forum membership classifications and some sub forums.

[snitcher]

please be prepared for a long post and try not to die.

1. forum age demographic classification.

description - there will be a certain sub forum for ea age group. if you're not in that age group then you are not allowed to post in it or maybe even view it or a completely different forum for ea group which is err.. (you already get it. no need for further pointless explanation)

mechanics - classification will be done by the actual age of the user, by devs/mods decision to place a user if they would seem to fit in that group, by forum users themselves via majority vote or by all of the above.

pros:

possibly more forum activity since things can be discussed on a level where people on that age group wants it to be.

less derailed topics.

less unnecessary replies that does not even need to be explained, but has to be replied upon.

the cons pretty much applies on how this could work:

if the users were to be allowed to vote on whether a user can be allowed to post & or view then it can become a "cool club" where bias decisions can be made which can render proper judgement towards a new user being able to join, but if we allow the devs/mods to decide then that's a lot of work for them and a user may feel like he is a part of that age group, but did not get permitted to join that group then the user might be felt obliged to quit, and a user's age can also be faked so i guess we go to whichever that works? which is none or everyone decides based upon the user's forum posts? actually, never mind. democracy never really works anyway. an individual can only care about what is on their own mind.

the final goal of this suggestion is to have more forum activity. it has been way too obvious that the there has been a lack luster of proper contributions from the new users compared from the one's that has been preceded.

proof of this that you can't deny no matter what is that there are barely any new threads or posts at the very least that are actually time worthy of being replied upon.

another evidence of this claim are the lack of current artists. most of them had quit for good and you can also say that some of them had moved on with their lives, but you can't also deny the fact that most of them just chooses not to post just like what most had claimed to be doing. one of the possible causes could be the lack of proper feedback or reward for what they have contributed or they just happened to ran out of ideas to share.

which leads us to number 2.

another type of membership classification. this has somewhat been suggested before, but this is a bit different so i preferred putting it in this topic.

description - certain users will be rewarded a new title aside from "Primary User Group: Registered" which is obviously are all of the users. title reward will be based upon their contributions, contest winners, and whatever that can be applied just to be rewarded.

rewards & mechanics:

premium membership - can be rewarded for a placer on a certain contest it can also show appreciation and gratitude for joining said contest, but not entirely winning.

lifetime premium member - for someone who has contributed a lot. and or for winning a contest.

previous winners can either not be allowed to join to give others a chance or they can gift it to another member who does not have one.

pro member - a lot of people who purchased pros are not even a member of this forum. it won't hurt anyone if they can at least have a different title here in the forums for supporting the game and helping it stay alive.

artistic member - if most of the art that they contributed appeals to the devs/mods and the other users then don't you think it is only proper for them to get some recognition for what they tried to do? they put in time and effort for said arts just to contribute and did an awfully good job at it.

according to the 4th house rule every members right now are limited to certain profile restrictions.

which brings us to the - bonus perks of each membership rewards:

private message storage, maximum avatar dimension & file size, and signatures dimensions are all going to be raised. (which are all completely unnecessary, but just for the sake of having additional bonus perks)

e.g.

lifetime premium member:
private message storage are raised to 500 messages, maximum avatar dimensions are raised to 200x200, with a raised max size of 20kb, and signature dimensions are raised to 300x1050 pixels + 3 more lines of text, + exclusive all access pass to all parts of the forums.

premium member:
private message storage are raised to 350 messages, maximum avatar dimensions are raised to 150x150, with a raised max size of 15kb, and signature dimensions are raised to 200x1050 pixels + 2 more line of text, + limited access in certain parts of the forums.

pro member:
private message storage are raised to 300 messages, maximum avatar dimensions are raised to 125x125, with a raised max size of 15kb, and signature dimensions are raised to 150x1050 pixels + 1 more line of text, + exclusive access to a pro sub forum lounge.

artistic member:
private message storage are raised to 300 messages, maximum avatar dimensions are raised to 150x150, with a raised max size of 20kb, and signature dimensions are raised to 200x1050 pixels + 2 more line of text, + exclusive and only access to an artists only sub forum.

instances:

if a user is both pro and artistic then they have access to both sub forums, have both titles combined to artistic pro member, and use the perks that has a higher value or they can be upgraded to premium members.

pro and artistic memberships can not be gifted away casually.

if a premium member won a tournament/contest, but is neither pro or an artist then they can only view the exclusive sub forums.

pros:

hopefully it can encourage more forum activity and more members. maybe at least a bit of competitive spirit too.

cons:

because of the perks we definitely will be scrolling down more.

it is also quite a shame that the members are the ones that tries the hardest to keep things interesting here in the forums. perfect example of this claim is that the players themselves are the ones that organizes tournaments and not the one's that are supposed to. everyone already knows that running a game is already a lot of tedious work and that everyone has their own lives to live, but so are everyone here that are trying their hardest to contribute in this slowly, but surely and definitely dying community. wouldn't it be nice to at least show a bit of appreciation to what they've done?

3. i'm not sure whether this has been suggested before or not, but a different languages sub forum won't really hurt anyone.

description - there's a wide variety of languages in game. it will be nice if we could tap on to that and use it to this forum's advantage. hopefully, it can encourage more traffic and activity in here.

the only cons that i can think of is that the devs/mods will definitely require to find someone who can mod the other language sub forum/support. otherwise, the obvious outcome is sure to be dire.

[eggsplash666]

Number one may be useful.

Number two sound very interesting and I do hope it will be applied.

Number three, if the forum was "bigger" this idea would be interesting, but right now it seem more work than gain.

[tenchi]

With the exception of the 3rd suggestion (to a certain degree), what you suggest is really just creating exclusionary/elitist forums and members.

Everyone is welcome to post (or not post) whether we like the person and what they say or not. By adding the distinctions, you inflate egos and only divide the players.

With the 3rd one, it's more of the same, but it's different in that it could attract more people. True, there would need to be more moderators (if not in general, then for those specific sub-forums), but they would need to be fluent in both the target language (e.g. Chinese (traditional and simplified), Spanish, Arabic, etc.) and English. In order for it to be fully effective, you would also need to add complete language support for the game. For example, if I were to try and communicate with someone in Chinese (and yes, this is a language I'm proficient in), then it would only be a false-conversation in which we type and guess at what the other person means to say (妈 means "mother" but has a similar pronunciation and spelling to 马 which means "horse").

The reason that language support is tricky here is that it's only 1 game whereas sites like Kongregate have thousands of games. More games directly translates to more players and allows for more generated income; and that in-turn results in the ability to program the different languages and search for the staff to moderate everything.

[Seshomaru]

Only thing I really don't like is your idea for age restricted sections.
There's no point in it, and the memberbase isn't large enough to be able to actively support that. Plus, someone could always fake their age, and in addition, it all becomes a bit demeaning if we're categorised in certain age groups. This would certainly not bring more forum activity, but would likely do the opposite.

So basically:
* It's unnecessary - serves no purpose.
* We don't have enough members for this to even work.
* Why put people into age categories? They can fake it anyway.

The rest is all okay, and reminds me of a system VBulletin already has.
Your classification requirements and the perks could be amended though.

[[TNT™] SwagMasterD]

These ideas are, and I'm just being honest, unnecessary and horrible. I'm not going to vote because you're trying to make people feel bad by saying "I don't care about the forum". Thanks, but these ideas are terrible.

[snitcher]

1st off i would like to thank and congratulate the few of you who has survived this torment. i barely even made it out alive from creating this topic.

(10-16-2014 07:37 AM)eggsplash666 Wrote:  Number three, if the forum was "bigger" this idea would be interesting, but right now it seem more work than gain.

thank you, but the idea is to actually make the forum bigger by trying to lure the ones in game that uses a different language and are currently not registered in her by having a language sub forum of their own.

(10-16-2014 07:49 AM)tenchi Wrote:  what you suggest is really just creating exclusionary/elitist forums and members.

Everyone is welcome to post (or not post) whether we like the person and what they say or not. By adding the distinctions, you inflate egos and only divide the players.

this claim can be applied to the 1st one if not done the right way, while on the other hand i don't see this happening on the 2nd suggestion. as i said the goal is to have more activity going on. therefore, more contests, tournaments, and great to decent contributions are expected to rise. everyone can have the goal of participating and thus pushing more interactions and traffic. i don't see how it can inflate egos and divide players when you are trying to achieve a common goal.

as for the 3rd one. there won't be any harm on having them ready to be posted upon. at least when a new user checks out the forum and they have a place where they can feel at home and use their own language then we have a new member that can stay and won't feel out of placed. this can also push them on meeting new players in game through here that uses the same language as them.

@sesho

some things might have been misinterpreted. in those sections they can discuss things however they want it to go without that much or any sort of interference from the other age group. i also did mention that ages can do be faked even if we go to the one that we used in the registrations and that most of the cons that goes with it pretty much comes from how we can make it work properly and the actual implementation of it.

as for activity, those sections can do help promote activity. a lot of the previous users are not happy with how things currently are due to unfortunate and unnecessary reasons. i guess we could only wait for them to reply if they do approve of that suggestion or not which is unlikely to happen since it might have been already too late to actually bring them back.

yes, the rest of the idea came from other places that i've been to and rewards users premium or lifetime by winning monthly contests. unfortunately, i don't know what other perks i can add aside from having the exclusive access towards certain sub forums in this kind of place so i just tried to be creative and that's the least that i can currently come up with.

@swagmasterd

ok, but what do you have in mind then? do you have any ideas that can help promote forum traffic and activity? and please do explain and elaborate how suggesting these to help promote those 2 became a terrible, unnecessary, and horrible idea when some of the suggestions is trying to push users by giving them this minor rewards for the contributions that they made? when having certain sub forums might get former players back in and be active here in the forums again like they used to? and when you're trying to bridge the language gap and bring new members from the game by having there own language forums? so please do explain and elaborate so that your comment maybe taken as a constructive criticism. otherwise, don't you think its also unnecessary, horrible, and terrible like what you think of these suggestions?

[Inuyasha]

Okay, let's break them down.

To begin with, I'd say that your poll is really, really skewed. Adding an option saying "none, cause i'm not really interested in improving the place." is the most biased thing you could ever do. Where's the option that says "none, because I don't think they are good ideas"? Nowhere? Thought so. Your poll implies that either we agree with you, or we hate the forum. If you want to make a poll for a suggestion, make it properly -- accept that disagreement a) exists, b) isn't wrong, and c) doesn't mean our intentions are bad.

Suggestion 1 is probably one of the worst suggestions I've seen on a forum. (I say "a forum" because I've seen age-restricted sections being suggested elsewhere.)

First of all, you want more activity, not less. If you have age-restricted sections, you have less people posting in them. At the amount of users we have around here (the active memberbase is two-digit, and a low two-digit at it), fewer users means less activity. Restricting sections to a very limited amount of people would basically drive everyone away.
Moreover, you're creating an "us and them" culture. Do you really want to separate the forum, to create subcommunities? If you're actually interested in the forum's status and well-being, then the short answer is "no".

Every large enough community (be it online or IRL) subdivides into small groups, but if those subgroups become strong enough as to rarely talk with each other, then you no longer have a community -- you just have a bunch of groups in the same place. And when the community disolves, there's no longer any reason for anyone to be in it -- you'd just get a bunch of smaller groups making their own sites/subsections/threads and the whole forum dying out.

You say that "things can be discussed on a level where people on that age group wants it to be". Do you really think there's such a thing as an unreachable level for the ages we have around here?
I'm pretty sure you have to be 13 or older to (legally) sign up for this forum. At 13 years of age, unless you have some mental/learning/comprehension issues, you should be able to at least read and understand most of a post left at a simple forum, and ask about the few things you may have not understood. (Note that this lack of understanding is rarely related to age, but more to interests. I probably knew much more about programming when I was 13 than most people of all ages do -- and that's not because I was particularly brilliant, but because the vast majority of the population knows nothing about it because they don't care about it.)
I don't know where this misconception of only being able to have good conversations with people your own age comes from, but if you really think that, just go and try to talk with someone with a really large age difference. Do it often enough. You'll realize it works.
You can talk about common discussions being kept at a level appropriate for someone's age at low ages (2, 3, 4, you get the idea), but past that there's really no such thing. As long as younger people aren't completely immature (which happens here, but rarely), and older people don't look down on younger ones due to their age (which I've only seen a handful of times here), age differences really don't impose a barrier on communication.
There's absolutely nothing to gain, and lots to lose (basically, a disconnected community) from restricting that.


Suggestion 2 is quite bad because it's also talking about restricted subforums. Let's face it, we barely have 1,500 posts per month here (that's barely enough to keep the forum afloat), diverting part of the flow to a restricted area will only lower it.
It takes us again to the "us and them" problem, too. You have better-class members and worse-class members. You're literally saying that member A is better than member B, because that's what "premium member" implies.
Also, having benefits for paid accounts it's just not the way of increasing any activity. When you start draining money from your members, you're getting paid in exchange for slowly killing the thing -- that's what the freemium model does. It's not an issue in a large game like BEO, because it's extremely active; the negative impact is invisible. On a dying forum, on the other hand, it could easily become your last bad call. I've seen this happen.

Having a few extra little things (like avatar size) for things like winning contests or contributing is good and useful. Having them for paid members is not a good idea, though. But so far it's not a big deal.
On the other hand, having a restricted area for these cases, and premium memberships (that even expire!), would almost certainly either fail or kill the forum.


Suggestion 3 has already been addressed. It's impossible to moderate, which is not good; besides, those subforums would rarely be used (how many speakers of <insert language here> are there around? Hint: if you cannot count 12-15, it's not worth it. And don't say "there must be that many", think of twelve or fifteen actual names).


All in all, there's really nothing I can say for these suggestions that is good, other than rescuing part of that little bit about avatar and signature sizes.

[Egactly]

(10-16-2014 07:49 AM)tenchi Wrote:  With the exception of the 3rd suggestion (to a certain degree), what you suggest is really just creating exclusionary/elitist forums and members.

Everyone is welcome to post (or not post) whether we like the person and what they say or not. By adding the distinctions, you inflate egos and only divide the players.

With the 3rd one, it's more of the same, but it's different in that it could attract more people. True, there would need to be more moderators (if not in general, then for those specific sub-forums), but they would need to be fluent in both the target language (e.g. Chinese (traditional and simplified), Spanish, Arabic, etc.) and English. In order for it to be fully effective, you would also need to add complete language support for the game. For example, if I were to try and communicate with someone in Chinese (and yes, this is a language I'm proficient in), then it would only be a false-conversation in which we type and guess at what the other person means to say (妈 means "mother" but has a similar pronunciation and spelling to 马 which means "horse").

The reason that language support is tricky here is that it's only 1 game whereas sites like Kongregate have thousands of games. More games directly translates to more players and allows for more generated income; and that in-turn results in the ability to program the different languages and search for the staff to moderate everything.

从现在开始，我们应该用这种语言说话吗？

[snitcher]

@inu

1. maybe if you were here back then, when everything was flourishing and striving, unlike now. every community should be improving and not going to a rapid steep decline. if only you saw most of the reasons unto why they chose to leave and not care anymore or not post the least then maybe you'd understand why an age-restricted forum might actually be a good idea. it's not like those people will just leave the other sections alone, what #1's aim is something like giving them a playground that they can play on their own without them having to deal with things that they don't like. it might have been able to keep those good users around.

2 & 3. mostly premiums does not expire, but that will be for them to decide. i just said lifetime on the other one since that how it is in other places.

as for your

"Every large enough community (be it online or IRL) subdivides into small groups, but if those subgroups become strong enough as to rarely talk with each other, then you no longer have a community -- you just have a bunch of groups in the same place. And when the community disolves, there's no longer any reason for anyone to be in it -- you'd just get a bunch of smaller groups making their own sites/subsections/threads and the whole forum dying out."

this can be perfectly applied to 3. isn't it better to have a strong small sub groups rather than not having any? in this other private server that i go to which is a constant top 10 contender in various ranking sites, a lot of them does not post in a different language, these said languages are spanish, portuguese, and some chinese the other languages and some of the members of the mentioned ones posts in both their own native language and english. the subforum that they have is incredibly solid and very strong, they have their own thing and community going on. hell, some of the chinese doesn't even type in chinese characters, and the traffic of that site is incredibly puny compared to his one. with the diversity that this game has we can also have that. with different cultures that most people can't understand having a place for them to slowly build from the ground up and possibly bring more people in can not hurt anyone, and what's wrong with having them ready to be posted upon? if modding them is a problem then proper users of those group language can just report them then if they can't understand it then google translate it until they find someone trust worthy to get the job done. even if the new community does dissolve then that will be up to the users whether they still stay in here or not, the most important thing is to get them here first.

as for your claim in many, there's an awful lot of them in game. the thing is that they can promote the forums like they do when they are trying to make the people aware of the latest game updates (the thing on the front page when you just logged in), just like when they had that competition going on. another is that the game is constantly improving, whether its in the client side or on the players population side, but not here in the forum. this is mainly the reason why you might want to try and spice things up here a bit. maybe that is also the reason why they're not really interested in investing anything here since the actual game is the one that gets the proper revenues and probably only gets spare change here in their own forum. they also mentioned that they are still learning so hopefully it all leads up to a better place, and its not really necessary to actually tackle the differences in culture any further than what i already had tried to explain.

some of those things can also be applied in #2. as i said earlier, most people who helped the game stay alive are not even registered in here. what you see here are only a handful of them. how can a little section for them do anyone any harm? it's not going to hurt anybody if you give them a little place for whatever little things they want going on.

EDIT: it can also help boost the sales of pro

---

(10-17-2014 03:47 AM)Egactly Wrote:  从现在开始，我们应该用这种语言说话吗？

you better not, unless you want to eat an 阿修羅霸凰拳

[tenchi]

Snitcher, you're arguing for something that clearly has no support. We've stated many reasons that this wouldn't work. I even partially supported the multi-lingual section and said it couldn't work. BEO is on several sites (each with their own forums) and the forums on each one are as active as our "little" community here. If you could gather everyone into the same forum, then you MIGHT have a valid argument for either 1 or 3.

#2 could never work because, as we've said, you're creating an elitist group of members. Would you enjoy coming to a forum, expecting to be equal with others, only to find out that someone like me (or any other long-standing player) was only slightly less powerful than any moderator? Once someone sees that, they will instantly leave because people aren't mature enough to handle that kind of system. Those that stay end up getting bitter feelings about those elite members and also leave. All-in-all, it fails.

With #1, even in the "glory days" of the forum, everyone was figuring out who all was what player. 90% of the posts back then were either: people making clans (a handful of which still exist), people reporting bugs (many of these were addressed and fixed, though some still exist), or people making suggestions. By dividing the forums into age-restricted groups, you would destroy the forums completely. People would fake their ages to gain access to certain sections, see something or post something that gets them in trouble and then they're banned (by mods/admins or by parents/guardians) and can no longer play the game or visit the forums.

The people that have stopped posting to the forums got bored and/or didn't want to deal with certain people. In that situation, it's easier and better to quit the game and forums than stay and suffer. I know because I've talked with several of those people (prior to their leaving).

#3 is something that would only be feasible if we had more people on the forums in the first place. Then, and only then, could this even be considered. Yes, it would divide everyone into regional groups (instead of the age groups you suggested in #1) and that could help the forums, but it would ultimately hurt them. It would hurt the forums because, just like with the age groups, people would only stay in one place to post. The difference would be that nobody could read what everyone else was posting about. For example, I could easily say that I disliked a player (in Chinese) and that player could see my post. They would try to translate it, of course, but the best translating software will still get it wrong and they could end up seeing a post that says I really like them. That player could then go to a Spanish section and post that they adore me. Eventually, that player would find out what I originally said, and then there's hurt feelings all around.

Now we look at the added bonus of in-game language support. The existing filters (though in need of some fine tuning) wouldn't be able to handle what can be said in other languages. This is not to mention that there's always a way for people to say what they want despite the filters being in place. People would figure it out and then there's a whole new battle as far as being an admin is concerned. Ultimately, the chat function would be removed because supporting many languages is exponentially more difficult than supporting 1. For the same reason, the forums would fail because, again, 1 language is much easier to moderate than many languages.

@egactly
如果你不用一个translator，我们当让可以打简体字。

(@snitcher: These 2 sentences, egg's and mine, are exactly what we've been talking about. You have no idea what's being said, and that leads to people being sore about forum posts.)