If I recall correctly the reason was that it only costed them money and it was too much trouble to run - especially with tons of NSFW stuff people were posting as well as content ripped straight out of AAA games.
Shame it was closed - new forums looked like a great platform for an innovation of some sorts with the coins system they introduced.
It’s very sad to see that the internet golden age is gone. I started watching YouTube videos back in 2007, my brother had a YouTube channel with 10,000 subscribers and millions of views back during the 2011-2015 years. But as of 2017, we’re entering the stages of the Internet Dark Ages.
It’s sad to see good websites from smaller companies like the face-punch forums go. The FTC getting their fingers into YouTube, as well as the corporatization and centralization of the internet. The internet for the next few years or so is going to be a depressing place.
Staff are able to easily & directly communicate with individual users, and engage in normal discussions, because it’s a small community. The larger the community, the harder this is to do.
Regarding non-staff engagement, you start to have a wider variety of posts (like @HoldBaker mentioned).
Realistically, the larger the forum community becomes the more posts may try to appeal to a wider audience.
While more people may be comfortable in knowing that there’s content that appeals to them, you lose a bit of the “tight knit community” feeling because of the different directions people are pulling the Forum in. Not necessarily a bad thing, because you can still have a strong community, it’s just different to what it is currently.
Memes are easy to read and subsequently like (or pretend that there’s a dislike button). Replies are also much easier, since a lot of them are in and of themselves a meme.
I’ve considered making it so brand new accounts can’t have their first posts be in Memes, but this isn’t something we’ve actually gone forward with doing atm and was really just me spitballing ideas.
It’s a mix of both new accounts and older accounts that post exclusively in Memes anyways, and I enjoy the occasional meme from either group. It’s more of trying to figure out how much emphasis there should be on SDG-specific content before community-specific content.
It’s definitely easier to keep something relevant, useful, and active. Sometimes things feel too niche, and in some cases it’s easier to either combine communities, or to broaden the community, than to reconsider what the community should be about/for.
If the community expands, the quality of content will decrease as people will be less determined to propose solid suggestions for Nelson and the amount of shitposting will become incredibly high because many… how should i say it…less mature people don’t really care about the game’s development, they care about the gameplay and the memes.
This really isn’t a downside. What’s wrong with a games community making memes about it and only caring about the gameplay? I mean we literally play games for the gameplay. Like by playing a game you don’t need to care about the development, Personally I do but it isn’t an issue if someone really doesn’t care. By calling people who shitpost and play the game less mature you are literally talking about every single person who plays the game including yourself, You have posted memes here yourself if I remember correctly. By playing and enjoying a game you aren’t obligated to make suggestions for the game.
Personally I feel the community has a lack of purpose right now, Its memes and suggestions - people blaming everyone and everything for the inactivity but really its cause an entire forum cant exist on suggestions and shitposts alone. There needs to be more community content - more incentive to create something and share it. Who cares if there is a bunch of memes if there is an almost equal amount of creative creations? Bottom line is - making shitposts and caring about the gameplay doesn’t make you less mature it makes you a part of the community, Not everyone needs to make suggestions or contribute to development.
In my opinion, a potential solution is an incentive to get featured in @MoltonMontro s community blog. Maybe something like what destiny does where getting featured on the blog gives you exclusive cosmetics in-game. Different cosmetics for different types of feature (ex - tshirt for videos, hat for art, different gunskins for different types of mods etc) Like honestly anything to incentivize creating something other than curated maps, Curation has lots of creative limitations and have to be spaced out - with a game as goofy as unturned we should be encouraging the community to just go bonkers and make crazy shit for the community. Stuff like Candyland and Tales of Terror are good examples of what we need more of, just really out-there stuff that still loosely fits unturned. I know fun workshop content is possible, just look at the mapjam stuff. Unturned videos should be as bonkers as the game, We need more unturned art that captures that crazy feeling of playing the game. The solution to the meme suggestion loop we see every day - is a reason to do literally anything else, and I feel like the community blog is where we could do that.
TL;DR: Instead of hating people for making shitposts or suggesting nonsense we should encourage them to create something more “worthwhile” via the SDG blog.
Staff are able to easily & directly communicate with individual users, and engage in normal discussions, because it’s a small community. The larger the community, the harder this is to do.
But What are you guys gonna do I dont know if it will ever happen or when it will happen but what if the community gets to a scale that you guys cant check through the stuff that the community posts anymore what will you guys resolve to then?
And can somebody tell me how to make a quote with mentioning a text of a other person?
One thing that will always sort of annoy me is that I never really got to truly experience those OG community driven forums back in the day, only maybe got a gist of them towards the end of the old Internet era, since I was too young and I was in a country which was not really involved in the online medium. My initiation in the whole Internet world was through Facebook and YouTube post its purchase by Google. Although I have to admit, I’m not sure to which extent, but these forums have kind of given me a similar feeling to what I think would go on back in the day. Just a bunch of sad losers talking about a video game, where for the most part everyone knows everyone. Quite a special feeling, and if the Internet’s only way of escaping all the corporatism threatening it is some kind of “Internet II”, then I am not sure if anything will ever even be able to come close to the feeling of belonging one can get being in their own little group online. It’s not like all of these are extinct now, granted, but whatever the Internet was before 2010… was something else.
Nelson (And us staff) would seek to recruit more moderators to manage the community in case the forum (Or UII community as a whole) grew to a pretty large and more active state.
However if it happen to be very manageable despite the size then extra staff is less of a priority (But still a vacant position). After all, the top of the community (Regs) would be able to help out with the available tools accessible to them (Report/edit post functions) to make it easier to track down bad content or behaviour.
You are right.I have to agree that i did post memes but i also did suggestions.You are right about me hating the people that don’t contribute in a way to the development of the game.It’s a build-up of frustration because ,through all the years i have been playing the game for, I have heard so many complaints about the game, but no sollutions and I love this game so much I feel the need to protect its reputation at all times.
One thing I’ve learned over the years is: you should be most critical of the things you love the most. The games and movies I hold dearest to my heart are also the games and movies I absolutely tear to shreds and over-analyze. You don’t need to protect unturneds reputation, you should just do what you feel you should do to contribute to the game and its community and let it speak for itself.
