Improving Gamingforce

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.

Jam it back in, in the dark.

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.

There's nowhere I can't reach.

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.

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

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?

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