Improving Gamingforce

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

Jam it back in, in the dark.

Originally Posted by Agent Di Gun Him

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

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?

There's nowhere I can't reach.

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

This thing is sticky, and I don't like it. I don't appreciate it.

Originally Posted by sprouticus

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.

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 am a dolphin, do you want me on your body?

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.

Originally Posted by DieSeLFueLeD

And if we're being completely honest here. GFF needs a new fuckin' face. The forums look like ass. The colors are a downer. The designer in me hates the fucking look of the forums .

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.

I was speaking idiomatically.

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.

What kind of toxic man-thing is happening now?

Originally Posted by Sassafrass

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

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.

FELIPE NO

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

What, you don't want my bikini-clad body?

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.

Jam it back in, in the dark.

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.

There's nowhere I can't reach.

Originally Posted by Agent Di Gun Him

This is a AWFUL idea

But why?

This thing is sticky, and I don't like it. I don't appreciate it.

Originally Posted by a_lurker

have you been in chat since 2002?

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.

I am a dolphin, do you want me on your body?

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 was speaking idiomatically.

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

What kind of toxic man-thing is happening now?

Originally Posted by Agent Di Gun Him

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

::laughter.gif::

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'

FELIPE NO

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

How ya doing, buddy?

Yes I already presented this very logical counterargument to myself

Jam it back in, in the dark.

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

There's nowhere I can't reach.

"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.

This thing is sticky, and I don't like it. I don't appreciate it.

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

For more 2.0ness

I am a dolphin, do you want me on your body?

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 was speaking idiomatically.

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

What kind of toxic man-thing is happening now?