Topic: Idea to boost activity

[the bread dragon]

^you beat me to the name rater point, thats where probably a good half of our members come from and if you cant submit anything than what is the point

[Spriter]

I'm not about to say these ideas are easy to implement or non-controversial but in my opinion I think the best things for this community/site would be as follows:

1) Get rid of the "What's making you sad/happy/confused/hungry/angry/whatever" threads. The rest of Random Randomness is basically irrelevant with these because it discourages people to make threads about everyday chit-chat and goings on in their life as most of them fit into those threads instead. What then happens is RR becomes a dumping ground for "le cheese!!!"-tier threads that I personally feel is a waste of time contributing to and probably won't give outsiders a great opinion of the community.

I'm not trying to say no fun allowed or anything like that, but it seems like 90% of posts in RR are the equivalent of either facebook status updates, or topics that are so 'random' they give no incentive to post. If we got rid of the former then it might encourage people to make slightly more inclusive chit-chat threads instead.

I disagree here. For one thing, getting rid of the sad thread is pretty...silly. Would anyone's threads about people's individual antics / problems be any better? The sad thread / annoying thread are safe spots to vent about problems, and it'd be better to keep them instead of littering RR with topics like "I'm Happy Because I Just Had Pizza!" or "I Hate People" (though the latter sounds pretty interesting, bad example!). Without those threads, RR wouldn't be as active.

[Joeno]

Let's go ahead and say there won't be a rewrite of any of the site's systems. The time isn't there, the will isn't there, and implementing a different system isn't trivial.

If you want to point at current (old) staff having to do things, you are out of luck at this point.

[lets all go out for some frosty chocolate milkshakes]

Don't say this; I'd rather hear ideas than none at all.

apologies, im still not v good at the whole "say stuff w/o immolating oneself in the process", its something im working on though cos dang im aware that its irritating as all heck

1) Get rid of the "What's making you sad/happy/confused/hungry/angry/whatever" threads. The rest of Random Randomness is basically irrelevant with these because it discourages people to make threads about everyday chit-chat and goings on in their life as most of them fit into those threads instead. What then happens is RR becomes a dumping ground for "le cheese!!!"-tier threads that I personally feel is a waste of time contributing to and probably won't give outsiders a great opinion of the community.

this'd be a perfect way to kill activity tbh,

given that a lot of people on the site are Socially Awkward in conventional senses, some of them aren't willing to go through the Social Effort that making a new topic entails, and those that do only get about two or three replies, i.e. someones "i only thought this happenedi n animes" which was about some, girl problems or something??? idk

the "whats ____ing you now?" topics are a nice ice-breaker for a lot of awkward nerds here and a way to just sorta say something w/o thinking too hard about it  - half of keeping activity going is Retention Of Users, and killing a space where people can drop in and go "blughhh had all of my teeth removed and shoved up my butt, wasn't fun" might not be met with favour for many,
i know that if my "livejournal style" topic home were removed i'd probably just go elsewhere on the internet tbh





i'd like to comment on the name rater thing but i have honestly no idea what the heck it is and i can't seem to figure out what it is either

[Kerou 犠牲]

i'd like to comment on the name rater thing but i have honestly no idea what the heck it is and i can't seem to figure out what it is either

The Name Rater is part of the site which usually draws most of our users

Agreed with the don't get rid of the What's ________ topics; they pretty much keep RR alive

[Kpyna]

In defense of the "right now" topics, I do agree that a lot of the stuff isn't topic-worthy. I would definitely promote that if you notice that you post something in one of those "right now" topics, and if it generates more than, like, 2 replies, maybe you should make a topic. for example, there are probably plenty of people who want to put their own two cents in on a topic like ferguson, for example, but having a lengthy discussion on an unrelated thread isn't the ideal place to do it. however, most of the time when i post stuff, it's about things that are mostly trivial or just don't deserve their own topic (ie. pooping in public toilets)

i just feel like forums in general are mostly getting stomped by facebook and stuff, and we can't expect to be like we were in 2008, just because the internet was much different in 2008. pokemon was much bigger in 2008. iirc, pokemon in general just hasn't been doing as well since black and white's release. we can also probably, like always, expect a boost in activity when r/s/e remakes come out.

[Turner]

^ I think if we're going to get new site news going in regards to Pokémon updates the articles themselves need to implement a conversational approach alongside the commentating system, just a small change in writing style could make a big difference, rather than making it come across completely serious and factual add some light-heartedness, some discursive points and whatnot to get people to comment on them and then hopefully move onto the forums for future discussions. I think too we should link in possible threads to these articles too.

I think also going on what we're strong at (and I know people are busy so please don't take this as a way of "you must drop everything to do this" sort of thing) but Name Rater and Sentret needs updating because the former especially is one of the key ways to bring in new members. Plus, we can add their "opinions" and other topics of discussion as well; plus I know having talked to some of the members on IRC recently that there's still a lot of hype and intrigue behind them.

Yeah it would be nice to link comments to the actual forums themselves, maybe link forum topics to the news article and put comments directly in there. So every time a news article is created it creates a respective thread on the relevant forum which would then have the comments of the article directly in there, which would further justify moderation of comments and would also automatically put non-member commenters in the forums, so they end up being a part of the community by default.

Obviously though, the problem with this is down to SimpleMachines Forum and whether or not this is possible/realistic. Most of the things with the site are down to Joeno or whoever he authorizes to make changes, I understand he's very much stripped for time so he can't just magic this stuff up for us.

I think though before everything else we just need the site re-hauled which is obviously a mission unto itself. I think without that we're always going to end up in the vicious cycle of requests for content which eventually gets abandoned.

[Joeno]

In the interest of "Yes we can" - implementing reCaptcha was fairly straightforward (and now something I can use again and again), so guest commenting has been enabled.

These are always captcha'd, registering allows you to bypass the captcha. I also need some new comment moderators soon.

[Kerou 犠牲]

These are always captcha'd, registering allows you to bypass the captcha. I also need some new comment moderators soon.

I am more than happy to help with this

[Lord Raven]

In defense of the "right now" topics, I do agree that a lot of the stuff isn't topic-worthy. I would definitely promote that if you notice that you post something in one of those "right now" topics, and if it generates more than, like, 2 replies, maybe you should make a topic. for example, there are probably plenty of people who want to put their own two cents in on a topic like ferguson, for example, but having a lengthy discussion on an unrelated thread isn't the ideal place to do it. however, most of the time when i post stuff, it's about things that are mostly trivial or just don't deserve their own topic (ie. pooping in public toilets)

I think it's more worthy of forum games than Random Randomness, because "What are you Listening to" is there as well.  I'm also going to point out that it does kind of suck activity out of the rest of Random Randomness, because it feels like the other threads get their week of sunshine then it goes back to the "right now" threads

i just feel like forums in general are mostly getting stomped by facebook and stuff, and we can't expect to be like we were in 2008, just because the internet was much different in 2008. pokemon was much bigger in 2008. iirc, pokemon in general just hasn't been doing as well since black and white's release. we can also probably, like always, expect a boost in activity when r/s/e remakes come out.

And I agree but this mentality isn't going to help us boost activity with the userbase we have now.  People are clearly joining and leaving almost as quickly as they joined.  Retaining them somehow in some way is nice, especially considering we have at least 30 consistently active users that can do things.

It's not that I want this to be 2008 again (really 2006-2007 - that's when DP came out and that was crazy enough for us to promote a bunch of gmods/admins) but I also don't want this stupid low "posts in only twitter-like threads" sense of activity.  It's like nobody really wants a discussion here at all, either.  It is really discouraging to people like me who wanted discussion and didn't get it; it's why I don't post as much here myself.

[Turner]

I think also the idea that facebook and twitter have destroyed forums is proving to be less and less true. There was a time from around 2009-2013 where that was true, but it seems like things are moving on again. I'm not saying there's some kind of magical resurgence in forums, but people are looking for alternative places from discussion as interest in social media wanes.

As I said before, you only need to look at the forums of other larger Pokemon sites to see that discussion is alive and well. 4chan's Pokemon board is pretty fast paced - I'd say 5-10 new threads every minute on average. I'm sure Reddit has numerous Pokemon boards which are also active.

PKMN.NET has always been known for the community; people are looking for communities more now than they were in the social media boom; all we need to do is make it easy for people to keep visiting the site, become involved in the community and the rest will fall into place.

Me, Del and I'm not sure who else are now currently comment moderators, plus Joeno has now implemented re-captcha. The re-captcha is removed for anyone with an account which means anonymous posters who find themselves coming back to comment have incentive to join the community. Last night within a couple of hours the comment moderators cleaned out the comment approval queue with a backlog of 800 comments - so the manpower is there.

If we look at a site like slashdot, the news stories are almost always reader-submitted and don't differ greatly in writing style. If we can spread the workload amongst a group of trusted content moderators, we can get a group of people who Joeno feels are capable of accepting submitted news articles and/or rewriting them to fit the tone of the site if necessary. That way users can submit news or interest items themselves and the moderators can approve/disapprove it before it ends up on the site; this would be much faster than tasking 5 people with a solid responsibility to keep on top of Pokemon news and consistently write about them nearly every day but would still ensure the quality doesn't decrease.

[Liam]

Could we at least attempt a trial period where we remove the "what's making you x y z" threads from RR. If we're going to be comparing social medoa to forums then we need to realise that threads which are in the similar mould to updating a FB status are not going to stimulate discussion, which is after all the main draw of a forum.

I have to admit that I wasn't aware of the changes made to commenting, now that I'm aware of it being more accessible I could always contribute some articles or content.

[Lord Raven]

The comment stuff is cool.

I agree with Liam at least in terms of a trial period.  I don't mind being wrong, but I'd like to see if it helps or hurts.

[Joeno]

It doesn't seem worth the risk when it's the sort of change that could semi-permanently deter currently active people from coming here.

For a valid measurement you'd need clear indicators of success or failure anyway. What would you expect the test to change, other than a general and vague "the discussion improves"?

[Kpyna]

 We can just see if topic creation goes up, since as I pointed out, there's some stuff that can be made into a topic in there. I mean, this isn't the first time that a bunch of people have said to get rid of those topics. I could lock at least my own thread, as it generates the most replies, and then people would still be able to complain in the sad and annoying topics. And I mean, maybe if activity ends up going up in those other two topics and topic creation doesn't really improve, we can draw a conclusion that the threads just attract people that want to say a quick word about themselves and don't care for a conversation about it.