Improving Gamingforce
 

You've probably noticed that GFF has been pretty quiet as of late. This is not a "GFF is dying thread". We all understand that GFF has evolved into a place where a small but close knit group of people hang out, and it's bound to be a little slow. That doesn't mean we can't make changes to liven things up a bit. Let's hear some suggestions from the community on improvements that can be made to enhance the GFF experience.

This isn't an officially sanctioned thread or anything; it's just me asking folks for ideas. I make no promises, but I'm interested in what people have to say.

Problems
-Hazing of new members
-Apathy of current membership
-Not enough visibility of current community events
-Lack of Ace Combat Era
-Outdated forum design
-Forum is "cliquey"
-Outdated rules

Suggested Improvements
-Redesign the front page or forum header to better advertise events/things new folks might be interested in
-More theme weeks
-Somehow move activity from journals back to the forums
-Merge more subforums together
-Find a niche for GFF and capitalize on it
-Legalize thread necromancy
-Loosen the rules in general
-Less megathreads, more smaller, focused threads
-Site redesign

Well, this is going to be an unpopular suggestion and it's one that I've made in the past without much hope, but: maybe we could do something about the fact that "Welcome, Welcome" might as well be titled "Get The Fuck Out". I don't know whether it needs closer mod supervision to stop all the trolling or just needs closed entirely, but the entire subforum basically exists for the express purpose of giving trolls easy meat. Any community, no matter how small, needs the occasional infusion of new blood. Every time we drive someone off before they even get the slightest chance to acclimate we're doing ourselves a real disservice. Count the people you haven't seen in a long while. Count the new people you can bring to mind offhand. You see the problem.

(I won't bother to get into the chilling effect trolling has on posting in general, that's obviously a war that's been lost.)

The other major reason activity is low is that most of you are just lazy as all fuck. I give the CH folks a lot of shit, but at least they managed to organize their own (deeply silly) event. And when things are planned, the information is poorly disseminated and nobody knows what the fuck. Acer is running three goddamn streams a week or some shit (or maybe more) and the only way you'd know is if you happened to bumble upon that particular thread. What we need, maybe, is to make some goddamn USE of VB's calendar function and then (and I know this is a little beyond your direct power, nutty) maybe automate some kind of front-page flashing lights and sirens when A Thing Is Starting, no matter how minor. Things need to be... consolidated, if you will, so when a newbie shows up we can point them to a list. This Is The Cool Shit We've Done Lately, This Is The Cool Shit We're Doing Right Now, This Is The Cool Shit We're Doing Soon, This Is The Cool Shit We Do All The Damned Time, etc

To be honest nutty, I don't really have too many good suggestions to improve GFF. I try to at least put up a topic once a month, but I kind of want to try topics that haven't been done before or can warrant some discussion.

I've been to too many forums in which people have a hard time putting single sentences together for a specified topic.

I really love Acer's Western Animation Thread, that was probably one of the best ideas I've seen on GFF in quite a while. I wouldn't mind seeing the snakes and ladders game Shin and Acer did up come back, since it kind of died off.

I still plan on doing my GFF Gamers Month every March since both years it has been met with immediate success.

Maybe someone on the forum could do a GFF Film Month, since the majority of us are avid film watchers . You could do the Heavy Metal Month for a lot of things, such as Anime, Books, Tabletop games, or anything along those lines.

I wouldn't mind seeing more avatar and sig theme months. I'm not really good with photoshop so I wouldn't be able to lead them, but I would love to see theme weeks based on popular 80's action movies such as:

Top Gun
Predator
Running Man


One idea I kind of thought about, but I'm kind of reluctant to do it. I was thinking as I eventually get more videos on my youtube channel. My number of subscribers could increase, I was thinking of giving this website a shout-out but it could bring a lot of idiots here in the process.

Speaking of theme months, we haven't done Color Month in forever. That's always fun.

Or Ace Combat Era, for that matter.

But theme months aren't the answer, so.

Is trolling, especially in Welcome, Welcome, that big of a problem these days? The recent threads in there have been troll-free as far as I know. As for trolling new folks in other forums, maybe? It seems like it's less about trolling and more about mods handing out silly infractions until the new person gives up trying to figure out what they've done wrong and just leave. Sure it's funny, but it does drive away any hope of new membership.

There's trolling going on in general, but since we all know each other here, it doesn't strike me as a big deal. If you've survived on GFF this long, you've developed a thick skin for that sort of thing.

The lazy bit I definitely agree with, and I'm guilty of it too. Also, we've sort of reached the "Simpsons did it" level, where you think of a thread idea, and realize it's already been done.

I'll get yelled at, but I'd say any new blood is better than none. It's not like we mods have much work on our hands these days, and I'd personally be happy to police new folks (though I'd be more lenient than most would like, I'd wager).

Why does everyone assume everyone else is going to yell at them for trying to increase the userbase?

Who are these mythical people who DON'T want forum activity that you're all so scared of?

Honestly.

It's not that they're mythical, it's that it's much more productive not to mention them by name as then they'll march in pretending to be offended and derail the whole thread.

Not to say that their GOAL is to stifle activity, but rather that their behavior stifles activity perhaps by accident and they would rather see that continue than, say, modify their own douchery.

Nutty mentions mods handing out infractions for dumb shit and then refusing to explain themselves. We don't need to tell you who's doing the lion's share of that, do we?

Obviously not, but I refer more to the "they" who would shut down any of these planned initiatives at the source, and even those-who-shall-not-be-named wouldn't fuck with those.

I shall be your aegis, folks. If you want to be more direct about it, go ahead.

Well, I like pang's suggestion for a front page announcement thing. That will really help in getting attention and encourage members to participate since most people are too lazy to dig up interesting threads. So if we can re-arrange the threads in such a way that the ones who are attract discussion are easier to find.

Theme months are fun and I'm for it. And I've always liked GFF because of the moderation. Some boards are filled with idots who can't type properly, and proper moderation on forum behavior really helps in keeping everyone in check and make the place a better environment for discussion (also to practice proper english).

As annoying as it was for me to figure who was who, the Kirby Week, RGB Colors, etc., theme weeks and months were a blast, we should have those again :)

Seconding Pang's suggestion about the top board ALERT: THING IS HAPPENING SOON idea.

When is Plane Week again?

(I call dibs on RAZGRIZ squadron again this year!)

I think that one of the reasons that things seem slow here is that so much of the community has moved to other modes of communication. Stuff like GFChat is typically full of people, many of whom rarely post on the forums proper.

When the Mom's Basement subforum is one of the most active around, something is up. I haven't seen a new popular thread come up in a long time, and the Testing Thread is mostly dead, whereas it was practically a board version of GFChat when i first got here a year and a half ago. It seems like everyone is just out of ideas, which is sad. Even when an exciting new thread does come up, no one notices without posts in ChocoJournals and GFChat being warned. Even Chocojournals are starting to decline. A few days ago i noticed that only 3 or 4 journals had been commented on in the previous 24 hours. It seems that people are simply either choosing to find other ways of communicating or simply moving away from Gamingforce. I hope that if it is the latter, we experience some sort of mass return before long.

That said, Ace Combat Era looked like great fun. I am anxiously awaiting my own chance to join the GFF Air Force.

The journals are the closest thing GFF has to Facebook. I think a lot of the people who are sticking to journals are the people who have become more and more comfortable with that style of socializing rather than the forum style.

Just shut down the gurnals for a couple of weeks. It wouldn't be that devastating.

Also, I would second Pang on the chasing noobs away dealio, but I'd probably just get tempbanned for it again.
A schedule of events wouldn't hurt. It could replace the latest 5 posts area on the front page. All that thing does anyways is help people assume nothing is happening and then quickly navigate away.

A huge part of it is just drawing people here in general. We don't have the insiders of GAF (who doesn't want to come watch Vic Ireland melt down daily?), or the mass hosting of some other forums.

I mean, sure, bitch about driving newbs away all you want, but how many welcome welcome threads are there? 2 a month? Maybe?

We can worry about behavioural problems all we like, but unless we actually have new people popping in at the rate of at least one a week, not much hope in us growing just because we play nice.

Let's make a wet t-shirt contest or something. But with attractive girls not from the internet. That'll do it.

P.S.

Yes, we're usually a little harsh on new people, but we've -always- been hard on people who come in and say they're pandas without fur. It's just we haven't had any great new members for a while. However, it wouldn't take much for us to back off them a bit.

Zeph, we're trying to come up with ways to improve Gamingforce, not kill it entirely. (Seriously, a little more than a week ago I had two entries 24 hours apart in the top 10 most recent journal list, and then when we came home from Sebago there had only been three journals commented in in the previous 24 hours.) Following up with:

It's also easier to regulate the conversation to fit your desires (I believe they call it "e-forting").

If the idea is to get people away from the journals and into the forums then I suppose the right course of action would be to determine what makes the journals more appealing than the forums themselves (if there is any reason besides being able to make an e-fort).

Sounds to me like you're suggesting a GFF mixer. But dragging the Concert Hall people into the rest of the forums might be difficult.

This might not be a popular idea, but we seem to have a lot of sub-forums that just don't see much action. Combine that with the fact that we have a large selection of subforums and new people might be overwhelmed. (I know the counter-argument to this already, but we're not Something Awful. We're not NeoGAF either. We simply don't have that many people running around here at all hours.) We have thread prefixes and people use them, so there's really no reason why we couldn't merge more of the subforums together. Creator's Cafe and I make a bitch sandwich could be merged into a umbrella creativity subforum and, even more outrageously, maybe even merge Media Center and Video Gaming. :gape:

I just crunched some numbers regarding our new members. The tl;dr version is spoilerized, the summary is after. (Total # of members, total number of posts, any members with more than 10 posts are listed with the number of posts, where they post, and their current status if they haven't shown any activity in a while)Since January 1 this year, we've had 1,162 new registrees. All new registrees have accounted for 707 posts total, and the 16 members who have more than 10 posts account for 457 posts between themselves, accounting for about 65% of the posts among new members this calendar year.

And at least one of those new members is likely a dupe. And another is effectively banned.

13 relatively active new members out of 1162 new registrees.

I'm sure this is interesting to no one.

A lot of those are spambots. Styphon literally catches about a million a day.

Changing the new user registration captcha system to ReCaptcha should eliminate 900,000 of them.

It's fairly clear that active new membership (as opposed to sheet-music-filching membership) is in the pits because we literally offer no reason for anyone to stop by. We have one method of recruitment; word of mouth. And even if we WERE all aggressively attempting to drag our friends onto the board (I do not recommend this course of action), it's a tough sell.

"You should stop by this forum!"

"Why?"

"Because of... the... I told you to, that's why."

SOMETHING interesting needs to be on the GFF.org frontpage, for starters. While your glowing reviews of old SNES games are all very nice, the casual visitor does not give a shit what your opinion of Super Metroid is.

(Even if someone DID want to read GFF for the articles, where the fuck are the archives? Why is there a "search box" that's actually a nonfunctional image? Why is the site's tagline a prehistoric chantard meme? These things do not inspire confidence in the reader.)

True enough, Pang, but WHAT should we put on the frontpage? You're just criticizing shit and not suggesting solutions, you dick.

We have to find a niche. I can't think of any way that, say, a Google search would ever bring anyone here. Now, our niche at one time was offering big ugly heaps of mp3s. Obviously that's not an option anymore. But we still have stuff. A lot of stuff. We draw, we write, we make music and movies and weird little dolls from yarn. And these things can be CAPITALIZED UPON.

Like, for example. Sometime I make video game comics. This is hardly the most creative new idea in the world. But it is SOMETHING. Some of us like doodling pictures of Sephiroth with dicks in his ear. That's creepy! But it is SOMETHING. And it can be something that, instead of all of us having 300 different backwater sites, we could all have one really BIG backwater site! With like Digg links and Stumble and Facebook Likes and all that Web 2.0 happy crappy. Even if only 1 in 20 things even gets the slightest passing notice then that's still a lot more notice than we're currently getting with our current publicity strategy of "....."

PUT YOUR SHIT IN THIS BUCKET. BE THE FIRST AMONG YOUR FRIENDS TO LIKE SHITBUCKET

Edit: This probably comes off a bit more belligerent than I intended

I think Pang's idea of an announcement of activities (Drink On, Anime Streaming, GFF Radio, shit like that) is a great idea. I know it would work for me. I only remember to go join in on things when I, like Pang said, stumble on the thread or Acer IMs me and invites me.

I don't think it should be one of those sticky announcement... things either. There are a million of those all over the place, and really, I just ignore them now.

I like the whole Recently Posted method... is there a way we could try that? You know, when you go to the main page, how there's the Recently Propped and Recently Posted thing which you have the option to hide? That's a great feature. Why not use it more? Especially to notify folks of events that are coming up in the near future.

Meanwhile, the activities are out there. People are DEFINITELY hosting their own shit, but they're just not talking about it too much around here. They could definitely get MORE forum involvement if they did, but who knows how much.

As far as NEW members, we need to find a way to ENCOURAGE posting, not DISCOURAGING posting. Right now, it could be argued that it is neutral on that basis.

Maybe if we brought back the HP bars, we could get people more interested in upping their postcount again ahahaha

Actually, I have an idea for this.

We do have a Ventrilo server put up now, so what we can do, is have a music bot running in there. I haven't quite figured it out yet, but there is a way for a user in vent to broadcast/run a playlist of tunes to vent and it will just be like listening to someone else's iTunes on random mixer.



It may not be much but I had a feeling if something similar to what the FTP exchanges were available, the musically inclined group and the community-based group would have a chance to mingle together.

Like for example, have some of the CH people volunteer to broadcast music in there (it's like the radio! what a concept! You can't listen to what you want exactly, but what they play is actually pretty good and you may not haven't heard of it!)--if people randomly show up to listen and get a chance to meet and greet, great. If not, who cares. The server is still there for anyone to use.

Adding recaptcha to registration will eliminate all but the actual human spammers, and it's easy as heck to set up on vbulletin. Don't know if it's a feature supported by 3.6.8, though.

During the first year or two I actively posted here, I got the impression that the community was extremely hostile to new faces. Far more so than anywhere else I've ever posted. It might just be a consequence of the close-knit nature of GFF, but the atmosphere here has always struck me as one that'd intimidate people who weren't already forum-hardened into leaving almost immediately.

always thought this place needed to collectively take a deep breath and count to ten

This is what I have been saying for years now

I actually thought of you when I wrote that. <3

Improving Gamingforce, eh?

Pang is right about how tough people here make it for newbies. Maybe less so lately, but that's probably because we've driven everybody away and all the new people that come here see the welcome threads that derail into trolling and other bullshittery and just don't bother. I think we should purge the Welcome Welcome forum and start fresh, and have mods be a bit more strict there than in other places. If Welcome Welcome is people's first impression of GFF, it's a pretty lousy one.

I agree it's cliquey but I think you're being awfully unfair singling us out considering Chat Cabal is a much bigger influence over board confusion than us communicating via our journals. Without fail, whenever there's some inside joke or name change or table-stretching avatar that confuses the fuck out of people, it's something that the Chat crew found funny and don't feel the need to explain to anybody else. However, Mo0 raises a good point about how a lot of us have turned to other methods of communication, and meet crew could probably shoulder some of THAT blame, since meeting each other in real life does tend to open up methods of communication a bit more. Speaking personally, I can say that a major reason I stick around GFF these days is primarily to stay in touch with the people I've met, so I mostly hang around the journals for that reason.

I do like being a member of the community at large, though, and agree that things could be better and more active around here, so I propose a few ideas:

1. Kill the rule that says we can't revive dead threads. I don't see why any discussion should have a moratorium on it. A lot of people, newbies especially, come here and ignore the "dead thread" rule, and then get shit on for breaking it. Honestly, who the hell cares? Let's revive some dead threads, I'm sure lots of us have new things to say, so let's open those back up.

2. Less strictness on discussion topics in general. I always got the sense that making a new thread on GFF required the topic to be one that can be discussed thoughtfully, and thus, fewer threads are created. Whereas with GameFAQs, the thread can be about anything, and thus, thousands are created every 14 minutes about FFVII alone. Maybe we should find a middleground somewhere? Open up the media center and make a Movies subforum, and allow people to create movie-specific threads, for example. Stuff like that. Let's broaden our sights a bit more on what's discussable vs. what's considered lackluster.

3. Link the forums to VGMdb visitors. I'm not sure if we do this already, but if not, I see no reason not to. Maybe we could talk to them about putting discussion links on the site that link to Gamingforce.

4. Stricter trolling enforcement. Yeah yeah, I'm sure some people will come in here and say how trolling isn't a problem anymore, and to them I say that while I agree, I only agree because there's no activity for the trolls to take advantage of these days. And not just trolling in the threads with shitty attack posts, but mod trolling as well, which I'd argue is a far more obnoxious problem. Shin banning me from the meet thread and handing out infractions to try and increase discussion (lol) is a terrific example of this.

I don't think it's about having thick skin, nutty. I think it's just that some people, myself included, have a lower tolerance for stupid bullshit than others. Trolling doesn't hurt my feelings, but it does annoy me and make me want to seek discussion elsewhere with other people (facebook or the journals). Before the meets, one of the reasons I stuck around with GFF back in the day was because of how strict the rules were with making sure discussions were kept civil and mature. Discussions on GFF used to be like walking into a mortar testing range. You might get caught in the crossfire, but if you're smart and post well, you can dodge the bullshit. Lately it's like walking into a minefield. You're fucked no matter what you do.

VGMdb has its own forums, though, where discussing the shit on VGMdb is basically all they do.

We have to remember in making our suggestions that Gamingforce survives on VGMdb's server out of a sense of nagging obligation. I don't think they'd spit on us if we were on fire.

And yeah, just doubling up on Krel's suggestion that people need to just chill the fuck out. WE HAVE ALWAYS HARASSED PEOPLE FOR X isn't an excuse, it's a confession.

I do feel like there should be a friendlier attitude regarding topics of conversation around here.

I mean, yea, some shitty member comes in and posts about how girls hate him and how can he improve and then immediately gets told that he's a prat, to shut up and stop posting.

Sure, he's a fucking idiot. But let him post. He can be entertainment if anything. The instant you get hostile with a member, it sends a message. Most people won't stick around after getting a light thrashing.

Sometimes, the way some people get treated on here really discourages others from posting. I know I've avoided certain topics or replying in certain threads just because I don't want to get trolled, yelled at, ridiculed, ee tee see.

I'm not blaming anyone. I'm just suggesting maybe a different approach to what some people perceive as stupidity could both provide more entertaining posts and encourage more open posting among people who may feel threatened or whateverthefuck

Another thing: We seem to have a SA style approach to threads, that of focusing on megathreads just to avoid clutter. The problem is, we don't have nearly the activity level to justify that. Why can't threads get created about smaller topics? They may get a few posts each, but that still looks better than having 3 months' worth of threads visible on the first page of a forum.

I'm just waiting 'til the Political Palace and the Quiet Place get merged. Now THAT would make for interesting discussions. :p

On topic now, I tend to disagree with welcoming just anyone with open arms to the forums and letting threads be created that aren't at least somewhat thought out and different form the last 20 threads that were created. I'm not much the socializing type whether in real life or online, and this is about the only place I've ever come to consistently for that precise purpose for as long as I have. It is as far as online places go anyway. A big part of the reason this is has to do with the fact that I know if I come here and read a thread, I'm almost guaranteed to find some food for thought on the subject of the thread. This is a rarity as far as I've seen on internet forums, and throwing that away simply for the sake of having more movement seems like a shame to me. I'm sure many forums have interesting threads buried beneath the thousands of shitty ones about X video game character is hotter than Y, and post your 100 best video games of all times, and so on. I keep coming back here on a regular basis because I know that if I have to sift through shit to find something worth reading I won't spend an hour looking.

I do agree however that a bit more activity would be welcome, and the only way I see that it would be possible to do that without sacrificing the things that make this place great would be to find a way to get more visibility. Be it through advertising of some big event that we would organize on the boards or simply through everyone doing their part in coaxing friends to join for a given aspect of the site, there would be ways to attract new people without having to lower the level of discussion to the lowest common denominator of the internets.

Yeah... I don't think I made a Welcome, Welcome post for myself back when I first joined in 2003, but I'm amazed I didn't get trolled/flamed for the username I had then. People were quite civil. (I think I may have gotten the occasional Yamanamana annoyance in some thread somewhere along the lines, but nothing compared to the hostility we show to every new blood that seems to show up nowadays.)

You lot saying that people being mean to newbies is why the place is quiet is laughable bullshit. We don't get any newbies and as Deni pointed out, all the Welcome threads from the last six months or so have been entirely civil and friendly. We're not overly hostile, there's not enough activity for it. I don't know how some of you kids have got so butthurt about trolling and being the victim of random chat jokes because frankly, without that there'd basically be nothing here. I agree that certain people have been far too infraction-happy with what new members we have had and I discussed it at length in the Hut but to be fair, what newbs have been run off by it were basically exceptionally fucking boring idiots and we're better off with no posts than their posts.

Pang is entirely correct. There's a fuckton of cool stuff here but it's incredibly well hidden. We have all those stream things Acer does, we have the radio thing, we have chat and the drink-ons, we have an active community of Xbox Live players that actually attracts new members (Shake posts in the Halo thread, that counts), we have a bunch of incredibly eloquent and creative people who are all more than capable of making awesome posts (Just look at Daravon's Halo thread OP or all the Gamers Month posts) and we have a burgeoning DnD community which results in threads as funny as anything posted on sites like Darths & Droids which has millions of visitors.

The problem is simply one of apathy. Nobody does anything and when someone has a good idea, they rarely act on it and even more rarely get any support. It's all well and good bleating about how mean everyone is here but if everyone else actually posted stuff then very quickly what little actual trolling foes on here would quickly be buried. Back when I joined this place was way more hostile than it is now and yet we attracted hundreds of active members.

We need to capitalise on our strengths. A proper front page would be a good start and I'm surprised that the idea of member reviews didn't kick off better since most reviews here are way better than any crap from Gamestop. An events calendar is a top idea too, especially with big flashing announcements. I also think people should just go ahead an act on any ideas they have. Let's be honest, although instances of mods fucking about (Primarily out of boredom rather than maliciousness) are up, instances of mods actually moderating threads are pretty fucking slim lately. I'm up for ditching the thread necromancy rule but that only comes up once in a blue moon anyway.

A front page for a small-ish forum is a bad idea. Conversion rate for registration is far higher when people land directly on the forum index. Most won't even realise this place has a message board if they don't see one immediately upon arrival.

I'd wager most of the incoming traffic here is driven by people finding individual threads through google. Incite people to join and they'll do so.

Most of our members are somehow related to Gamingforce Audio.

We've had tons of factions split off from us that were originally part of that user base.

I mean, I'm just saying, VGM was (is?????) pretty kool.

Well, let's review some rules/guidelines, shall we?
Spoilers have been used to cut out rule-details to make this post simple and to the point.

Reviewing the current state of GFF where the next thread down from the top most hasn't been updated in like 2 months, Number 1 and 2 seem to conflict (not just in Political Palace but overall across the board). It's true the same exact conversation topics shouldn't be made into new threads, but at the current activity rate, it almost makes sense to start over again. The general rule-of-thumb about old threads when this place was getting multiple threads in sub-forums on a daily basis was that 3 months since the last post or couple pages within the sub-forum view. Since new threads are sparse and we're looking at an activity level equivalent to seismic activity/Earthquakes in North Dakota, we may want to review it and see if there's a reasonable compromise.
Number 7 seems like it's a blatant NO on political discussion on the topic, which in the year 2010, seems like it's doing the community no good to keep around this rule. There's been plenty of good, healthy, sane and civil conversations regarding the topic so I don't see why prohibiting people from talking about it openly can lead to something harmful to the community in general. (My two cents, nothing against Styphon or the decision made by admins/mods at the time of inauguration of said rules.)

Let's see if I can categorize the responses/suggestions so far, and I'll try to keep it updated in the first post:

Focusing on the improvements, I strongly support a redesign of at least the initial layout of the front page of the forums (not the "front page", but the page most of us see when we log in). The "5 Recent Posts" encourages apathy, and we'd be much better served with some promotion of events. I'm sure Acer could somehow advertise his nightly streams, and BlogTalkRadio has a plugin that could stream GFF Radio right on the front page. The last Drink-on didn't get nearly the promotion it should have.

I'm really surprised thread necromancy is still enforced. When you have one active thread in each forum, why not allow a little necromancy?

The big question is, what could we do to modernize ourselves? What's popular these days, Facebook, Twitter, etc.? Sure, groan all you want, but they're successful, and many of us use them. Is there some lesson that can be learned and incorporated here? Is there some way to update our antiquated arcade to encourage more user interaction (i.e., something cooperative)?

Is there someway to integrate journals with forums? I think Aussie-Nintendo's forums are kind of neat, in that any time an article is posted, it gets added as a forum thread. What if we had journals work more like forum posts? A user makes a journal, it gets added to the "Journals" subforum. If a mod decides it's worth discussing, it can be moved to a more appropriate subforum. A user could still close their own journal threads, since they're the creator. Sure, they couldn't delete them (maybe that permission could somehow be granted in that subforum?), but it's more fun if you can't delete your drunken journal entry the next morning.

While we're on the topic of facebook, something I've always thought would be cool is the ability to tag your friends in journal entries or posts. Just a quick thought, more to come later.

I am decidedly not okay with the facebook-ing, or gameFAQsing, or MySpaceing of GFF.

The solution to a problem is not to become just as bad as other shitty media. We've never wanted to be a major center of activity because of the sheer amount of idiocy that requires. We've always stood away from that, and this is no way to make it better.

Sprout, the way to fix a cliquey site is not to start tagging individual members to entries or posts.

The LAST thing this place needs is to start modeling itself on the idiocy that is facebook or twitter. Short messages, devoid of any sort of context and just nothing but superficial garbage. I will take a smaller membership any day of the week (yes, I know, we need more people than we have now) to avoid that sort of forum culture. We've always been above that, and it is probably one of the things we can be really proud about on this board. We don't need more furby to make this place better. Facebook and twitter appeal to people who want their world wrapped up in under a paragraph. Preferably under three sentences. I'd like to think most of the people here are better than that.

So yes, we have to make changes, but I will firmly oppose changes that dumb down our presentation to the point where we might as well be GameFAQs or a Twitter feed.

I'm not saying we need to stoop to the posting quality of Facebook or Twitter, but we have to evolve or die. If you're content to let GFF fade away as a horse and buggy while everyone else on the internet is driving a fancy car, so be it, but if we can modernize things a bit, maybe we attract some new blood.

Or we can just go back to 1995 and make the site run in frames. Rename ourselves Framingforce Interactive Frames.

God, am I going to agree with Deni. It hurtssss usssss

You don't want to send traffic away to Tweeterspaceface. I wouldn't try to use it. I would try to improve connections here and now, not using outside communications. We need to work here, not there.

I mean, I know that sometimes, I will communicate with people on FB over GFF. Sooo I'm guilty. And I will try to correct this.

Didn't we have some kind of "instant messaging" capabilities on here for a whole what, 2 hours once when Bobo was around?

And honestly? I would rather keep my FBing, blogging, whatever SEGREGATED from here. There are just some things I'd rather you people not use against me.

http://www.gamingforce.org/forums/im...ons/icon14.gif

Furthermore, like nutty said, nobody is saying we need to become the next Facebook. Just look at what made them successful as a communications platform, look at what could potential make us more successful as a communication message board, and apply it however possible. I think the idea of tagging members in journals or posts is hardly going to transform GFF into facebook, but merely implementing something that might wash away some of that apathy and give people more incentive to stay active and even incentive to join.

There are ways to modernize without dumbing down, RadioMan.

It's not a matter of let us be a buggy while people drive sports cars. It is a matter of if we're going to modernize, let's make sure we modernize in a way that isn't fucking ridiculous. Because that sports car you mention looks a hell of a lot like a Honda Element, and anyone with half a brain is laughing at the poor sap driving it. Even if he is worth a couple million.

I like Pang's thoughts of instead of completely overhauling everything good we have into something terrible, just for the sake of being trendy, we find a way to accentuate the amazing things we do have.

Bring the mom's basement to the front. Incorporate Acer's numerous streams and shorty's ventrilo to the front page, to give them more prominence. If we could somehow begin to actually show people the huge amount of activity that goes on off these boards, we'd definitely have more people sticking around. We don't have to sell our souls to get new people, we just have to market ourselves differently.

We have a nearly constantly busy chat room, we have, what, like... five streams a week of people team watching anime. We have an active group of chatters who watch certain tv shows/sports shows together. We have a huge network of people who are close outside the boards. We have meets. We have games of D&D that are so hilarious and creative I've shown them to people who hate D&D and their first question is: "Is the game always this good?" We have a weekly radio show that is brilliant (except when nutty tries to invite simply majestic). We have one of the greatest Video Game music cataloging sites on the net.

We aren't short on kick ass things, we're just doing a really good job of making sure as few people as possible participate in them. The LAST thing we need to do is make the place MORE glossy and try and make content even more trunctated. Facebook and Twitter have shitty discussions because they're designed to make erudite, intelligent conversation impossible. We should not, and can not, go that route. Spruce the place up, make the kick ass things we do more obvious, do more kick ass things. Do not make it shitty just to make it popular.

The concept is ridiculous.

P.S.

Sprout. The thumbs up and down thing is there purely to avoid short "your idea is stupid/good" messages. They exist to avoid twitter idiocy, not to encourage it.

It'd be neat to do something along the lines of Prime Gamer except not restricted to game reviews. Just let people post stuff that goes on a WordPress blog. It's not something we'd ever advertise the hell out of, but it's a better and more modern frontpage than what we have now.

I agree 100% and I think a lot of this stuff can be worked into a GFF event calendar system or whatever. The more I think about it, the more it seems that what we are best at is events and community-driven games. We should be working on bringing these to the forefront, and creating new ones as well. Hell, Gamingforce might as well refer to message board games instead of video games.

If there is a serious consideration to replace the top 5 posts with an events feed instead, I'd also like to suggest a small forum highlight ticker as well. It could be randomly generated to suggest somebody read a currently active thread, a post that received a certain amount of props, a new thread/release in the VGM section. It's open to creativity.


And along the lines of needing advertisement, what the fuck are we going to advertise on? Half of the VGM community has left us high and dry, there's not a major non-forum community anymore. The site that bobo made back in the day for people to host their own pages for art and music was kinda kool, but that's gone.
Basically everything about this fucking place is word of mouth.

I propose Bring Your Kids to Gamingforce day!

Who said anything about advertising?

Via multiple mouths, including yours.

Except VGMdb is part of this site, and I meant by pushing what we do on GFF proper.

So the only mention of advertising as you mean it was on Angel's youtube channel.

So, no. Not really what you said at all. Just people talking about how we present things we already have.

I'd be all for a quick, obvious link to get into #gfchat somewhere at the top of the page.

Well, there is a link to Gamingforce on VGMdb on this page.

And while I hadn't looked at VGMdb's forums until just now, all of the subforums are related to music discussion. There is no section for "General Discussion", "Off Topic", nothing.

So I'm a bit tepid to the idea that bringing GFF to their attention in a more pronounced way (or, more severely, merging the two forums, if that ever came up) will have much impact on Gamingforce, aside from that in the Concert Hall, the regulars of which don't spend much time, if any, in the "Gamingforce" sections of the forums or in the journals.

Nevertheless, if the idea is to seek an immediate influx of members, VGMdb is the likeliest well to tap.

Additional Spam:
What, you want something more direct than Quick Links > ChocoChat? You lazy bastard.

I'm not sure that "get people into chat faster" really solves the problems we're discussing, RR. If we could integrate chat INTO the board, though (there must be a plugin for that somewhere), that would be awesome and might help to fade out the sharp line between chat regs and chat negs.

edit: never noticed that "chocochat" business before but anything involving java popups is going to be inherently undesirable to a lot of people. There must be a better way to do it without spawning new windows.

Honestly this is probably one of the fastest ideas things we could do. There's a lot of nostalgia in the design but it's stuck in 2001 and looks it. Just a big wall of the same blue color, doesn't eyecatch at all. We know Bobo was a fuckup, why have we retained his design sense? Why have we retained his moderator picks? Does anyone around here really specialize in web design? This is something we could get cracking on right away, and have a big pile of pngs and css files ready to dump on the first admin who actually pays attention to our little project here. Hell, let's just rehaul the goddamn logo first.

I know some people will want to resist the idea of a full-body overhaul, but it's a grim necessity. Don't be a grognard. We don't need to paint flames on the hood but by god let's at least buff off the inch-deep coating of rust. If I can bring myself to agree that Devo then you can bear to dispose of that old swoosh.

As much as a forum redesign sounds like a good idea it is hard work. It took CHz a couple days just to sepia and green the place up for Gaminfort and Gaminfort Yuletide Edition. A good deal of that grief was probably spent skinning the journals which is a hard feature to update without losing everything which is why we're stuck on such an old version of vBulletin. As much as I love chocojournal it is a real hindrance in getting this place moderned up. The other problem with updating vBulletin is the various custom stuff we have like dice roller and other misc. bbcode. Oh but we only have to reskin the place, not upgrade the vBulletin you say. Well I suppose so, but if you're going to go through all that trouble to get the place up to spec looks-wise shouldn't it's framework too?

That said I'm totally interested in seeing what people would like this place to look like. I've certainly thought about it myself.

Shit, I didn't realize how far behind GF was on VB updates. No wonder you guys are so hesitant to install plugins and shit. Apparently the newest versions come with built-in personal user blogs so there's a CJ replacement just waiting for us to take it. Shares the forum skin, too! Most of the other stuff like the dice roller etc has alternatives for the new revisions as well, hanging onto old & busted because other old & busteds are stuck to it with duct tape is for suckas.

Chocojournal was a pretty amazing thing back when it was created in 2004 or whatever but nowadays? Honestly a lot of people might object to losing their old journal entries but it's not like we haven't survived wipes before this. At least there'd be a warning and they could back up their shit. Maybe you guys could back it all up on the database end, not sure how possible that is. OR! You could just move the whole old CJ system to a new .php address, so people could look at it if they wanted but it wouldn't need to share the new & improved forum looks. Just remove all the buttons for adding new entries and comments and all that jazz. READ ONLY

Not that the creative group can't be working on shit at the same time as the server-access group, things like "this is the logo" and "these are good colors" are pretty applicable regardless of version.

I know this is a lot of hassle for you guys and I probably make it sound a lot easier than it really is, but I'm just saying this is totally doable if you just NO FEAR this shit.

I love this. If we do a re-design, it should be a community-wide re-design that everybody can contribute, take part in, and vote on.

I would hate to lose my many many entries, but I'm not against a complete overhaul of the journal system. Backing up the old journals wouldn't be too hard but having them stored on the server somewhere would be ideal.

How far behind are we on VB? What exactly has changed since our last update?

In regards to the journals, I suggest:

Take down the logo and put up a notice that the journals will get wiped due to upgrades at a certain time on a certain day, and to USE THE BACK UP FEATURE. After that, it's a clean slate and the journals'll be updated. And I mean, take your time about it.

Maybe an "import" feature could be coded in even, so you could actually put the shit BACK into your journals (though not necessary)

I may have completely misunderstood Acer though (I read a little quickly because I was excited).

Are we considering getting RID of journals? 'Cause I'll be sooooo sadface about that. The journals are an awesome feature here, and I'd love to see them maintained, let alone upgraded

With a bit of artful programming, it shouldn't be impossible to import old journal entries into the new vBulletin blog system. I'm not saying it would be easy, or that it should be done, but with sufficient will, it should be possible. It is just a matter of copying and pasting database entries into the proper tables...

I doubt we'll get rid of journals, but it can be revised per later versions of vB.

A suggestion that is more cosmetic than anything else: fix the broken thread title header images for things like [music] [televsision] [sports] etc, or get rid of them. They've been broken forever.

Couldn't we do it with .csv importation, if that capability exists in the vB thingie? (PAng tells me vB does have the journal feature in a sense)

I mean, if we're saying the journals are the only thing holding us back from a re-vamp.... well. Seems like the obvious place to start, cosmetically (and I DO agree with Devo on that)

I don't think anybody's suggesting that at all. The point was that admin have been holding off making other improvements because of the dead weight of the old CJ system, and we're just looking for ways to jettison it while maintaining a similar functionality. Obviously the new system would be different in many ways and some folks would have trouble adjusting but I think it's a necessary surgery at this point.

In a SENSE we'd "get rid of" the journals, because we'd replace them with all-new journals. Which, IN THEORY, you could then port all your old entries into. No guarantee that would work, but.

STOP ASKING IF YOU SHOULD MAKE A THREAD AND MAKE A THREAD

I like the old two-tone blue. :(

(Can I keep it as a setting somewhere.)

Also, pang, I was thinking the same thing with some sort of direct plugin for the boards so you could see chat happening as you browse around. I mostly figured having chat show up in a somewhat more prominent way would show people there is some activity going on here.

Fuck yes, THIS. Blue owns. Everything should be blue. Blue, blue, blue!

It's just a matter of CHz's time versus everybody else's time. I'm pretty sure CHz's time is p valuable to him though so don't get your hopes up.

Yeah well the whole discussion depends on administrative access to the forum files being granted to someone who both has free time and gives a shit so uh honestly this whole thread is pretty pie-sky so we might as well just ask for free ponies as long as we're on a roll here.

Someone mentioned customizable skins for the newer version of vBulletin. Couldn't that be incorporated as a style? i.e., New and Improved look, Old School GFF look, etc.

Custom skins are fun and all but there should be a set default style/skin that most people will end up using. People tend to make sigs that use the gff blue as a background to achieve a transparency effect. Basically I'm saying it's your choice to be different and see sigs that don't match your style's background is all.

Surely the obvious solution to the users losing journals thing would be for us to just back the whole lot up and dump it back on the server under gamingforce.org/journals? I mean, with no attachments, the journals must take up a tiny amount of server space and can't we port the journals into an archive somehow? If they're just an archive then we don't even need any commenting functionality. I know literally nothing about the tech behind such things but it strikes me as something that surely isn't that hard, given we already have backup functionality.

A redesign is a great idea. A new logo competition is a great idea too. There is no point in hanging onto to things for the sake of it.

I would suggest that we need to archive the old journals, upgrade to more recent software that supports similar things anyway, redesign, and get a new logo for starters.

Once that's done, we need to think about how to promote our best stuff. One idea might be to combine the recent props and recent posts thing and have a longer list of the most heavily propped posts in the last 24 hours or so. I would suggest having a feed of the DnD threads to the front page somewhere, but a version you can't post in so as not to lead to interupting posts. Then setup a proper events calendar showing regular and one-off things.

Someone needs to get hold of Miles and Blah to get them involved in this discussion. If nothing else so they can give requisite access to someone who can be arsed to action all this.

Some folks have suggested upgrading our version of vBulletin; how much does that cost. Would we need to have another donation event?

If we're upgrading, doesn't the current version of vBulletin have support for RSS? Not to beat a dead horse, but some of us have been wanting that for years.

Upgrading to VBulletin 4 will cost $175. $250 if you wanna throw in all those fancy CMS features.

Compare the features: http://www.vbulletin.com/index.php?do=features

Only the expensive version seems to have RSS for threads and blogs.

While I concur that there is no need to emulate Facebook or Twitter, there is something we can learn from the games within Facebook. Although most are casual games that require merely a few clicks to play, people keep returning and returning to these games on a clockwork basis. Perhaps the Arcade can be revamped to draw in, and more importantly, keep some new blood.

Many of the Facebook games lets you spend money to get ahead in the game, and a small minority of people do seem to bite. This can possibly be a small way to recover server costs, in lieu of outright donations.

24/7 Santa Sleigh / Ace Combat action, on a separate page maybe? Lolocaust 2.0?

Yes, the upgrade would be kind of costly (honestly we're probably small enough that we could get away with piracy, but why risk it?). Still, a quick whip-crack in the direction of the donation page is probably enough to solve that issue; I know donations probably trickled out pretty quickly after the initial rush but people here can be very generous if you give them some kind of immediate prompt. This is assuming they've let their vb license expire, but they probably have.

I upgraded Concert Hall Interactive to vb 4.0 just to see what it looked like, and damn. This needs to happen.

$285 is chump change compared to the meet. We should be able to raise that in a week. Seriously.

I'd love to see GFF reach the modern age.

Hell, if no one else has the time or wherewithal to do it I'd even volunteer to do the upgrade myself. I need the practice.

Yeah, was gonna say that I'd be happy to front the cost of upgrade if you guys decide to go forward with this. I can afford that at least.

There's some sort of sexy catch involved here, isn't there.

You're stepping up for that, Nutty?

Thank god, I'm getting sick of shoving socks down my pants to appease him.

Additional Spam:
And honestly I'm sick of wearing the fake beard too

but it helps complete the illusion

You're doing it wrong. You're supposed to put the socks on underneath the sandals.

ONLY YOU ARE INTO THAT.

NOT RADEZ. YOU.

The license has not expired. The update hasn't happened because of the sheer amount of recoding necessary to make half the features we take for granted work.

Additional Spam:
This is a AWFUL idea (that integration thing I mean) but I will turn the greentext on the front to a mibbit link. One click and you're in a web browser window for it. I will add a small link next to it that's in the irc:// format.

EDIT EDIT:

OH WELL THAT'S A SILLY PLACE FOR IT

But why? :(

have you been in chat since 2002?

Honestly, chat moves way too fast to be at all readable or usable as a small window on the main page.

Also, the only premade plugin I know of for modern vB is just a mibbit front end, so if you're going to go to mibbit and have a new tab or window for it in order to actually read it....you might as well go to mibbit proper.

There are other webchat applications, obviously, but having a feed for the fast moving gfchat would be difficult to follow or implement in any way that's not "a new tab" or "new window" or what have you and still be user friendly, and in that case why even bother?

I go in there like once a year, and wait around a couple hours hoping something funny will happen. My expectations have not, as such, been challenged.

But okay if you guys think it would compromise the "useability" of #gfchat I'll bow to your wisdom. Just tryin' to bring your creepy separatist camp into the fold~

"Fast moving" compared to the forum, sure.

It at least provides the illusion of it being a PART OF the forums, so.

It's not nearly so fast anymore, Pang. Jump in already.

Actually my point was that gfchat can get offensive and if the point is to motivate people to participate more, maybe we shouldn't offend them right off the bat, kind of a homage to what you were saying initially and all.

Also (speaking as a user of the internet) I've always hated active chat window widgets on pages where I'm just trying to browse content. They're slow to load, and they move quickly (or quickly enough to attract my attention while I'm trying to read about Mo0's latest antics). I'm not saying it's wholly a bad idea though - maybe a slightly filtered version could exist, like taking select quotes out of context (not QOOC but more like how chat statistic pages are done) and posting it somewhere. "See what chat brigade is talking about!" sort of thing. Dunno.

One of the better parts of Gamingforce was that it use to be more about posts and less about ... internetisms, if that makes sense. I think I first came her via Jessykins to find something involving Syndicate Wars because this was some place to find stuff out when it came to gaming - and now its a place you come to to throw Christians to lions and jews to panthers and white women to black men.

(Whoops, see what I did there?)

Okay, honestly though, this place has lost its edge by being without a point. I don't come here nearly as much not because of the people but more because theres no reason to talk to most people here, especially when the ones I want to talk to I have on AIM or Facebook already. Theres no good threads, the journals - though they get posted in - are rarely interesting and the rest of it is the usual suspects spinning the same posts as they were in 2002.

So how is it this place went to being called Gamingforce because it was about gaming to being called Gamingforce and being a site that tolerates music leechers, hates new people and internet humor?

Just curious. Aside from ChocoJournal, what else might need recoding? Extensions that come to mind for me are (1) dice roller (2) props and disses and (3) VBSEO, and that's it.

Yeah, I wasn't suggesting some kind of toolbar jammed onto the side of every single page or nothin', just a dedicated forum page with chat embedded in it. Clicking "Chat" is significantly less annoying than Download mIRC, try to find where they've buried the goddamn address, wait for some clown to voice me, etc. The mibbit link is a lot less hassle than things used to be but it seemed like a fun idea to, as Mo0 said, provide the illusion that hurf durf GFchat is part of GFF.

As far as props go, VB4 already include ratings for blog entries/threads, post rating probably isn't hard to get going. Journal has already been shown to be superfluous old outdated chaff that we can safely discard. DICE ROLLER! (!) I haven't checked into but honestly I would ENDURE THAT SACRIFICE for a while to get this done :(

I just thought of all sorts of markups that may or may not be part of vbulletin proper. So then, here's a list with links to equivalent vB4 hacks.

Custom Markups:

1. [columnsplit] - table bbcodes supported in VB4
2. [popup]
3. [marquee], [marqueer], and [marqueepong]
4. [blink] - Blink BBCode- The Ultimate BB Code! - vBulletin.org Forum
5. [spoiler], [spoilers], and [spoilersa] - Custom Title Spoiler Button (Smooth Version) - vBulletin.org Forum and Borgs' [BB Code] Pack For vB 4.0.2+ - vBulletin.org Forum
6. [hide] - vS-Hide Hack Resurrection - vBulletin.org Forum
7. [youtube] - JW Player: Flash Video Player | LongTail Video | Home of the JW Player
8. [mp3] - Inline Concepta Mp3 Player - XEON Series 4 - vBulletin.org Forum

Custom Thread Features:

1. Thread prefixes
2. Release listings
3. Props and Disses - [AJAX] Helpful Answers - Allow users to rate individual posts - vBulletin.org Forum
4. Dice roller - Dice Roller [BBCode] - vBulletin.org Forum
5. Automerge Double Post - Doublepost Prevention - vBulletin.org Forum
6. PM on Moderation Actions - Moderation Auto-PM v4.0.5 - vBulletin.org Forum
7. Separate Sticky from Non-sticky - Separate Sticky and Normal Threads - vBulletin.org Forum

Custom Board Features:

1. ChocoJournal - innately supported as "Blogs"
   
2. ChocoRate and Batch User Rating - innately supported as "Reputation"
   
3. ChocoSig Hosting
4. Hide Member signatures

Without knowing where to look, I can't say anything for sure, but isn't there a "marketplace" of sorts with vB extensions that could take care of some of those?

Yeah basically everything is completely replaceable and the only reason this isn't getting done is because we haven't made Acer admin yet

::implication regular admins can even do these upgrades::

::laughter.gif::

In all honesty, this is the only stuff we even really need, and even then I could argue we could do without a youtube embed.

ChocoJournal would be gone (oh no) but replaced by a journal system built into vB itself. CJ has for a long time been a major reason behind not upgrading GFF. It'd be hard to rip the bandaid off, but really, if we're talking about getting a fresh coat of paint, it can't hurt to upgrade the foundation while we're at it.

It's kind of a mystery to me what the point of even having admins without code access is. I mean either you trust a dude or you don't IMO =/

Edit: I mean I know that's not your decision or nothin' just sayin'

Does the journal system support a back-up function? Certain blogging systems like Livejournal have things that allow desktop saving.

But how else will they be able to promote people to positions of dubious distinction in the world's most hilarious game of "Let's Pretend We're In High School" this side of LiveJournal

I have made this argument too but get no love, Pang. :(

Wait I just realized that I argued for Styphon to be allowed to edit templates

And I don't want to browse GFF with red fonts on a black background

You guys have to keep in mind that all these modules are user-generated, which means we could be getting CHz-quality code, or we could be getting bobo-quality code. I know that some of the stuff we have originated as modules, but there may have been work done to make sure it's compatible with the rest of our stuff and also works to our taste. This takes time; since we had this version of vB since 2006 it doesn't seem like it takes that much time but it does. In fact, off the top of my head I can recall the "last 5 posts" thing being a module Blah downloaded, which he then had to modify when he realized there was an exploit in it. And I know half the forum couldn't live without the prop system.

If what we want is to move to a vB 4, that's what we want, but just recognize that this is a large time investment you're asking of the developers on staff just to get the new forum up to speed with the old forum, nevermind the new tchotchkes and gewgaws we want.

I'm not saying that new features wouldn't be valuable or worthwhile investing time in, either. Just don't ask so much of Skills and CHz's time.

Look as much as I'd love admin powers I've never really toyed around with databases or vBulletin. No way I could do this by myself even given the opportunity and even then holy crap.

Yeah, pretty much you require access to the server completely to do all this. Regular admins can basically do jack all.

We'd really need CHz to do this.

Yes. At the bottom of the screen there's a BACKUP tab that lets you backup in XML, CSV, and TXT. Not ideal IMO but it's something!

It's not really a level of trust issue, rather than a level of competency issue. Styphon is brilliant at bringing down the banhammer and I trust his judgement in picking out people who can monitor a forum full of miscreants, but I don't know how good he is at editing a system in which there are no constant backups made. Do you remember how Paikuhan deleted every one of his posts? And he didn't have code access.

I'm just saying I'm totally okay with admins being admins for wildly different reasons.

Yes I already presented this very logical counterargument to myself :(

I'll admit to being guilty of getting distracted by the shiny new toys vB4 would offer.

Let's be honest, though, a majority of what GFF takes for granted isn't really all that necessary, and some of it is built into vB4 out of the box. If we look at "things that had to get added to current GFF" as a list of things that will need to get done, it'll look like a much larger task than if we sit down and assess just what exactly would have to get done.

And, again, I'm volunteering to help. For selfish reasons, to be sure; I've not worked on a codebase of that size, and I want to exercise my coding muscles.

I didn't read it.

...




...

I'm glad we agree, though!

I guess I meant something that saves entries PLUS COMMENTS in XML format? :\

Another thing to point out: If we were to upgrade, it'd be a bitch and a half to get the old posts/journals imported into the new system. It's a guess based on zero knowledge of the backend, but it seems likely that the amount of hackery involved with GFF as is would make importing either impossible or horribly not worth the time it'd take.

And we did pay out the fucking nose for a hard drive fix a while ago.

Mo0 said I'm being a little too abrasive here, so let me sort of reiterate my stance.

I'm not trying to sound defeatist (especially to any baked Sassafrasses or other radio listeners) but I'm trying to be a touch realistic by letting you know just how much of an undertaking it is.

I am also trying to hammer home the point that it's not as modular as it first seems, especially on a fresh installation there. Granted, without having access to several things currently OR vB 4, I am making some assumptions. But based on what I have seen I think I'm not erring here.

I really don't want to sound like negative nancy and be shitting on this initiative. I want to help too, but I'm trying to be realistic when I say that there is a lot of loss that's going to happen if we jump straight into it, and carrying some stuff over will be quite a bit of difficult work.

I also hold the belief that we didn't pay to recover all that data those years ago to lose any forum info or anything that makes us unique because we want a fancier post-bit.

well if you want access to vb4 to poke at it I set up Forums on Saxypunch for basically this reason. I will gladly hook up anyone trustworthy with adminry if they want to poke around. Over the next week or so I'm gonna be installing plugins to see just how much functionality can be duplicated. Science!

And then I will duplicate ALL functionality and sit there with sullenly

I will concede that PROBABLY journal comments are unpreserveable and journal entries are only preservable in the form of text dumps. And some of us are really concerned about this! For some reason. So.

Also there is the legit issue that "works on vb4" is not quite the same as "works on GFF vb4" due to kludgy code here and there and ever'where

VVV the smarter way to do this is just set up a vb4 (on a separate database) and NOT TELL ANYBODY until you eventually plug in all the bells and whistles

I'm speaking purely from a general lack of knowledge on how vBulletin operates, but I have a question for Skills (and anyone else who may be trying this):

Since the conversation about upgrading has come up, has anyone tried taking a mirror copy of the core data on Gamingforce (e.g. members, posts, threads and subforums) and trying vB4 to see how it will work? Or is importing this data into an empty forum really that time-consuming or difficult? I mean, how hard would it be for us to take a fresh vB4 install and, bells-and-whistles removed, have a usable forum that would tide us over until the bells-and-whistles are fully functional again?

GFF's main hook has always been its strong IRC and music discussion but lately in recent years, GFF's hidden gem has been mom's basement. Werewolf is bomb.

I'll be honest, I am pretty content with GFF's current form. The shrinking community and lack of activity no longer bothers me. I've made my friends who I will keep in touch with regardless what GFF's ultimate fate is. I doubt new members will stick around because message boards are antiquated especially because GFF isn't associated with a clan or major gaming website. As it stands, GFF is just a message board.

It's probably way past time I should post something in this thread. Sorry for being even more neglectful than I usually am. :(

There's far too much for me to respond to in this thread so I'm just going to pick a couple for now.

I'm interested in a vB upgrade, if not to 4, then at least to a higher version of 3. I'm unable to do either at the moment because I'm in possession of neither a vB 4 license nor the current license to 3, and I'd prefer to keep us legit at least in that respect if possible. I sent a PM to Blah, because he's the dude and also because he's updated GFF in the past, so we'll figure out what we're going to do.

I've personally never upgraded any vBulletin install, so I have no idea how well GFF will react to a major version update. GFF is essentially the Winchester Mystery House constructed with ad hoc plugins and templates gathered from custom design and fifty previous versions of vBulletin. I can think of a lot that could possibly go wrong in the process.

I'm also kind of interested in a new skin, if just from a maintenance perspective, because making anything more than a simple adjustment to one page is a pain in the ass. It did take literally two days for me just to change the colors from blue to green: one spent just on the forums and one for the journals. vBulletin has a ton of templates, so creating a theme from scratch or doing more than changing the colors and so on of a pre-existing one would take a lot of work. That'd take a while to do, and I can't do it myself (as I am a piss-poor designer), so that's a pretty low priority at the moment.

Also I'm going to be gone for almost two weeks starting next week Wednesday, so I'm not going to be doing anything major until after I get back.

Okay, two points:

1. I do have the vBulletin 4 license (bought it as soon as it was available). I'd be happy to help install it, but I must emphasize here that it will HAVE to be a fresh install. vB4 is radically different from vB3.x, and every single plugin installed here absolutely has to be rewritten (or redownloaded, if the original authors have bothered to upgrade them). At the same time, plenty of plugins have been made obsolete by the new features of vB4, so we should jettison whatever's applicable.

2. I propose installing it on the gamingforce.com server first, then I can open up access to people who wish to help out on design and coding. You guys can then port over anything that needs porting and see how it goes before we make the decision to go ahead and transition the forum here. Or hell, if you want to use the .com domain again that's fine too.

Fabulous. Please do this.

The difference between .com and .org has always been negligible to most of us humble users as long as the majority of people who made GFF what it was, were also there.

Moving the forum to gamingforce.com once you guys have figured out the vB4 and design and stuff seems like a working idea. I guess once the full transition of the forums happen, you can close/lock down the forums and all the journals but keep it accessible so that people can go back and look at it for nostalgia sakes.

If we're going to dump 3.x for v4, all I ask is that we're given time to back up stuff. I'm pretty sure I have PMs from Deni and Kyndig from years prior that have URLs in them I should keep on hand.

Yes, this JUST occured to me now.

You don't have to worry about that right away, we are not doing a flat out transition right off the hop.

Okay, I'll see if I can set it up over the weekend.

Re: cliques at gamingforce.

I reiterate the need to remove the prop system. Nothing could be more back-slapping and self congratulatory. And they can take on a particularly vile nastiness, as evidenced in Bradylama's latest journal entry.

Yes, instead let us have thirty posts of "I agree" or twenty of "No, you're wrong."

Kinda like this one?

"Too many posts!" is not really a problem we need to nip in the bud at this point. Aside from Kolba of all people telling us how to behave maturely, props often do cause more problems than they solve. I mean, I understand the motivation behind their existence in the first place, but for now? Why not just let people babble.

Again, it's entirely possible the prop system can't be ported to v4 or won't be seen as worth the bother so maybe it's a moot point.

You're wrong.

The funny thing is that vB actually has props built in already (the "reputation" system). We just don't have it enabled.

I for one would miss those wonderful thumbs up and thumbs down gifs. They are endearing. Also I like props because it's like keeping a tally of high fives. =)

Let's keep the gifs but emboss them and put a gradient on top.

For more 2.0ness

Can they have lens flare?

And drop shadows.

Let's put an AJAX thing in there that makes the number magically appear like digg does

Also also when you press the buttons they make sounds

if you prop a guy it goes YEEEEEEAAAAAHHHH

but if you you diss it plays the sad trombone sound

This on top of the constant PLINK! PLINK! noises every button on the site should make when you mouse over them of course

I want the sad trombone from The Price Is Right to play when you try to access a thread while you're banned or don't have the privs to access. Can we do this?

Except on the first of every month, when a prop does this

YouTube Video

and a diss does this

YouTube Video

I've thought on why it is that my comment count is about three times my post count. I find I focus more on the person I am interacting with (and to some extent the audience as a whole) than a particular topic of discussion. It's easier to do that in the context of a journal with the atmosphere found in most threads. I like to reference something about the person that I've learned in a prior journal entry. While I tend to be more active in delivering mockery, criticism, and advice, I would like to think that I do so in an interesting and humorous way.

I'm not exactly an engaging personality, but I'm of the impression that most find my writing style favorable rather than lacking (I gather props are intended to support this impression). I suppose I've strayed from what was intended to be the topic of discussion, so maybe it would be helpful if I explained the thought that inspired me to post: I think I would enjoy talking to Alton Brown. I don't know the man, but the conversation could be about anything, and I think I would walk away being interested in whatever he talked about due to how he talked about it. I think there would be more positive activity on GFF if more members displayed that quality.

I'm always happy to engage a fan. Would you like to discuss the best way to slice an onion, or perhaps my stellar commentary on Iron Chef?

Can we discuss your more esoteric, and almost spiritual, approach to your woefully underappreciated Feasting on Asphalt? I noticed an almost Joseph Campbell-like approach to the subject matter, and it seemed truly close to your heart.

Do you think this had anything to do with your admitted struggles and ongoing search for god via the religion you grew up with being skewed by your experiences through adulthood?

Also, how can I make my deep fried turkey stay moist while using your tremendous fried turkey rig?

Navigating the open road on the back of motorcycle is a truly religious experience, and it gives a person time to reflect on his place in the universe. Like my grandmother used to tell me, "If you don't grab life by the horns, someone will put grits in your brisket." Actually, grandma never did make much sense.

As for your turkey, the secret is not to overcook it. Drop it in there, give it 40 minutes tops, then pull that sucker out. Any longer, and you might as well microwave it.

Does the inclusion of a police siren make a difference?

It doesn't help seal in moisture, but it does alert your neighbors that you will be eating delicious fried turkey, and they can't have any.

I used to have difficulty slicing onions until I discovered that my abacus can function as a vegetable slicer, and with some work, a pair of nunchucks.

Ah, yes! An abacus is one of my favorite multitaskers. Have you tried using it as a substitute for the grates on your grill? The contact between the beads and the food leaves a wonderful sear.

But wouldn't the beads minimize the surface area contact, which is essential to the searing process?

This is why I advocate a dual-phase cooking process; first a quick sear on a cast-iron skillet, with just a tablespoon of vegetable oil and a dash of kosher salt, followed by a grill session with a preheated abacus. Once you have the sear, the abacus produces a unique set of grill marks.

I may have asked this before but how can salt be non-kosher?

I mean, it's not like it has scales or cloven hooves or anything.

Kosher salt has nothing to do with the hebrew concept of kosher. It has to do with the grain size and shape, and happens to be the salt most often used to make meat kosher.

Thus, kosher salt.

It's called kosher salt not because the salt itself is more kosher than other salts, but because it has a larger grain which is useful in extracting the blood from meat, thus making the meat itself kosher. In addition it often has a platelet shape rather than a cube, aiding in the same process.

UNWANTED EDUCATION

e: aw, fuck you anyways

Please register at Gamingforce Interactive Forums 2.0 - The Front Page

It's just a staging area so fill it up with nonsense all you want. Once you've worked out the plugins, forums, categories, prefixes, tags, smileys and all that shit, I'll see about transferring the content from here. Eventually we'll put the vB4 installation on the dedicated server (whether we decide on using the .org or .com domain)

If you want admin access just message me on IRC.

The blog and CMS features are both really neat. People can promote posts to front page status or put a post in their blog, and the blog stuff in general is pretty neat compared to ChocoJournal.

The user reputation system is not really a good replacement as-is for props/disses. By default it just toggles a little variable that you have to hover over someone's name to even see. Not to mention the fact that it takes two clicks to prop someone and two clicks plus having to write a comment to diss someone. I've tinkered with trying to at the very least have two buttons there to streamline it, but no changes I've attempted to make have actually been reflected on the template.

I'd also need to muck around with reputation.php, because right now reputation.php doesn't have a flag (?action=prop or ?action=diss) so it takes you to a page that makes you choose if you try to do it directly.

It runs really slow for me and half the time clicking links times out before it gets to the destination. Is there any particular reason for that?

Maybe because it's running on Dreamhost or some shared hosting.