Topic: Rules

[Joeno]

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.

[Turner]

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?

[Lord Raven]

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.

[SirBlaziken]

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.

[Lord Raven]

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.

[SirBlaziken]

Right, I misread that. So if the forums are reorganized like that, I have no complaints.

[The Shrub Dragon]

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

[Turner]

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.

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. 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.

[Kpyna]

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.

[SirBlaziken]

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.

[Del]

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.

[Turner]

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.

[Lord Raven]

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..

[Del]

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.

[lets all go out for some frosty chocolate milkshakes]

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.