Plans for the future of Gamingforce

If this is strictly a money problem, and doing so would be better for the whole board, then I’m sure most Concert Hall members would agree with me that doing away with attachments would be completely fine. I have no problem really hosting any files I share on MU, RS or similar services. If the administrators wished I’m sure they could always just disable the attachments in the Concert Hall and other high-bandwidth areas while still leaving the option open to the other areas of the board. That way none of the members from other areas of the board would be inconvenienced.

If however the main problem is really that of worrying about possible future problems caused by copyright infringement, then perhaps splitting the Concert Hall section off entirely would be the best course of action. As much as I would like to think it wouldn’t be the case, if file sharing were to be prohibited, then I can’t really see many of the CH members sticking around and just chatting. I do however agree with the mentioned statements earlier, that the CH would become an easy target for copyright holders to take down if it was suddenly taken from the shadows, so splitting it off would probably be the same as deleting it outright.

That being said, I must say I feel a little conflicted over this whole matter.

On one hand, if at all possible I would love to have the Concert hall or at least some iteration of it remain on this server. Even if all attachments and sharing were to be prohibited I would still like an area on this forum to discuss music with others. True, I suppose if worse came to worse I could probably find similar music discussion communities on other websites, but I would still love the Concert Hall to remain part of this board. I may be a minority amongst concert hall members here, but I for one do occasionally enjoy browsing through other sections of this board, even though I’m usually met with hostility and usually get disses for just about anything I say. If the forums were split though, I would probably end up just focusing on the new forum at the expense of browsing this one anymore – or perhaps vice versa.

On the other hand, I have always felt a little awkward when trying to participate in other areas of this board, and I can sort of in a way understand peoples’ hostility towards CH members who never contribute outside their sub-forum. I’ve also always felt the concert hall never really fit the “gamingforce image” either. It is really almost like night and day between most of the concert hall members and members from the rest of the board…

I really hope some sort of mutually beneficial conclusion can be reached on this matter…

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Originally Posted by Shin

Nobody really gives a flying fuck what happens to CH or My Stuff, as you said yourself, the community has outgrown them and I doubt many of us would even have noticed if you'd just deleted them.

Originally Posted by Shin

Heh, see that's why none of the regulars give a fuck about ditching them. They're so fucking insular, we could move the entire subforum to a new url and but for their bookmarks not working, none of the regulars there would even notice. We're a place that prides itself on it's sense of community and they simply aren't a part of it.

It's hardly a surprise if people don't wish to be a part of this community when many of the "regulars" behave with such shoddy manners as the ones you're displaying here, Shin.

That said, considering how diverse GFF is in terms of the hobby's and interests we cater to, it's hardly surprising if someone joins here because he or she has heard about the Concert Hall or My Stuff. And why must you be interested in the entire forums to browse a singular forum which caters to your interests, such as CH or My Stuff? It's actually quite humorous how the people complaining about these so-called "leechers" are almost always users who seldom, or never, actually browse the forums in question. If the "leechers" were such a problem don't you think they would be dealt with accordingly by those who do [and believe me, those who are problematic are dealt with].

And as I previously stated, the attachment situation in CH should have been dealt with the minute it became a problem. One-click file hosting sites have been around for a few years now...

Originally Posted by Shin

Was it when LeHah reported us to the RIAA for that Superman box set?

Well this is certainly a surprising turn of events.

What kind of toxic man-thing is happening now?

Originally Posted by seanne

It's hardly a surprise if people don't wish to be a part of this community when many of the "regulars" behave with such shoddy manners as the ones you're displaying here, Shin.

That said, considering how diverse GFF is in terms of the hobby's and interests we cater to, it's hardly surprising if someone joins here because he or she has heard about the Concert Hall or My Stuff. And why must you be interested in the entire forums to browse a singular forum which caters to your interests, such as CH or My Stuff? It's actually quite humorous how the people complaining about these so-called "leechers" are almost always users who seldom, or never, actually browse the forums in question. If the "leechers" were such a problem don't you think they would be dealt with accordingly by those who do [and believe me, those who are problematic are dealt with].

And as I previously stated, the attachment situation in CH should have been dealt with the minute it became a problem. One-click file hosting sites have been around for a few years now...

I don't really care if people don't wish to become a part of the community because we don't have CH or My Stuff. Those are undesirables anyway. Any member worth a damn in the past year on my radar hasn't come from either of those places.

It's also not the people that are problematic, it's the content of the forums. Most of the regulars (and thusly, the people who run this place in the end), don't go to either of those forums, and most of the regulars to those specific forums could easily get together and create a new community for themselves if they so wanted. We're just being kind of doing it for them, from my point of view, because they pose a significant threat to the boards with actual content, and not just illegal files.


Shin edit: Sorry, editted the wrong post. All I did was trimmed down Seanne's quote a bit

FELIPE NO

Originally Posted by Ultima

I don't really care if people don't wish to become a part of the community because we don't have CH or My Stuff. Those are undesirables anyway. Any member worth a damn in the past year on my radar hasn't come from either of those places.

Yes, on that note, there hasn't been any new member worth a damn in the past year.

Most of the regulars on this forum used to be people who joined for filez in the first place, so the membership has been diminishing ever since the closing of GFA. I don't know what incentive people even have to join nowadays (especially if you were to take away the last of the original GFF, the VGM servers); playing Dungeons & Dragons I guess.

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

The thing is Seanne, I can be as rude as I like about the CHetards here in Board Support, safe in the knowledge that no more than two of them will ever read it and those two are probably already convinced I'm a boorish barbarian who listens all kinds of devil music and doubtless doesn't even own a harpsichord.

Yes, I'm being uncomplimentary about them but I hope you're not suggesting that Concert Hall types would be more outgoing if the rest of us didn't swear quite so much. My Stuff is not in the same league of unpopularity by any means. Most of us here will have had some interaction with My Stuff and the regulars there are not an insular community of their own, they interact with the rest of us perfectly normally and although some don't venture out often, they don't get all upset when someone gently pokes fun at them. Also, all the stuff in there is hosted off-site, all My Stuff is is a glorified links board and as such, the drain on the server is minimal. The only threat to the rest of us from My Stuff is the potential for a law suit fucking us all over next time LeHah makes some moves to maintain the exclusivity of some album he paid far too much for.

Think of it like this; Gamingforce is a small town and one side of town is a traveller camp (My Stuff). They're a bit unruly and make a bit of mess and don't pay to use the land but then they also aren't a drain on the town's resources particularly and they sell good drugs which occasionally, people from in town like to buy. On the other side of town is a gated community (CH), inhabited entirely be paedophiles who spend all day passing kiddie-porn around amongst themselves. They use the streetlighting and police paid for out of the council tax budget but they're all on long-term benefits so don't pay any council tax themselves. They have their own private security teams who enforce their own interpretation of the laws of the town and they never leave their compound.

For a long time, the town has existed as is. People bought drugs from the pikeys and sometimes, the naughtier kids would climb over the wall into the gated community for a game of footy on their nice park, until they were chased off by the security teams. Now though, the two neighbouring towns in the district are expanding and need a bit more space. On top of that, a disgruntled dealer from in the town has called the feds and sold out the pikeys.

The townsfolk are concerned that the expansion plans of the other towns might mean their own town amenities will suffer and as such, they look to the biggest drain, the gated community full of people who don't contribute to the town as a whole. As an added bonus, the removal of a large nonce-ring will mean less hassle from the feds if they ever show up. At the same time, a decision is made that maybe we ought to move on the travellers too because although we don't really mind them and they don't have much of an impact on the tax bill, it's not like we have that much to do with them and they are breaking the law after all.

Given the choice of higher taxes or getting rid of all the undesireables, the paedos and the pikeys, it's understandable that most towsfolk would choose to lose the outsiders en masse, no?

What I'm getting at is that Concert Hall is seen by a lot of people here as a non-contributing group who go out of their way to remain distant from the rest of us. Whilst at the same time there's a lot of My Stuff-ers who we have no interaction with, they don't go out of their way to remain aloof, they operate on the same rule set as the rest of us and they don't use up a huge amount of server space to conduct their illegal activity. If the server was based in Finland or wherever Pirate Bay are to avoid getting in trouble for posting links to illegal stuff, My Stuff wouldn't even have come up in these discussions. What we're primarily worried about is Concert Hall but the simple fact is, most of the regulars there, people who probably visit this place as much as I do, won't even be aware fo the problem, let alone the suggested moves to fix it, unless a very explicit message is posted in their little forum telling them.

Gamingforce is a community and through their specialised interests, general lack of a sense of humour and fear of social interaction outside of choir practice, the CHetards simply aren't a part of that community and as such, not many people who are a part of the community would be too sad to see them go. The rare breed of CH poster who does occasionally post elsewhere will continue to do so after a split, especially if we have inter-forum links clearly labelled and available.

For most of us, it's a win-win situation. The only real issues raised in this thread are that some people are worried that Gamingforce isn't self-supporting and are concerned that we're playing second fiddle to SD and VGMdb, which has pretty much been shown to be untrue because deep down, Miles still loves us more than them.

Jam it back in, in the dark.

Originally Posted by Aardark

Yes, on that note, there hasn't been any new member worth a damn in the past year.

Thud. You might notice if you were around or still a member worth a damn. Instead you've fallen off as much as anyone and just sort of wander around failing at being sarcastic.

Quote:

Most of the regulars on this forum used to be people who joined for filez in the first place, so the membership has been diminishing ever since the closing of GFA. I don't know what incentive people even have to join nowadays (especially if you were to take away the last of the original GFF, the VGM servers); playing Dungeons & Dragons I guess.

Condescend a little more. I can still make out some of your face through the smug.

That being said, I've never had an issue with CH existing, or MyStuff. I use MyStuff fairly regularly, and CH I don't go to enough to care.

There's nowhere I can't reach.

Ah, yes, Thud, the person who won the best newbie award with 35 votes, because there was literally no one else to vote for. Point taken.

You might think I'm an asshole, but honestly I'm not saying this to be condescending, it's just the truth. I understand that it's not anyone's personal responsibility to create attractions for drawing in new members, but at least we could not try to actively get rid of them (I'm mostly talking about My Stuff; I don't care about Concert Hall one way or the other).

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

Originally Posted by seanne

It's hardly a surprise if people don't wish to be a part of this community when many of the "regulars" behave with such shoddy manners as the ones you're displaying here, Shin.

Says the guy who comes here to do nothing but bootleg. Clever.

Not to beat my own drum but its a sure sign of how little you bother with the rest of us if you're not in on the RIAA joke already. I don't think Japanese WWII vets have been hiding in caves for as long as you weirdos have. If anything should be done, perhaps we should rename "Concert Hall" to "Malignant Tumors", considering just how much good the people who populate it do for the rest of GFF.

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All of these analogies seem kind of silly and not really accurate.

The Concert Hall was created because people here were interested in classical music and performance. It grew on its own over the years because it was of value. I know we had crossover members back then (Face, Minion, someone else whose name I can't remember) who have since left. So it's not some group of gypsies that took up residence out of nowhere. We fostered it when we had an interest in doing so.

So, I don't the level of rage against CH (unless this is some backhanded overreaction to Minion.) They just need a gentle push to move off on their own, and I think they'll be fine.

Also, come on Shin. You need to boil your thoughts down to something more concise and readable, especially for us Americans.

I was speaking idiomatically.

Originally Posted by Secret Squirrel

So, I don't the level of rage against CH (unless this is some backhanded overreaction to Minion.) They just need a gentle push to move off on their own, and I think they'll be fine.

The level of rage is based on that they should've been pushed off a long time ago, since they give back nothing to the larger community. Yes, they exist as a single function on a board with many other subforums - yet we don't have the same overwhelming numbers of giant bags of dickholes in Video Gaming or Community Commons, do we?

People show up simply to "get what they want" and ignore the rest of the forum - and these are the kind of people you want to stick up for, SS? I understand that theres some rose-colored glasses involved with it on your end but the truth is - can you name one person from CH who isn't a staff member and has done anything worth mentioning on GFF? Even a really funny journal post or something?

What kind of toxic man-thing is happening now?

Where does it say that someone has to make a contribution worthy of Lehah's seal of approval in order to not be considered a dickhole around here?

FELIPE NO

These are the following things that's bothering me a bit, regarding the future plans.

1. VGMDB is accounting for 44% of the available server space. I don't know how much room there is to expand the database (that is to say, how many video game soundtracks and doujin albums remain uncatalogued), but suppose it grows to 35 GB? 45 GB? Will there be future cutbacks here, or perhaps forum prunings? Or will this definitely be where the line is drawn?

In a nutshell, I am asking how much maximum space would be allocated for the Gamingforce Forums.

2. What are the current hosting plans for the split-off CH/MS boards? Will they be hosted on a Dreamhost account?

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

If anyone really wanted to be a smart guy they'd say look at the donation list and not counting you top three psychos, stack up to see who answered the call when Miles asked for it when we first got this place running.

I don't see a lot of CH members on that list, do you? I'm sure if he made the call again it'd be a chunk of the regulars around here footing the bill, not the CH people.

Also I read all of Shins post and I'm American. Why you gotta disrespect, Squirrel.

Jam it back in, in the dark.

Originally Posted by Secret Squirrel

Also, come on Shin. You need to boil your thoughts down to something more concise and readable, especially for us Americans.

Heh heh. Essentially what I'm saying is that there's a feeling amongst certain regular members of what we'd probably call the wider community here who are resentful that their forums are threatened because of the actions of a group of people who make no effort to become part of that community.

I don't believe anyone has an issue with CHetards sticking to their own discussions in their own sub-forum really. The issue is that space on teh server is apparently at a premium now and there's an increased risk of the whole place getting taken down in a legal battle. Ignoring VGMdb and SD, this is due to a massive attachment load from CH and illegal filesharing in CH and My Stuff.

The fact that CH types as a rule are so aloof and don't engage in conversation outside their forum makes it easier for the rest of us to see them as expendable.

What people are saying is that if CH was more than just a leech magnet on one hand and a bunch of hawty closet cases on the other, we'd be more inclined to think of ways to work round the problem but as it is, they're perceived as a drain on the place and removing them is the simplest solution to the problems we have.

What Zerg raised is the other issue and is the same thing Acer was worried about. What reassurance do we have that when VGMdb gets even bigger, we won't be forced to prune something else off Gamingforce, the worry being that next time it might be something we care about. Blah has pretty much allayed that fear though by assuring us that Miles is looking out for us and that you and him will listen to our concerns if we have any.

At this point we're all just standing around waving pitch-forks for the fun of it but I'd genuinely like to see some input from some CH regs in here before we cut them loose and I'm trying to coax some of them out as we speak.

Shit, that ended up all long and wordy again. Sorry Squirrel, I think I'm just naturally obtuse.

There's nowhere I can't reach.

Our card catalog site (VGMdb) has about 40,000 scans now, and that number is growing steadilly. Eventually we will have to upgrade our plan to get more space. Based on current trends, VGMdb is going to consume the lion's share of space and maybe BW no matter what, and that's something we'll have to come to terms with. We've been toying with the idea of putting up some kinds of retailer purchase links on some of the albums to help recoup some of the costs, but that's still in the idea stage.

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

You do have links up telling people to come and join this message board, right?

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Originally Posted by Secret Squirrel

Where does it say that someone has to make a contribution worthy of Lehah's seal of approval in order to not be considered a dickhole around here?

I assume in the same place where it says people from CH are worthy of any form of respect.

I was speaking idiomatically.

I have no issue with CH and MyStuff purely because they're entirely ignorable, but at the same time they are an isolated community nestling within the large one. I agree that if attachments are taking up a lot of space then they're a natural start point for cutting back, but to the extent of removing forums? Is that entirely necessary?

And if there are space restrictions that all three sites must fall into, why is it falling to GFF to make cutbacks? If VGMdb is using up the lion's share of the space, then why is the onus not on VGMdb to start imposting limitations?

Much like Acer (and plenty of others here) I'm willing to throw donations down to support GFF, but I'll confess I forget sometimes and so a prod from time to time wouldn't be the worst thing.

What kind of toxic man-thing is happening now?

Originally Posted by Shin

You do have links up telling people to come and join this message board, right?

Well, I still haven't done a bona fide links page, but I do give the GFF link with a kind of shout out.

About Us - VGMdb

Dang, it looks like I'm just as wordy as Shin.

FELIPE NO

Maybe you could add a link to us in your Off-topic discussion forum. I bet that'd increase our flow of new members, even if they were all tragic VGM nerds. I mean, if we're sharing a server it might be nice to share our members too...

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

I'm not sure if this sentiment will resonate anyone else's view on the subject but I'll give it a go anyway.

I've been here for almost two years, and I may do more lurking than actual posting, but so far I've observed that most often the members of CH who actually come here for the discussions in the main part of the CH forum are the ones who tend to at least try and participate in discussions going on in the other parts of the board. Heck, I've even seen some of the regular non-CH members post in that part of the forum a number of times. I remember when I myself first joined this iteration of GFF it was because I remembered having read and participated in a few of the discussion topics in there many years back and I was curious to see if what it would look like today. I've also noticed that a certain number of the people who frequent that part of CH don't necessarily participate very much in the sheet music sharing part of it.

I have noticed that the incursions from both camps into the other have lessened a bit in the last few months, but nowhere near the point where there is absolutely no contact going on whatsoever, which is how some people seem to be seeing the situation. However, the Musician's Library (where all the sheet music trading is going on) is a whole other matter, and I do agree that that part of the boards is almost completely detached from the rest of what goes on here.

In any case, while I do agree that the massive sharing threads are the logical place to retrieve server space, I'm not sure that removing the discussion part of the CH would neccesarily be beneficial to the GFF community, as to me it still seems to have it's place within GFF as a whole.

What's more, the moving of the sharing part of the sub-forum might well alleviate tensions between the CH regulars and the rest of the community, as CH would no longer be that part of the board that absorbs server space disproportionately to the amount of regular members who benefit from its presence on the boards.

I'm going to remain here no matter what happens, but I would honestly be sad to see that part of the board go completely as to me it doesn't feel like it's out of place.

Jam it back in, in the dark.

I admit that my past donations were mostly justified by the fact that the money was helping to support VGMdb. If people are worried about VGMdb getting more precedence than GFF, they should shut thy flaps and open thy wallets in support of GFF.

There's nowhere I can't reach.

Except that Blah would prefer that we not donate, since hrrrrmmm hrnnnnnrn hmmmmmmm

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Speaking of, according to Blah I like it in the rear.

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

Too bad. I'm donating $50 and these admins will take it



I was speaking idiomatically.