Forum Utilization / Reformatting

[lynxie]

17 minutes ago, sWz said:

since this is the end times @lynxie @Time @DabOfGravy @kit @dolo @Kofigaisie @Che @Shy @Amazing @carrollton @esports speshulist @dvd-appeal @BoM  @I just lag, not toggle! @ImHunterIRL @monkemanappeal @MeGGi<3 @Roddy @Ero @Zero Two @Starlegendgod @ramsec @Jackson @Divine

 

 

youre all insufferable sacks of SHIT and im DISGUSTED while some the funniest most genuine and cool people ive ever met online slowly stopped playing you RAT FUCKERS STUCK AROUND TILL THE VERY END sucking the fun from the final moments of the servers

 

how did half of you MORONS even get promoted to staff LMFAOOOO oh yeah bc the staff DIDNT PLAY THE SERVERS AND DIDNT EVEN KNOW HALF OF U RETARDS

 

how you all managed to be so stuck up ur own assholes 24/7 and would consistently ruin the server atmosphere for ur own k/d or drone your nasally voices in voice chat for hours on end or play sweaty in TROUBLE IN TERRORIST TOWN FOR GAMER KARMA is beyond me 

 

all of u need to actually get off the internet and learn to not take things so goddamn seriously this was a playground for TEENAGERS that you losers tried to run like the military

 

DAFT OUT!!!!

 

EDIT: If this is taken down within 7 days im releasing blackmail on all BD's

 

We all live in your head rent free

[the baconator]

 

2 minutes ago, sWz said:

i wouldve agreed a year ago. two years ago. ITS OVER BRO. its actually over. no more copium. no more CONSTRUCTIVE CRITICISM. its OVER.

He-y d-d-daft

[ArcticWolf]

12 minutes ago, lynxie said:

We all live in your head rent free

You wanna hear a verse rq?

[Infinityward]

Man the shit isnt funny. Chill out guys.

 

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[Jake]

On 12/3/2023 at 1:10 AM, Spiritwind said:

 

 

I think staff is looking in COMPLETELY the wrong direction as to why SG is failing.  It is not the brand, it is not the servers, it is the direction, it is the leadership, it is the lack of initiative to actually stick with something.  If you really want to see things move forward, you have to build some morale within the community.  You have to get people motivated.  SG worked in the past because people actually worked together.  There was structure, there was a system, there was discipline, there were hard working people that made it happen, and people felt like they were in a community.  The leadership led, and they actually listened and took action based on what the group as a whole spoke about.  

 

 

 

I think a great example of this point can be seen with GMOD TTT. Elf, Huwa, Jazzy, and triou actually play on the server, constantly get it populated, and seed it as often as they can. If you also look, its the ONLY server been actively updated, developed, maps being added.  If you look at the server its has more players than any of the others servers and guess why? Because the people running the server actually care, play on the server, and enjoy it. I can almost promise you more than half of the AO+ members have not touched a server in months. What we need is more members like Elf, Huwa, and Jazzy who actually care. The only reason I am still around is because of these guys and the work they put into make a server consistently fun. 

 

Also, the amount of threads that propose big changes and literally never go anywhere is crazy. This community is essentially all talk, no action. I'm not saying its easy to make changes or run a community, its not. However, the people in charge lack serious motivation or discipline. Either do something or step down and let people who actually have ideas and motivation step into those roles (easier said than done, I'm aware). 

 

I don't want to shit on anyone, but come on guys this community had so much potential and its sad to see its current state. 

 

[jazzy]

hI didn't really want to bump this but figured I'd chime in on a lot of stuff and my thought processes and why a lot of these conversations have happened recently.

 

To start, and this isn't me making an excuse, this is me setting the stage. I probably work on average 40~45 hours a week in my current role, I'm married, and I have other obligations beyond games that I tend to. This isn't saying I don't have time, in fact, what a lot of these conversations have been about is to help MAKE time.

 

I've been somewhat vocal about my disdain for the forums, even as someone who doesn't manage the forums very much. Mainly, it's almost always a matter of replicating exactly what I would've already done or did do in discord. So for instance:

1. Doing events means posting/advertising in discord and the forums, each with their own pane of glass to design (markup in the forums, discord markup and event form fillout, plus posting in respective channels, hot linking messages, etc)

2. Doing admin permissions has to be done in multiple places and I can personally speak this has caused issues since I was assigned AO/TA and that's why I'm only TA right now, was partially because of how jank this is.

3. Doing bans likewise must be done in multiple places- forum ban, a discord ban, a source bans ban, and once CS2 launches, we'll need to add bans there until SB integration is made. This is especially annoying because discord usernames can be wildly different than forum usernames as well meaning people aren't always punished across platforms. Heck, we didn't even bother banning a few people from this thread on SB because we didn't see the need (hint, it's because you few that were banned don't play on gmod ttt)

4. Moderating for spam and purging messages, etc has to be done in multiple panes of glass, again, me stressing this whole thing for a reason.

 

All in all, it's a huge fucking waste of my time to have to look at both panes and I don't even hardly manage/have full access to the forums. Our roles are wildly disparate in what can be done on discord as well (this is being worked on however).

 

And for what benefit does the forums have? We now delve into this question and hopefully solve this once and for all.

 

 

On 11/27/2023 at 12:23 PM, Spiritwind said:

Removing the forums will just encourage old players to accept SG as dead and move on permanently.

I said this in discord to you but you have yet to respond but for the record, no, our servers do not have "zero players" as you stated earlier in this thread, and we have just as many people coming into the discord that were "OGs" who are asking where our servers are, no different than the shoutbox.

What I can say is our gmod server is utterly cracked out of its mind and is currently ranked #11 on gametracker out of around 100 servers tracked, and I'm sure it's also beating out the hundreds of untracked servers as well.

 

But let's go into some anecdotal discord stats:

 

User1 joined Nov29, 2023:
47 messages

0 forum posts

13 hours played gmod

 

User2 joined Oct15, 2023:

8 messages

0 forum posts

51 hours played gmod

 

User3 joined Oct14, 2023:

141 messages

1 forum post

51 hours played gmod

 

User4 joined Oct24, 2023:

106 messages

0 forum posts

7 hours played gmod

 

So let's level set here:

We have new members joining who never visit, join, or post on the forums

And our forums have... old heads who have never once joined our current server offerings, who have no/very little activity in discord in the last year+, going on here and thrashing a dude for posting about an idea *I* mainly have been pushing for.

 

All this does is revitalize one obvious point: there is no necessity for the forums aside from a place to handle discord bans and serve out links to our discord, server IPs, and some major news/announcements.

 

Now finally, back to the original point after typing up this entire fucking thing and doing research that obviously supports my point:

If the forums were active as all hell I would not be up on this soapbox, I would gladly eat this time consumption lunch and gladly post all my thoughts, my jokes, my currently listening to, my tiktoks all here. But the reality is the interaction here is so utterly low it's not funny. You can blame higherups for that or you can realize it is not the higher ups fault the forums are dead, it's because the modern generation of people playing games, interacting, and making friends are doing it on discord, not on some random ass forums with a hyphen in the url.

I have a limited amount of time after 5pm when I finish working and I'm tired of spending those valuable minutes trying to curate out an experience on here when it serves basically no purpose and benefit for myself and for us as a community.

 

You guys want us to do something, let us make changes that give us back the time to work on the things that actually bring in community. In fact, a lot of you who even ended up shitting on dom later in the thread actually agreed the forums should go (lol)

 

I have some thoughts on the technical standpoint but something like "forums are not supported by admins" is not a solution. Maintaining the forums means maintaining security updates and cross compatibility with addons. If our forums get hacked, we could leak out things like e-mail addresses. Maintaining the forums, the theme, everything, it is all time spent by OUR community's staff members.

 

[Spiritwind]

Yes, I can see why you would not want to bump this thread.  You have been doing your best to bury it and move on since the conversation here got started.  More people have been banned in this thread  than have joined SG in the last month. 

 

We do appreciate your work, and I have no doubt that you mean well, and are one of the few staff members actually spending a lot of time working on SG from what I have seen.

 

 

With that said, I feel like 99% of the rest of your post is just a big fuck you and a big example of why so many members have been leaving.  You literally did nothing but prove my points on why SG is dying.   You have had the largest acitivty that SG has probably seen in the last 2 years, and it's all because there was a calling out of the VP to resign, and for the rest of the staff to actually listen to the community.  Wake up dude.

 

Hear me out.  Do you feel SG is a syndicate of Admins, or a gaming community?  You guys have it so BACK ASSWARD it isn't even funny.  Dominics post about having asked the higher ups if he should resign is a crock of loaded shit.  This is a gaming COMMUNITY, the community have spoken, and the staff have quickly covered it up and "tried not to bump" the post.  Again, this is a gaming COMMUNITY, not a community of staff. You deleted and banned about 15 people who agreed, and the only people standing up for him are a couple of staff.  I'm sure you guys have jokingly shrugged this off, just like you have during any other similar instance.

 

This is why SG is failing.  You don't listen.  You get an idea in your head, and yes, that includes you Jazzy; and you run with it regardless of what people say.  You make pointless threads asking what the community thinks; and then give a big fat middle finger to anyone that voices objection.  I've seen it happen time and time again over the last 5 years.  You dedicate countless hours to things that don't matter, and neglect the ideas that do.  Nobody is turned off by the hyphen in steam-gamer.  You really think people look at that and go "OMG, I need to leave this server right now, how could they hyphen".  

 

The Forums have been around since the founding on SG.  Unless SG is in dire financial distress, they should not be removed.  It is a large amount of SG history, and it is also an easy place for people to search for information regarding the community.  It also gives SG great google seo potential.  

 

Yes, gaming has changed.  Yes, discord is easier to draw members into.  But, it is also far easier to just become another in the mass of channels someone is in.  I bet you anyone with over 1000 messages in discord is also going to have a few hundred forum posts.  But, do you think it was easy back in 2010?  Staff worked their asses off to get people on the forums.  We gave rewards, there was incentive, it was a requirement to get beyond the basic starter rank in SG.  That attention has since been diverted to Discord, and leadership has since diverted their attention as well, so OF COURSE it's going to show that discord is more active than the forums.

 

 

 

 

 

[Spiritwind]

I also want to point out; if the forums are so pointless and left behind, why was it such a big deal when people posted +1 to show support of a prior post in this thread?  Should have been no reason to ban people regarding it if these forums were really of such low value to the staff and community of SG.  Or, perhaps it was the show of support that was the true infuriator.  

[Ejivis]

3 hours ago, Spiritwind said:

The Forums have been around since the founding on SG.  Unless SG is in dire financial distress, they should not be removed.  It is a large amount of SG history, and it is also an easy place for people to search for information regarding the community.  It also gives SG great google seo potential.  

 

 

 

 

 

 

No matter what else was said I support this statement and whole heartedly would be against forum removal.  And I believe a large majority of people that knew (either active or inactive) would be as well.

[eXtr3m3]

I was going to refrain from posting in here, but I had to bite considering there's a lot of animosity without enough accountability.

 

I can't help but notice a lot of "B listers" here airing out their grievances with the community who they themselves were also guilty of the same offenses that the current management is under fire for. A lot of you too either were not active or did little to nothing in your time as staff. The general mismanagement that has been spoken of in this thread is something some of you were the Game 6 LeBron at doing effortlessly. The slack then had to be picked up by the staff around you. It was almost like pulling teeth to get responses from you for anything during your tenure - and then you either stepped down/got demoted due to inactivity and fell off the face of the Earth only to come back to this very point in time and share with us your "wisdom" on how to improve SG via. I'm not referring to everyone, those who I actually sat down and put hours into this place with know who they are.  However, if you have enough doubt to ask yourself if I'm referring to you, well all I can say is "if the shoe fits then you must wear it." 

That being said, I do think there absolutely could be some more activity from those at the top. It has always been hard for the community to get the ball rolling during the President/Vice President's inactivity. It should be recognized that people have lives outside of SG and are probably very engulfed in that. The same way that you all who left were and still very likely are - myself included.

 

I see a lot more criticism than constructive criticism here - probably because some of you have some sort of history with the people in charge that did not end favorably for you. Instead of sitting there ragging on those damn dirty inactive BDs without providing any ideas on how to improve the community - be the change you want to see here. Help the current staff populate servers, engage on the forums in a meaningful way, sit in Discord while you have your drink and hop on whatever game you're playing. Or, if you don't want to/don't have the time to - kindly go back to browsing the forums lightly and move on like the rest of us. Activity on all fronts from everyone and unity are the two most vital components to rebuilding this community. I don't think criticism has to be void of calling people out - but it's become more of a pissing contest than it is actual insightful and beneficial to SG's growth.

 

I'm certainly not shy of inactivity myself - I spent months completely away from the community while I was in the BD role this last time around. But I decided since I was only here in an advisory role anyway I might as well not hold up a slot and offer what insight I could from the sidelines.

 

There is no shame in being straightforward on SG's issues, but pointing your fingers at the "problem" and offering no real solution does nothing but make you appear like a disgruntled former employee. I welcome anyone who is passionate enough to post on this thread about the issues in leadership to get back into staff and help make a change. Can't get those fresh new legs you want in staff if you don't try yourself or push for the people who are currently in staff trying to move up.

 

P.S. Fuck you Dominic - not for being a bad staff member but because you didn't get my reboot card in Fortnite.