So the forums have had less activity

[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

[Lord Raven]

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.

I'm just curious as to why we can't link to these other places if that's the attitude that is going to be taken >_>

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.

I'm not going to try to sound like a dick or a douche- I'm just curious how you think the members of this forum can go forward and attract more members during the BW2 release date.  At this point we kinda know that content is not going to be updated, so how would you suggest we work past that to make this place more active?

I kind of made this thread so the community can throw ideas around, because as of now most of our activity may end up being down to the forums and I want to see how we can use the forums to bring more members in.  At this point, I will take the time to acknowledge that I know I've had friction with you (Joeno) in the past, and I'm not intending to start drama or criticize anyone or anything, I just want to bounce ideas around.  I do really care about this place because I've spent almost 40% of my life here, after all.




idk what kind of charm do you feel this place had?  I'm not sure what we can capitalize on- I'm sure there is some sort of quirkiness associated with it.  I was thinking we have a group of welcome wagon people who post in threads to newbies and let them know that if they've got questions, they've got someone to talk to and that they can make friends with you.  They can be funny and a little bit quirky in their posts, but they can sort out what kinds of things they can do to make this place seem easy to get along with and easy to figure out.

Rules can be daunting and so can my pinned thread (which I can have a talk with someone about trimming down- instead of saying "read this before posting" we can say something like "everything you need to know about these forums in a nutshell").  Maybe having a .png image floating around that condenses them heavily?  Have a list of references so like...  if you want help with this, this, and this then consult that person?  Something to that extent.

This may not be the thread, I also think 50 messages is too low an inbox limit.  I don't think there's enough activity that we can really justify having only 50 PMs anymore...

[Kpyna]

i'm not suggesting we have people hawking over pokemon information and quickly punching in articles, i'm saying just put some kind of general information out there, so people click on it. i don't really like the idea of being totally out of the running as far as provided information goes. sure, you're more likely to have people on your page if you put things out there the fastest, but you'll still get more traffic putting up "late" information than putting up no information. when i joined, i wasn't looking on cutting edge information for how to catch feebas. like most people, i just wanted to catch a feebas so i shot a google search, clicked a link, and here i am 7 years later. if typhlosion, gravy, whoever actually wrote that up, decided people could just find the info somewhere else and didn't bother, i would have never come here. a lot of people wind up coming here because of site content and decide to check out the forums.

i liked this site because it was campy and not too intimidating. even the staff and members weren't intimidating. i'm not saying "everyone be nice now", don't put on a fake personality because people aren't stupid and it just seems weird. im just saying don't be complete jerks to newbies, even if they are kind of acting weird.

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

i don't want pkmn.net to be like this, but i think it would be most welcoming if it was like, a blend of what we have now and that this forum tried to do. i remember when calling a new guy a noob was super offensive here... i want to say one time i said noob in a kind of joking sense (probably mixed in with a lot of afro and policeman smilies, those things are beast) and i wound up getting reprimanded for mentioning it.

and joeno im going to lightly throw it out there, if you need submitted information to have some html in it, i'd be willing to see if i couldn't help out with that a bit so its a matter of just copy and pasting for you. i've done classes on html coding before so if its something thats a matter of popping in a bunch of tedious <br />s and <h#>s, sticking some images in there, i can do that to take a load off unfinished stuff off the site. even if i decide i kind of really hate doing it too and i don't do code much, at least some stuff got done. whatever works for you. i don't want to just say a bunch of stuff that should get done and not offer a hand.

[Clairefable]

and joeno im going to lightly throw it out there, if you need submitted information to have some html in it, i'd be willing to see if i couldn't help out with that a bit so its a matter of just copy and pasting for you. i've done classes on html coding before so if its something thats a matter of popping in a bunch of tedious <br />s and <h#>s, sticking some images in there, i can do that to take a load off unfinished stuff off the site. even if i decide i kind of really hate doing it too and i don't do code much, at least some stuff got done. whatever works for you. i don't want to just say a bunch of stuff that should get done and not offer a hand.

Good idea, if tedious but necessary stuff like this is getting in the way of implementing ~other fun things~ then perhaps these tasks can be delegated to willing volunteers?

[Specstile]

I'm not as active because i don't want to spoil anything from black and white2, i already know who the champion is and that is jsut too much xD

[Sean and Gliscor]

I think to be honest, this site was very active on the teambuilding section during Gen IV. People would join IRC because of it to ask for advice, and create topics with teams and lots would give advice. It had a competitive spirit... however, since Gen V I feel all that has gone downhill, partially due to the fact that Gen V just isn't as good as Gen IV competitively. Also, i think this site attracts a particular age group and we've all now fallen out of that age group - so yes we do need to attract more members perhaps. I think we all need to realise that its not the site's content as such that has made the forums like this, it's just there's not much adversity of this site. Like I remember finding this site by accident and i didnt sign up - and i remember for weeks i was trying to find the site again but i couldnt find it anywhere. We need more advertisement, and I would be up for taking on that challenge.

Also, Joeno, you say the moderators and admins are busy - why not simply add some more that are more active? No, I'm not asking to be one. But I am offering my help with coding, since I am studying Computer Science at University very soon so I will be able to help with that, and advertising I think I'm ok at. We are a tight-knit community and we can all come together to improve the activity on the forums and make this site like it once was.

[Lord Raven]

I'm not trying to be mean or anything but I hope you guys aren't biting more than you can chew...  On the bright side however, if multiple people do offer to do HTML then it's good because then you're splitting the work.

[Joeno]

Trying to address basic points in order.

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.

Bit late in responding - yeah, this sort of stuff sucks. I personally stay away from putting up content as it's the type of work any of us can do, while I'm the only person doing coding and focusing on related data entry. It's bad of us, and absolutely a failure of the system, but I can only defend why I haven't done anything yet.

I'm just curious as to why we can't link to these other places if that's the attitude that is going to be taken >_>

You can, as per the rules, which mention that linking is not allowed if we already offer such content - in the cases where this applies, we obviously don't, so linking is allowed...

At this point we kinda know that content is not going to be updated, so how would you suggest we work past that to make this place more active?

To be honest, I don't think that's going to be too possible at this point. We're not focused on this and it's not a priority.

If there's one thing, though, I'd say it would be through attracting new people - not change the rules so old members can do whatever they want and scare off new members with too many injokes, sarcastic/aggressive posting and so on.

At this point, I will take the time to acknowledge that I know I've had friction with you (Joeno) in the past, and I'm not intending to start drama or criticize anyone or anything, I just want to bounce ideas around.  I do really care about this place because I've spent almost 40% of my life here, after all.

I was hoping past friction would be mostly forgotten by now. At this point, if there's something I can easily support (and don't disagree with too badly) I can see where we might help, but that does run into time limitations - 'post more content' isn't possible at the moment.

Rules can be daunting and so can my pinned thread (which I can have a talk with someone about trimming down- instead of saying "read this before posting" we can say something like "everything you need to know about these forums in a nutshell").

Purging bits from the thread, sure. Rules-wise, we might be able to turn it into a shorter version, sure, but only as a reference, the sort of 'more details can be found here' thing.

This may not be the thread, I also think 50 messages is too low an inbox limit.  I don't think there's enough activity that we can really justify having only 50 PMs anymore...

Inactive member PMs still use server space and slow things down. I've upped the limit for higher post counts, but I'm not going too far without seeing what happens.

i'm not suggesting we have people hawking over pokemon information and quickly punching in articles, i'm saying just put some kind of general information out there, so people click on it.

That type of content still needs to be written, which takes time, which we can't all justifiably create. Still runs into the same objections, and if we're late, you do look at it and wonder why you'd bother writing it. It's an additional thing that demotivates, not the only one.

i don't want pkmn.net to be like this, but i think it would be most welcoming if it was like, a blend of what we have now and that this forum tried to do. i remember when calling a new guy a noob was super offensive here... i want to say one time i said noob in a kind of joking sense (probably mixed in with a lot of afro and policeman smilies, those things are beast) and i wound up getting reprimanded for mentioning it.

Agreeing with this here - if we get too new person unfriendly, things won't work.

and joeno im going to lightly throw it out there, if you need submitted information to have some html in it, i'd be willing to see if i couldn't help out with that a bit so its a matter of just copy and pasting for you.

And

Good idea, if tedious but necessary stuff like this is getting in the way of implementing ~other fun things~ then perhaps these tasks can be delegated to willing volunteers?

While I appreciate the offer of help, and would be willing to accept it, it's something I've personally always been a bit hesitant about, as it's happened several times that people volunteered to help out with things like this, but then failed to come through.

Part of this is automated by our systems anyway (Line breaks are - I forgot I put that in!), but there's a number of PKMN.NET specifics I need to show.

If people are willing to help out and put some time in, then I'll be happy to give some more access to a few people - the system should be fairly failsafe that we can give people enough rights to content without opening it too far.

We need more advertisement, and I would be up for taking on that challenge.

Please don't. We don't get higher in search rankings or get more members by spamming other forums or similar. I've studied SEO and worked with it on a few occasions, which is how we want it to be more visible. Part of that is down to content now, though.

Also, Joeno, you say the moderators and admins are busy - why not simply add some more that are more active?

Because we want to have people we trust, can do the job, and so on as well. Furthermore, we don't need mods, and admins really need a lot of training, which takes time, and really is for people who've already proven themselves. Furthermore, experience shows that making people admins doesn't mean they'll suddenly start doing more work.

[f3raligatr]

Hmm..

I was thinking about this a lot myself the other day actually, remembering and reminiscing about things on here. It's a shame really, at one point we had a really tight-knit community for a wide range of aspects of Pokémon as opposed to being designated, but for a lot of us we've done the inevitable; grown up and chased dreams, begun living our lives which restrict the time we can spend online. A lot of us have gone off in our own directions which finds you further and further away from those who you used to be close to, breaking such a community (certainly one I felt I was part of, both as a member pre and post being banned). You go weeks without speaking to some who you couldn't bare to not speak to them every day..

I think that's becoming an evident problem, one I don't particularly think we can do much about, we are pretty much all growing older and whilst the interest in Pokémon isn't exactly dead, it's not exactly as gripping or as exciting to the youngsters (in general) who should be replacing us all as we head off in our own lives. Nobody in particular, I just remember when you couldn't go into a room without somebody talking about Pokémon in some form, now I'm lucky to meet people who're ten years my junior who actually know what it is, other than to blurt out "pikachu" and think it makes them cool (because playing Pokémon into your early twenties is blatantly cool). Basically put, I don't believe the audience is particularly there anymore.. three years is a lot of time especially when you're stepping from your adolescent to your early adulthood where your internet time usually resolves around things like Twitter and Facebook. I could be wrong, but you know.. when Ruby and Sapphire came out, there was somewhat of a renewed interest and it was still relevant enough that younger kids got into it. It was still 'enough'. Not so much when Pearl and Diamond came out, certainly not when Black and White came out (but don't forget, eight years there in release dates).

Now, I'm going to take a step back here and speak on behalf of myself, not on behalf of the rest of the Admin team who, I'm sure, have their own opinions and their own ideas on this front. I'm not going to stand here and try and convince you all that I'm even a.. decent Admin in terms of content because, bar research when Black and White came out, I think I've hardly contributed to the website other than to be a figurehead, a point of authority, one I don't particularly feel I'm actually that.. good at. But, this isn't going to be about me, it's about the community of course. But the point comes where.. and I look across and see the rest of the team, bar Joeno who really IS an old man now (;o), we're all of similar ages where we've all hit these points in our lives and, for us desireable ones, find time that we used to spend on here is being spent with spouses, with social circles, being spent at work trying to earn money to allow us to do things we want to do (anybody want to give me a mortgage?).

In fact, I'd say work is possibly the biggest hinderance because for a lot of us, we find ourselves in reduced productivity due to stresses at work and other things that we're supposed to be doing (such as being now late for a pool tournament because I wanted to type this up oh god). Again, I'm blabbering on, simply put we're chasing our dreams and living our lives which, like the members and the community, finds the time we can devote to PKMN.net dwindling and reducing by each passing day. Things that we used to be able to do, or rather YOU used to be able to do seeing as I wasn't particularly involved in anything other than giving out 'advice' (used loosely :D) on Team Building, we just don't have the time or energy for, but then again, we wouldn't have time if we could put them on to actually do them anyway.

I think.. and I do hope I'm wrong, I think we're just facing the inevitable like a lot of forums out there where we'll remain active as long as have members and a community (although no longer as close knit as we used to be) and a reason to keep the website running, but we'll get smaller and smaller.

Whether we need a complete refresh of the direction of the website, which I guess we've already attempting to initialise with Jeroen: Our next project, or whether we need to buckle down and try and work out ways of getting back on track.. I don't know.

</2cents>

=]

[Lord Raven]

Lack of Pokemon interest is something I'll say something on.  Since it's me, it will be extremely quick because I don't like beating around the bush...  The easiest solution to the problem is to just talk about other things.  There are other boards and we can post whatever our interests are, and I'll even go out of my way to take an interest if someone ends up posting something (so long as it isn't in Sports).  I know work is stressful (I was working 40/week while on 24/7 call with another job during the summer, it's awful), but hey at least boost forum participation!

Purging bits from the thread, sure. Rules-wise, we might be able to turn it into a shorter version, sure, but only as a reference, the sort of 'more details can be found here' thing.

I think this is good.  I'm writing a draft of a rewrite of the thread and I'll PM it to you as soon as I'm done.

I'll respond to other things later.

[b1g]

There are other boards and we can post whatever our interests are, and I'll even go out of my way to take an interest if someone ends up posting something (so long as it isn't in Sports).

For me (and perhaps I am speaking for other once upon a time posters here, too), the problem with talking about other things is even that became tiresome, it seemed in two years there were always the same topics being made, the same people giving the same replies, yada yada yada, circle goes back around again. And what tends to happen is you'll have a few people who start a topic and it gets going, people are interested, hefty replies, et cetera, until you get this rush of one sentence comments that ruin discussion. Now I know that comes with the territory but it seems that most of the time, for me, talking about any interests just... isn't interesting. Who knows... refreshing the media board once bimonthly seems to get me by with only two new topics posted that aren't talking about Lady GaGa's latest hit or something like that. It'd be nice to see stimulating discussion floating around the board that stays stimulating.

Welp, thanks for linking me this thread Muhed, hopefully something comes out of it. Maybe everyone has outgrown the central focus of the forum and we need a new one if there's going to be a forum here at all.... !