple people on a twitter account as well, so yeah one single person doesn't need to run it
Title: Re: Rules
Post by: SirBlaziken on December 29, 2015, 18:53
If people need replays of smash battles or pokemon battles (on DS), I can send them out to the right people to get them up on the internet somehow. Also, I'm actually not bad with kirby, making me play as olimar/alph would be a real punishment.
Title: Re: Rules
Post by: Turner on December 29, 2015, 22:15
im a bit iffy on the "showcase a post" cos "funy post" may cause a bit of awkwardness specially if its at the expense of a kind of vunerable user emotionally/socially due to how you can't undelete someone elses reblog once its done. idk im just bein hippy counsellor here a bit i guess and also given people brought up Past Beefs as a reason for why stuff has gone a bit stale its probably best to steer away from progenitors of that sort of thing??? idk i might be blowing it out of proportion but i think its just a bit Risky is all. just me 2 centimos   

Yeah I mean, we'd just have to trust whoever runs it not to be like that. I know there are people on the forum with the common sense who could manage it, poking fun at posts is a fun idea and has actually been done before here (Forum Burp). I'm sure whoever gets elected would be smart enough to dip their toe in the water and gradually build up to stuff like that.

ROM hacks specifically, or all emulation? Again, without emulation altogether I expect there to be very little Pokémon content.

I think whoever streams should observe Twitch's acceptable usage policy and not stream themselves breaking the law of their respective country, but as long as they're only streaming original game content there's no proper way of telling if a game is being emulated or ran through a capture card so it's pointless to think about or police.
Title: Re: Rules
Post by: Spriter on December 30, 2015, 16:57
Re: spriting and writing, I can't guarantee it but maybe I could try and dip my toes back in spriting. As for writing, I'm pretty fond of it, so I could potentially submit some short stories. I've seen plenty of interesting threads elsewhere that could merit posting here (e.g. word crawls, maybe even certain challenges that I could attempt, and post my progress in a thread?).

I have something of an idea for Music, sorta like the radio where you have a song of the week or something -- though we already have threads concerning current favourite songs and what you're listening to. Just something for thought.

Not gonna lie anything I say will probably fall flat after 2 weeks when college gets more intense, but I just thought I would brainstorm a couple of things.
Title: Re: Rules
Post by: SirBlaziken on December 30, 2015, 18:58
I am thinking about restarting my Ruby Nuzlocke, or maybe even one with Colosseum if I can get comfortable with it. My writing style for some reason fell flat when I tried to make a story of it last time, so if someone else wants to write it and make less vanilla I can give you the details of what happened as long as they can make posts in a timely manner. If not i'll just post what happened, and ask for nicknames, moves and the like.
Title: Re: Rules
Post by: Turner on January 01, 2016, 22:13
I know some people have shared other ideas above which is cool, but we'll stick to the basics first. Before we go slightly off base, it's probably a good idea to work out what our boundaries are.In other words, we summon Joeno and see what he'll let us do.

Joeno; Revival of the PKMN.NET twitter account, a PKMN.NET tumblr account and a PKMN.NET Twitch account.

Which of these would you be comfortable with community members here running and under what conditions? Let's assume in advance that whoever is elected to manage these are the ideal candidates, do you approve of these as ideas in principle and do you have any guidelines, rules or input that you would like to add beforehand?

My main question is about authentication. I'm guessing you will want to have the accounts created using an email address that you ultimately manage so you have overreaching control should things go awry. Twitch works basically on the same principle but you can dish out stream keys (Authentication strings) for other people to stream to the same channel. If you have any questions or scenarios you think might be problematic, we'll look into them and tell you what would happen (Say for example, if 1 person tried streaming while another person was already streaming).

Once we've got everything sorted then I guess we can start looking into electing the best possible candidates and putting plans into action.
Title: Re: Rules
Post by: Joeno on January 01, 2016, 23:54
In terms of ruels, the vague 'stay with the spirit of the site' is the main thing - excessive swearing would be an obvious example, but beyond that we'd see where it goes. There's also the intentionally vague "don't bring the site in disrepute" - but that'd go against the goal of this project anyway - and "don't land us in legal trouble" - Twitter links to warez sites wouldn't do anyone any good.

Beyond that, selecting the right person should help, people can always check with me and we can always course correct down the line.

Twitter: I need to fix an error because it hasn't been touched for a while ("The Twitter REST API v1 is no longer active. Please migrate to API v1.1.") and we can allow simple posting automatically. Beyond that I don't know for sure what the access restrictions are that are available, but also what you'd want to do with it. It looks like I'd able to share Twitter account access without sharing access.

For setting up other accounts, I can always set up an email forwarder that people use to register through. They can set it up, but it'd be easy to move control of that address around as needed. It looks like group blogs are a thing on Tumblr though, so that'd be an option to explore.

It might be a good idea to soft launch the Tumblr blog - spend a few weeks posting without properly announcing it, both so I can set up any integration on my end and so you can work out what posts work/are easy to do and whether certain posts are appropriate.
Title: Re: Rules
Post by: Del on January 02, 2016, 00:55
Alright, well I'm happy to put my name forward to help organise, run and broadcast on a potential Twitch stream then. I'm fairly well accustomed to Twitch, so I think I'd be able to answer any questions people may have, if anyone has any.

Twitch works basically on the same principle but you can dish out stream keys (Authentication strings) for other people to stream to the same channel. If you have any questions or scenarios you think might be problematic, we'll look into them and tell you what would happen (Say for example, if 1 person tried streaming while another person was already streaming).
In this example, the second person to go live would become the current streamer, and the first would be taken offline. To work around this we'd have to either establish a set schedule, or streamers would make sure to check the channel before going live to ensure there wasn't a current stream they would be interrupting.
Title: Re: Rules
Post by: Turner on January 03, 2016, 22:46
A soft launch of tumblr definitely makes sense, so I think it'd be a good idea if we could get started on arranging people to manage it right away if we're going to leave it some time to gather steam. I'll create a separate thread for that now.

As for the twitter account, even if automatic posting isn't an option just yet, how about nominating someone to help soft launch that too? All we need them to do for now is to retweet Pokemon-related news or anything viral that happens to be Pokemon related (E.G Twitch plays Pokemon). I'd also recommend getting them to follow Ken Sugimori and some of the other Game Freak staff as they often tweet similar things; fanart they've drawn, Pokemon-related food they're eating and so on. You don't need to know any Japanese for it and if in doubt, don't retweet it - it'd only be to grow the account so that when it's official there's enough content to interest people.

Del (or anyone who wants to answer), with regards to Twitch - What would you say is a good average time for a stream to last? How long do you typically watch a stream for before it gets boring? I'm thinking in terms of time-slots here, we don't want people to be spending ages streaming if we end up with a lot of people volunteering themselves, but obviously an hour might not be long enough to be enjoyable either.
Title: Re: Rules
Post by: Del on January 03, 2016, 23:20
it depends on the streamer and game really? i've sat and watched people stream for 10 hours before, and sometimes i'm bored after half an hour. whenever I stream, I tend to stream for somewhere between 1-5 hours i'd say? 1-2 hours would probably be enough for streams here at first at least, especially for newer streamers, and maybe work our way to to 3-4 if viewers are interested and streamers feel up to it. it's a little more tiring than you'd expect it to be, so i wouldn't expect anyone to jump straight into 3-4 hours.
Title: Re: Rules
Post by: sans the skeleton on January 04, 2016, 20:08
Also, regarding tumblr, you could theoretically have months worth of posts ready to post - a queue holds up to about 300 at a time, and you can set it to post once a day or up to 24 or so per day. it lets you schedule posts as well, which is helpful for important dates (eg christmas or a anniversary of a game release). The tumblr blog needs to be a secondary blog, though, to access additional features that wouldn't be accessible otherwise. So if Joeno wanted to have it on his account, he'd have to have a primary for himself first, and then one for Pkmn.net, to get to admin position.

However, the way tumblr works is that to get into the inbox and for some posts, the people chosen to run the blog also need admin. I don't think they can close the blog or kick admins out, but it's been a while since I've ran a secondary blog (my homestuck blog is a primary) so, uh. Yeah.
Title: Re: Rules
Post by: Turner on January 05, 2016, 00:00
Also, regarding tumblr, you could theoretically have months worth of posts ready to post - a queue holds up to about 300 at a time, and you can set it to post once a day or up to 24 or so per day. it lets you schedule posts as well, which is helpful for important dates (eg christmas or a anniversary of a game release). The tumblr blog needs to be a secondary blog, though, to access additional features that wouldn't be accessible otherwise. So if Joeno wanted to have it on his account, he'd have to have a primary for himself first, and then one for Pkmn.net, to get to admin position.

However, the way tumblr works is that to get into the inbox and for some posts, the people chosen to run the blog also need admin. I don't think they can close the blog or kick admins out, but it's been a while since I've ran a secondary blog (my homestuck blog is a primary) so, uh. Yeah.

Yeah, it's actually ideal having it set up that way too as it means Joeno still maintains control over the primary and we don't have to throw around passwords too much and end up with a situation where someone tries to lock down the whole account.
Title: Re: Rules
Post by: sans the skeleton on January 05, 2016, 00:30
Yeah, it's actually ideal having it set up that way too as it means Joeno still maintains control over the primary and we don't have to throw around passwords too much and end up with a situation where someone tries to lock down the whole account.
yup, that was the general idea i was getting at. as long as the primary's taken care of and isn't deleted, it should be even more secure. the problem arises if the primary gets taken out/hacked into or if anyone who is set as admin starts messing with the settings, i think. i'd have to look more into the settings before i can confirm if anyone set as admin cal delete the blog. i know admins can demote the mods at least, it's mostly just needed to answer messages in the askbox i think.