Decline in OT activity

[Hygro]

http://forums.civfanatics.com/showthread.php?t=31266

I really like your poll options.

How would OT react if I begin spamming Bulgarian news applied with appropriate comments added by me?

probably with 6-8 post long threads. But that's okay.

 

[gay_Aleks]

Ah well. At least I tried. Guess I should work a bit on my very own Ask a Bulgarian thread.

 

[Narz]

Like if dick pics are actually a good online dating strat or not. I'm genuinely curious! Guys keep doing it so it might be working....

Depends how bad your face is I guess. Might work out in the gay community.

childrearing

Yeah, I'd be kind of interesting in this, problem is most CFC parents are pretty busy.

Also, more meetups. Wouldn't mind a meetup in the NYC/NJ or Philly regions.

I already hang out with Peter Grimes occasionally, it'd be nice to have some interaction beyond the screen.

Maybe some new forumer games that are interactive. Shipping a small box around & everyone adds a little photo, poem, tiny toy, whatev. Maybe a US version, a UK version, a continental Europe version.

I dunno, I'm not so attached, sometimes you can muster great strength & focus to save something, most of the time you just have to go with the flow.

 

[Hygro]

I had a friend live in Bulgaria, learned to speak Bulgarian and everything. Her elementary school students were very sad for her that she was like 24 and not married. They thought no one would want her by then.

 

[BvBPL]

Yeah, I'd be kind of interesting in this, problem is most CFC parents are pretty busy.

Those of us who are childless should certainly weigh in on such a topic. Maybe limit it to them if our parental contingent can't contribute. Wouldn't be the first time our symposium of fools opinioned upon a subject it knows little about.

 

[gay_Aleks]

I had a friend live in Bulgaria, learned to speak Bulgarian and everything. Her elementary school students were very sad for her that she was like 24 and not married. They thought no one would want her by then.

Welcome to Bulgaria - come for the nature and history, stay for the total insanity that rules there.

 

[Hygro]

Those of us who are childless should certainly weigh in on such a topic. Maybe limit it to them if our parental contingent can't contribute. Wouldn't be the first time our symposium of fools opinioned upon a subject it knows little about.

Herein I think is an example of the big change. We used to be down with arguing about things we knew nothing about but believed we did. Now we're not so down. Meanwhile crickets chirp while we wait for experts. I say lets all just spout (unintentional) nonsense until we get pwned by someone who knows.

 

[madviking]

really, i believe it's entirely to do with member decay due to x, y, and z reasons.

as posters have previously mentioned, forums just aren't in vogue anymore. while reddit is basically a forum, it's as BIG and active forum you could ever want. i can go from basketball talk to philosophy talk to people posting weird pictures in seconds--with all those communities being active (to some degree or another. as a sidebar, the nba subreddit currently has, at 3:03am eastern time, nearly 4,500 people online. that's something that this forum cannot compete with).

frankly, the only reason i go onto cfc is to talk/banter with people i don't talk to on reddit, facebook, or #fiftychat. if i could talk to everyone i care about through those media, i wouldn't be going here.

so with fewer people coming to forums, and usual forum goers leaving, the number of posters decline.

ETERNAL SEPTEMBER HAS ENDED.

 

[gay_Aleks]

Forums are so 2005.

 

[Valka D'Ur]

The forum is also really dated. How many forums and websites remain that ban swearing, nudity and vulgar conversation?

Some forums have an opt-in subforum where almost anything goes. Swearing, vulgarity, trolling, flaming, staff calling members all kinds of derogatory names... is that how far you'd want CFC to go? And once that happens, it leaves the question of "which part of the forum is this person's truer self?"

Strange no one has addressed the forum split. That seemed almost delibrately desgined to kill the forum :tinfoilhat:

I've seen it work elsewhere. But that was on an RPG forum where they didn't allow discussion of politics or religion unless they were in-game and nothing to do with RL.

Yea, but CFC didn't make A&E exclusive for A&E content, or make it more personal. All the 1-3 page A&E content related threads get posted in OT and die. Even some quality threads just don't have much content to continue going. The choice is either slap it in OT to get a little bit more participation or throw in in A&E where I don't think it gains anything in quality. Look at the scarce activity of A&E or S&T threads--they live for a little while then die out. If S&T and A&E were put back into OT, literally like 3 threads would be effected (s&t frequently asked questions, draw your own story, and nanowrimo). And I think they would change for the better- the quality won't really change if put into OT.

I'll give 2 examples- 1 S&T and 1 A&E:

1) There's actually duplicate discussion occurring on "news" related threads. E.g. a little press hype thing by skunkworks on magnetic confinement. OT and S&T. There's not really any difference between the two, because the same people are involved in both. Whether that thread was created in S&T or in OT the "shelf life" of the thread would be the same--a science discussion would occur for 3-4 pages and then just stay in the minds of those involved.

2) OT continues to get cluttered with relatively meaningless A&E threads such as a thread currently active on the upcoming Suicide Squad film. Now I created a movie thread that would be able to handle and consolidate such 1001 (movie) threads that keep popping up in OT but it did not take off. CFC never established "the place to discuss movies is here". They have a supposedly "serious" place in A&E that no one uses, and the culture is still to have 1 thread for 1 personal thought rather than have a place to collectively have personal thought discussions.

So what benefit does A&E and S&T provide? They don't increase quality and they don't really increase the longevity of the discussion. All these subforums do is decrease visibility.

They either have to be strengthened and be THE place or finally die.

There are more active threads than that. Just because they're not added to every day doesn't make them inactive. It just means that there's a temporary break in activity that will pick up later. Take Doctor Who, for example. The new season is being filmed now and it'll be back on TV later this year. At that point I would expect activity to pick up. Same with Star Trek - I try to post about the new fan films I'm familiar with, and I would expect activity to pick up more, the closer we get to the next movie and the 50th anniversary next year.

NaNoWriMo is a thrice-yearly event, and I'm happy to see more interest in it in recent years.

However... I'm willing to try an experiment. The next event after the current one is in July. Let's see how long it lasts on the front page of OT before being drowned out by "what book/video/whatever did you last read/watch/whatever" threads and US politics. I'm guessing not very long at all. In A&E it's got much better visibility because it's a month-long event and people are encouraged to post regular updates. For that month, it's always on the front page.

As for silly threads, I don't know that we shut those down especially often. Every once in a while a pure spam thread is shut down, but I don't think this has become more common at least since RD threads were introduced before the split. But then again they're rarely posted anymore compared to how often they used to be.

TrekBBS used to have a really fun spam thread called "Quinto's Spock Should Be Constantly Shouting!". It was started before the 2009 nuTrek movie came out, and the idea was that if it was going to be true to the younger Spock from the earliest ST episodes, that version of Spock would have to do some shouting - because early TOS Spock shouted.

So the rules of that thread was that you could post anything you wanted, whether or not it had anything at all to do with Star Trek - but whatever you posted, it had to be in all-capital letters. The people who didn't do that were usually met with the next poster saying, "SPEAK UP - I CAN'T HEAR YOU!"

A read-through of that thread was one of the funniest things I'd ever seen. Sure, there were a lot of spammish one or two-word posts. But sometimes there would be jokes, one-liners, whole discussions among people... all in capital letters. Any time someone felt like shouting on that forum, they could just go to that thread and get it out of their system, and then go back to regular posting where all-cap posting was not allowed. It was fun and harmless and lasted many thousands of posts before it was shut down.

Finally, about nudity, not only will this not be allowed but there's another, unexpected problem that's popped up recently. Stay tuned for an announcement that will come sometime in the next couple of days, and in the meanwhile save any babe thread pictures you're attached to. I can't say more except that this is being forced on us externally and has to do with robots and Google taking over the world. I'm not kidding.

That's happened elsewhere (on the aforementioned other forum). At least we won't have remotely the amount of cleanup to do that they did. People should save any "babe"-themed avatars they're using, as well.

Measuring, counting and competition can be fun. How about adding badges for contribution to OT activity?

Most threads started in past 90 days
Most OT posts in last 90 days
Thread started in a month with the highest post count on the last day of the month

If you want people to post and start new threads, give them a reason to do so.

That's an open invitation to spam, though.

 

[cybrxkhan]

More silly threads would be cool, now that I think about it.

I had a friend live in Bulgaria, learned to speak Bulgarian and everything. Her elementary school students were very sad for her that she was like 24 and not married. They thought no one would want her by then.

In Asia - but most famously Japan, due to the widespread influence of its pop culture - women over 25 were traditionally considered old maids of sorts. In Japan I believe you get the term Xhristmas cake from this (ie after Christmas, Dec 25, no one is interested in cake anymore). However due to changing socio-economic and cultural trends this isn't as much an issue anymore, but people will still make jokes about it I guess.

 

[Hygro]

More silly threads would be cool, now that I think about it.



In Asia - but most famously Japan, due to the widespread influence of its pop culture - women over 25 were traditionally considered old maids of sorts. In Japan I believe you get the term Xhristmas cake from this (ie after Christmas, Dec 25, no one is interested in cake anymore). However due to changing socio-economic and cultural trends this isn't as much an issue anymore, but people will still make jokes about it I guess.

I'll have me some cake any day of the year.

 

[Camikaze]

Hygro is right in saying that Civ5 was (eventually) a massive critical and commercial success. It is certainly not an unpopular game, and it did bring us a bigger audience than Civ4 ever did. However, it was definitely popular in a different way, and its popularity manifested differently. I think it's fair to say that it did disappoint more 'hardcore' fans who are crucial to this site, and was more appreciated by 'casual' fans, who aren't as likely to stick around here. This has come up a number of times during staff discussions (not on the topic of OT, but CivFanatics in general) - if you look at the sort of participation in the Strategy & Tips community and modding community for Civ4, it was much more in-depth than for Civ5. There are now strong communities for Civ5, but those took longer to develop and never had quite the same depth. This is noticeable in creating Civ5 content, for example. There has never been quite the same group of experienced members to draw on as there was for Civ4. This is exacerbated by the rise of the 'casual' competition of reddit. If you have a quick question that needs answering, why would you post it here rather than r/civ? We might be able to provide a more in-depth answer, but it'll probably take longer than in a sub-reddit with hundreds of active readers, and people will have to go out of their way to find us in the first place. And of course reddit isn't the only competitor - there are the official Steam forums & the official 2K forums, on top of the older sites and Civ Wikia.

That of course compounds with the effect reddit has on OT as distinct from the site as a whole. I must confess I now do a fair portion of my posting at reddit, typically in relation to Australian law, which just isn't something that I've found can be viably discussed here.

 

[cybrxkhan]

I'll have me some cake any day of the year.

So do I. So do I. (Not to mention I'm getting close to 25 myself anyways, so no big deal.)



On second thought, one thing I'd like to see are more "Ask a..." threads. Back in their heyday a couple years back I thought those were quite interesting, since they allowed people to express their opinions and discuss their perspectives without worrying about having to deal with debating or controversy (theoretically, of course). There are a few healthy, active ones at the moment, but they've been long-standing ones for the most part. I do recall doing a Ask a Vegetarian thread myself a few years ago, that got a few pages of discussion, that was interesting.

 

[Goodfella]

That of course compounds with the effect reddit has on OT as distinct from the site as a whole. I must confess I now do a fair portion of my posting at reddit, typically in relation to Australian law, which just isn't something that I've found can be viably discussed here.

This is true. But on the other, part of the reason cfc is my first stop when I'm taking a break from homework or just simply bored is because it's a small enough community that I'm familiar with everyone here. I have opinions on most of them and understand their personalities. I'd even be able to recognize a lot of them if I saw them on the street.

 

[Kyriakos]

Hygro is right in saying that Civ5 was (eventually) a massive critical and commercial success. It is certainly not an unpopular game, and it did bring us a bigger audience than Civ4 ever did. However, it was definitely popular in a different way, and its popularity manifested differently. I think it's fair to say that it did disappoint more 'hardcore' fans who are crucial to this site, and was more appreciated by 'casual' fans, who aren't as likely to stick around here. This has come up a number of times during staff discussions (not on the topic of OT, but CivFanatics in general) - if you look at the sort of participation in the Strategy & Tips community and modding community for Civ4, it was much more in-depth than for Civ5. There are now strong communities for Civ5, but those took longer to develop and never had quite the same depth. This is noticeable in creating Civ5 content, for example. There has never been quite the same group of experienced members to draw on as there was for Civ4. This is exacerbated by the rise of the 'casual' competition of reddit. If you have a quick question that needs answering, why would you post it here rather than civ? We might be able to provide a more in-depth answer, but it'll probably take longer than in a sub-reddit with hundreds of active readers, and people will have to go out of their way to find us in the first place. And of course reddit isn't the only competitor - there are the official Steam forums & the official 2K forums, on top of the older sites and Civ Wikia.

That of course compounds with the effect reddit has on OT as distinct from the site as a whole. I must confess I now do a fair portion of my posting at reddit, typically in relation to Australian law, which just isn't something that I've found can be viably discussed here.

CFC (and moreso OT) is not that big a site in the first place. It is even smaller than the Paradox forums, and the effect of the OT is similar there as well, namely as you noted most people don't have something to say in very particular topics, and moreso some can post just for the hell of it, while in reddit they are swarmed by a huge number of people who have interest in the particular sub-reddit in the first place.

Ultimately a Reddit-type overforum was a very smart idea, and likely will lead to OT forums in other sites being all the more diminished.

 

[Valka D'Ur]

Looking at what works on other forums and trying it here is an excellent idea. I would strongly encourage you and anybody else with the time and inclination to take ideas that work from other forums and just create them here. Maybe once you create your "8 things" post on that forum, you could also use that post to start a similar thread here?

Sure.

Unfortunately, I can't link to the thread on the other site so folks can see what I'm talking about. It's in an opt-in subforum that isn't visible to non-members.

The first part is true but probably not very important - there should generally be no shortage of current events to talk about in a given timespan. Unless the world has gotten more boring lately and interesting things just don't come up as often.

Of course the world hasn't gotten more boring lately. But the current events of immediate concern to me are likely to bore most others here since it won't have any relevance to them. Take the upcoming Alberta provincial election, for example. This is of relevance to fewer than half a dozen people here, and I have no idea if they're remotely interested in talking about it other than a comment or two. So I tend to have my say on the CBC.ca comment boards when they're open (no rhyme or reason as to when those get opened or closed since CBC outsourced the moderation of them).

What sorts of things do those sites allow that we don't? In general I'd be interested in knowing what sorts of things we might plausibly allow that would boost interest without just causing the decent post-to-drivel ratio to crash.

Basically it's a matter of language. I try to keep my language clean, but other people prefer not to, and the sites give them that leeway. I'd hate to see CFC compromise too much on that, although I do think there are some words in the autocensor that don't need to be there.

On second thought, one thing I'd like to see are more "Ask a..." threads. Back in their heyday a couple years back I thought those were quite interesting, since they allowed people to express their opinions and discuss their perspectives without worrying about having to deal with debating or controversy (theoretically, of course). There are a few healthy, active ones at the moment, but they've been long-standing ones for the most part. I do recall doing a Ask a Vegetarian thread myself a few years ago, that got a few pages of discussion, that was interesting.

I really wish there was a way to do a search for these threads. It's downright silly that we can't search for something if it's only got 3 letters. Not all 3-letter words are as common as "the" or "and."

 

[EgonSpengler]

Something I see on a lot of other sites is the ability for a reader to publicly acknowledge a post without responding to it. One site calls it a "Thanks" and lists the username of each thanker along the bottom of the post. Another calls it "Props" and allows you to leave a private note for the poster, if you want to. Another allows you to either "Like" or "Dislike" a post, and then displays the post's aggregate score in a lower corner.

I wouldn't be surprised if the idea has come up here before. Maybe it's time to revisit it. A couple of things this might address were touched on by Valka a few pages back:

I might care about what books people read or the movies they watch if I knew why they liked those.

Something I noticed also... my Cosmos thread was the busiest OT thread I started, at 330 replies. But I was just blown away by the fact that it had 13,314 views.

There may be things people enjoy reading but have no (substantive) reply for, and feel dumb simply saying "+1", "thumbs up", or "I agree" and nothing more. At the same time, posters need some kind of feedback. A while ago, I posted a short review of a book I'd just read and nobody replied. And really, why should they? If they hadn't read the same book, they'd have nothing to say. But I have no idea whether anyone appreciated that I'd written it, or had even read what I wrote. It felt like I was talking to myself, and I haven't bothered to write anything about the books I've read since then.

 

[Kyriakos]

I think a "like post" system might work, but going by the recent failure of it in the Paradox forums it should at least include the following characteristics:

-There is only a "like" option, but not also a "dislike"
-All "Like" options can be applied solely on posts past a timeline, eg to posts from the day the new feature appears and later (to avoid necro-liking, which was what caused Paradox to cancel the system due to very deliberate abuse).

Not sure if the latter is that easy to include, maybe with some added script to the forum script?

Ultimately, though, the like option will be abused in other ways, and may even make some people post differently out of some will to get more 'likes', which would be a further erosion effect in detrimental synergy with the corrosive agents in the OT sewer-system

 

[Camikaze]

Although we haven't recently discussed the issue in staff, I think it's safe to say that a 'like' button would at least not be strongly opposed. The major obstacle is actually being able to implement it, and the current situation is such that that's not at all likely.