General Category > PKMN.NET

So the forums have had less activity

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Lord Raven:
Right, so I'm not here to complain about anything since forums having less activity is something natural.  I just wanted to start a thread so we can bring this to light and we can suggest ways to make this forum have more activity.

For example, like in the debates forum, we could have something to the extent of current events and have a discussion about that over the week.  Probably a daily show sort of thing as well, where someone just makes fun of or picks up on inconsistencies in politics.  Maybe a game review of the day/week thing, where people review a game and discuss it.

A problem that I have myself is that there either aren't interesting enough threads, and when I try to make one that interests me it gets no responses.  People seem to love these "what are you doing right now" threads, which is fine because they're simple but we used to have some pretty good discussions outside of the Pokemon forum.  Just some of my own thoughts; I can suggest everything in the last paragraph to boost activity but not many people will be interested in having a discussion on it.  I haven't talked to many of you guys in a month either, and I want to fix that :/

Richard and Blaziken:
I've noticed this as well, but I'm not sure what we can do to fix it. BW2 will boost forum activity I'm sure, but I think many of the people that made PKMN.net a tight-knit community have left, and there's not much that can be done about that. I do my part and rate teams, since it's pretty much all I'm good for around here, but I can't think anything I'd be actively involved in that would help the community.

I don't think this is entirely the fault of the members of the community, though. There's been a slump in participation from the admins as well. Hell, I submitted a rather lengthy article of content for this site like 7-8 months ago that was never even posted, so I mean... when the higher-ups don't care, and the members don't care... I find it hard to see anything I can do personally.

Kpyna:
i really liked forum burp to be honest, i thought it was really cool. even when we all complained people were making unnecessary posts to try to get in, at least people were making a lot of posts.

a lot of us have gotten older. i don't even really like pokemon anymore, i just stay here because i've been going here since i was 9 and it kind of feels like my home when i'm on the internet. a lot of people don't feel that way though, so when their interest faded, so did they.

i just feel like a lot of people don't post because there isn't a lot to post about. sometimes i get upset that i created the topic "what's making you happy right now", because it has about 450 pages right now, and i feel like people are thinking thats a topic where you post everything that made you happy. or everything that's confusing you. or everything thats making you sad. or everything that's annoying you. those topics when they were created were meant to get out the little things that made you happy, not things that could be a discussion point. i've considered getting rid of mine, but i mean, 98 percent of whats posted in there can't be discussed too much.

 beyond that, there's no real incentives. remember when post count was a big deal? karma was a big deal too, i feel like when karma was around people tried their best to make thoughtful posts. and even forum burp served as an incentive. we don't have pokemole anymore.

 but we also need to draw people in. richard is so right as far as members needed to post things, and admins needing to approve them. when i first signed up here, i remember going on pokemon emerald to try to find out where i could catch a feebas, and then i saw "name rater" and i decided to push a few names through there, except i needed an account so i signed up. about a month later i led myself to the forums. a lot of people had the exact same story as me. nowadays theres not a lot of news posts, and theres not a lot of content posts. the site portion needs tlc as a way to draw people in, so i think that when black and white 2 come out, that should be our plan of attack, to create some new articles there. the more newbies we have coming in, the better.

 also, this part goes out to people who roleplay, everyone who's not really *~in the community~* doesn't really need to bother reading this. don't criticize people who create roleplays that seemingly have no point, or that aren't made 100 percent properly. if nobody's interested, it'll sink down and nobody will join. when you invade the first 4 posts of the topic telling them what they did wrong, nobody is going to join that rp because honestly it's kind of been tainted. just let it get engulfed in the forum, and maybe shoot them a friendly message advising them what to do on their next roleplay. its a lot less confrontational. but some of those roleplays, people will want to join because they tend to be extremely relaxed and open ended. when i first became a member, most role plays were like this:

 "You're a pokemon at a pokemon daycare center! Fill out this application and we'll get to started!"
 No literacy level. No real rules, no real plot. It was a good time.
 "You're a fire pokemon, and we all must unite to defend ourselves from trainers and protect eachother! Here's the form"
 Same thing. That role play reached i believe 45 pages of us just making up what we were doing as we went along.

 Even as the years went on, most popular role plays, even though the more literate player scoffed at them, were more relaxed. I've been wanted to start just a simple one for a while now, and just let everyone who wanted to join join. Lots of roleplays then didn't make it, they were simply looked over, but my favorite roleplays, maybe it was because i was just a kid, were the easy and simple ones. and when 100 percent of our role plays are supposed to be written in novel quality writing, we're not really opening up to new role players. At all. Just let the new guys learn for themselves. I love that we all love high quality writing, but not everyone is as pompous as us guys :p

 I guess this role play thing would have been more relevant a few months ago, because things have improved, but don't make the role play board a board full of elitists. I really think that board is one of the coolest ones for younger folk, let's let them play too. Because I really think that someone who's involved in a role play is more likely to stick around and post elsewhere, since you're waiting for someone to reply to your post. plus newbies have a tendency to post post post, which is great for our activity.

 tl;dr, roleplay, try to be welcoming and newbie friendly :p


 when the new games come out, things will get better, just let's do our best to prepare for it.

Joeno:
On the topic of content - and other things that require staff to do work, such as forum burp - we don't really have the time. All staff works fulltime now, we've got other things going on and we're just not as focused on Pokemon anymore. Some of us focus on our own things (I'm still working on coding things, updating the Pokedex for example) that we enjoy, but we can't really justify spending the time on writing articles - or really even taking the time out to completely HTMLify an article, source images and so on - especially when we also know other places got there faster and have better info.

In fact, we've been working on starting something that matches our interests more closely, but even that runs into the time constraints we have.

Right now though, it's basically how life worked out, these things happen to forums and sites. B2W2 may improve things, but we're not suddenly going to get a lot more time (looking at what's coming, it'll rather be the opposite). I just hope we can get things moving on our other project soon, although right now that's not down to me.

lets all go out for some frosty chocolate milkshakes:
i reckon its cos it's the summer holidays and everyone gets super lazy during the summer holidays

that and there hasn't been any lgbt ineptitude which usually create at least a bit of forum drama and subsequent activity and laughs for all haahahahah
what
was that too soon




tbh i think whats happened is that everyone's outgrown puk and its not gonna be much else than lots of activity in the game threads and minimal activity in the random randomness threads unless you eject the section of the forum that caters for children more or less and tell them all to sod off to blocked or pokemasters or whatever the rivalry story is with you lot and the other pokemon forums

holy crap how is pokemasters still going ugh

i had this happen with a forum i went to in the past they tried to cater for the newbies and there was this awful "NO CUSSING! BE NICE!" kind of smileocracy that just ruined any sense of community cos you couldn't ever argue or be sarcastic about things newbie users seemed to refuse to understand cos the mods would get in a huff and mod you if you were like "holy crap did you even read the rules" cos you weren't Being Nice To The New User
and the veteran members literally couldn't stand it and it culminated in a row over hosting costs and one of the admins leaving in a flounce and setting up a forum and dragging the newbies with him and then their ragequit forums were swamped with about 30000 people all just asking the same stuff over and over again and even now its a cesspool of users posting furry art and being stupid and doing stuff
us back at the original forum now having all the idiot users long gone to aforementioned New and """"Better""""" forum like our place dwindled in quantity but kept quality whereas New Ragequit Forum had lots of members and activity but almost constant bickering between mods and normal users and lots of people quitting cos they were sick of everyone being so limpwristed and it was just literally hilarious to poke fun at it more often than not like those two moody guys out of the muppets its 9 in the morning and im insomniac and i havent slept ok so i cant remember their names waldorf and salad or somethign

and they tried to introduce a "well if someone asks something obvious you can be sarcastic if you want" rule but too little too late and the "popular" forum still sucks horribly like their limpwristed "ok you can be mean SOMETIMES i guess its a bit silly having a play-nice forum all the time" just was worse than before 


 
not to mention a lot of drama in the past here has scared/turned a lot of good/long-time users away just cos of the dichotomy of trying to have a close-knit-community-forum but trying to also cater for 13 year old pokemon fans and having people who freakout when a joke falls flat and it just sort of creates this venn diagram with slightly agitated looking emoticons in the centre and over time the forum slowly dies 



like forums just get old and infirm cos even the owners more or less can't pretend they're as into it as they were 10 years ago and unless we have another massive shakeup or some more wonderfully melodramatic forum drama like it won't get much more active than this
maybe minor resurges every time a pokemon game is released but they're going to stop making that one day too

a forum i've been at since like 2006 is pretty much suffering the same fate tbh and now theres like one post a week and we're all sarcastic to any new user that bothers to sign up cos they usually disappear once they realise this isn't a forum of buxom young females that surely want to ask an awkward male nerd new forumite out

like roll back to when i was like 15 and the gamefaqs spinoff scene was THE PLACE TO BE now theres only about two gamefaqs spinoff boards left and no-one really cares any more cos they all Grew Up or they set up their own communities up and no-one really cares if you were banned off GameFAQs a whole bunch of times and resided in GAMEFAQs FOR PEOPLE TOO COOL FOR SCHOOL kind of thing



i mean what do i know ive only been here like a year or two at best though har har har

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