To site owner/forum admin/mods

Discussion in 'Site Feedback' started by Dmonik, Nov 22, 2001.

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  1. Dmonik

    Dmonik New Member

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    I think there should be a board for online users, it could be called
    "Multiplayer League" or something. I have noticed that no one really talks about the online version of Arcanum, but perhaps if they did see a multiplayer forum, they would start.

    - I will volunteer to be a mod for it :grin:

    The reason being, I like the online version as much as the single version, but I dont think it has gotten enough publicity
    _________________
    As of Nov/19/01
    Online Level - 30
    [​IMG]

    <font size=-1>[ This Message was edited by: Dmonik on 2001-11-22 01:17 ]</font>
     
  2. Calis

    Calis Member

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    Well,

    Truth be told, most people seem to be disappointed with the multiplayer mode of Arcanum. Lag seems to be high for most people, and gameplay-wise it's not all that good either. I don't think a multiplayer board would help all that much, but I'll think about it a bit...
     
  3. Jinxed

    Jinxed Active Member

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    I would suggest not only arcanum online but other games aswell, like a multiplayer general board. Ofcourse I would love to be an admin too. But I don't count on anything. I mean, expect mercy from an evil dictator? naah...
     
  4. Dmonik

    Dmonik New Member

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    pheeeew

    ok, well I am fine with that. I just thought that you would get mad at me for basically asking to be a mod, but ok :grin:
     
  5. colonel_mortimer

    colonel_mortimer New Member

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    Shameless plug.

    The Tarant Daily’s message boards http://arcanum.gamestats.com/?action=messageboard have these and other features.

    We have both a multiplayer board and a role-playing discussion board for any non-Arcanum role-playing game.

    You would think a big site like this would have more boards than are little old second-rate site. :roll:

    _________________
    My love winks, she does not bother,
    She knows too much to argue or to judge. - Bob Dylan

    <font size=-1>[ This Message was edited by: colonel_mortimer on 2001-11-25 09:07 ]</font>
     
  6. Calis

    Calis Member

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    Morty,

    First of all, fuck off. Second of all, what use is a huge amount of boards when NOBODY'S POSTING ON SAID BOARDS?

    THAT, my good man, is the main reason we didn't create those boards yet: we doubted they'd get much traffic. As anyone who has run a semi-popular message board can tell you, there *is* such a thing as too many boards.
     
  7. Jinxed

    Jinxed Active Member

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    I would agree if its the case of Tarant Daily. But how about Voult13.net? I mean that is huge. maybe that is the reason its loading ages and I don't feel like posting there. There is another answer. How about an all in one? You could have a arcanum multiplayer/misc games corner. Ofcourse if you still think it wont work, If you don't mind an extra member I will be happy to be here. If you need any help with the stuff you wrote about in the email, it won't very hard for me.
     
  8. colonel_mortimer

    colonel_mortimer New Member

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    Don't you think that was a little strong, Calis? What was so offensive the part where I informed people that TD had those boards, or was it when I mentioned that your site was bigger than ours in an attempt to show the irony of the fact we have the boards people want, yet you have all the posters.

    Personally, I don't think TD has too many boards. TA with more boards may be a problem, though. With all of the posts you get it is sometimes too much with the boards you have now. It would be better if people did not have to reply to every post on a board (there's nothing like coming here to see the last 20 posts were by one person) imagine what it would be like with several more boards.

    What this all boils down to is you, as an admin, should surely realize that your conduct was not becoming of a person of your position. If you were pissed because of the TD plug it was the title of my subject, (thanks again for adding those subject lines back in the day) and I would expect you to plug your site if you were down to around 5 posts a day. It's been really dull over there lately due to the Thanksgiving holiday (a lot of Americans at the board) and lack of Arcanum news. It should pick up today or tomorrow, but I am thinking in a month or so, if all goes as planned, we will again shine in the greatness of a popular fan site.

    P.S. Sorry if I pissed you off there Calis. Most of my posts are only half serious. If I have a real serious post I will usually throw something crazy at the bottom. It is just the way I am; so don't take me so seriously all the time. :smile:

    _________________
    My love winks, she does not bother,
    She knows too much to argue or to judge. - Bob Dylan

    <font size=-1>[ This Message was edited by: colonel_mortimer on 2001-11-25 20:44 ]</font>
     
  9. Calis

    Calis Member

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    Sorry for reacting so strongly, Morty, but look at it from my point of view. First, a couple of board regulars imply that a multiplayer forum might spark some interest in multiplayer Arcanum. Personally, I think groups would've formed using the general discussion forum if the interest was really there, but my reply was "I'll think about it". Next thing I know, an ex-regular comes out of the woodwork and uses this discussion as an excuse to do what he always does on those few occasions he posts here: promote another forum.
    Yes, but NEVER on a competitor's forum. Never. I'd do contests, post content with forum links, make my site popular by e-mailing news sites about the cool content we have, but never, NEVER would I post on another fansite's forum to promote my own. In "Calis' Great Book o' Fansite Ethics", it's worse than stealing news, putting your logo on screenshots, and copy-pasting the official site and calling it "content" all lumped into one big pile (note that none of those are references to any Arcanum fan site, they're remarks about fan sites in general). I've always tried not to be too anal about stuff like this, because I've seen stuff like this turn a fansite community into a bunch of anal, righteous bastards (the Fallout fan site community suffers from over-analness when it comes to stuff like this, and it's horrible) but occasionally I lose my cool. So sue me.

    As for your remarks about spam, yes, I agree, forums don't need 100 posts a day to survive. However, if you're going to create new boards while the old boards serve the purpose just fine, all you're going to accomplish is breaking up your own community.
     
  10. Jinxed

    Jinxed Active Member

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    After some serious thinking I have to agree that the multiplayer forum would be unnesessary. I do stay here alot of time and if someone had questions or problems, he would probably post it in genarl discussion which handles all sorts of things including spam. making other forums would be quite useless since the setting that is on right now is working just fine.
    My whole point is that I really want to be an admin even at TA if it would mean that I would moderate a useless forum, not useless to me since its on TA. I just like this forum that much. So if you need any help with admin. I would be glad to help.
     
  11. colonel_mortimer

    colonel_mortimer New Member

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    I posted that at 4:00 a.m. I was not at my best, like now at 9:00 a.m. after not being able to sleep, so please bear with me.

    I saw that completely different. I was throwing in a little plug and showing the irony I talked about earlier. I never had said that this was a bad forum and never suggested that your posters leave this board to post at TD, but I assumed they would post on this board and at TD. We are one big community. As a community we should do are best to support the other fansites to help them develop into equals because right now if you go to DoA you will find things that you nor TD has and vise versa. All the fansites are unique and one is not any better than the other. The way, from what I have gathered, Tonurics and shards (the Webmasters) view other fansites is more of a mutual acknowledgement and respect; almost an alliance. You yourself posted at TD and many members of TD have posted here. Nobody is jealous or feels like their site is better than the others. Hell we have even found news, from our site only, grace your news section and I am sure all the fansites share each other’s news.

    I thought this friendly view we had towards the other sites was returned in kind. I really do not see how posting something about another fansite would do anything more than bring the whole community together as a whole. Hell, when this forum started all of the posters were from the Inn. TA was the first fansite I visited regularly, even before I found the Inn.

    I was here posting in your infancy to try to help create the strong community you have today. I did leave, kind of for a while. It was because I was working all summer long and was unable to post so I lurked, then slowly as the board almost died. Around July I quit frequenting the board. By the time I had time to post again the TA community was totally different. I did not know these people, so I never got back into it. But about a month or two ago Jinxed made his way to TD said a few things about TA, and somehow got me to remember the good old days when this board first started. Since then, I have slowly started posting here more and more.

    About me only promoting another forum, you might have missed some of my posts on the other boards here but I have added to other discussions, and tried to help those in need. The only other time I promoted TD on this site, that I remember, was an invitation to you to come back to TD and add a little to the discussion which you never did. Then Al said something about TD and I made the mistake of inquiring about what his deal was with him being an admin of that site and talking bad about it on another forum. And I was the only member to see it so I had to react. I did apologize then if you go back and look at those posts. Surely, I figured you could see the problem of this nature, imagine if one of your members in high power came to TD and said how TD was so much better than this one.

    All because one person came to TD from a competing board do about the same thing I did. Now I still post at TD as much as I can during its cold spell lately, yet I have been here at least lurking everyday.

    Even during the heightened spam of TA, when I did have major problems trying to break my way back into the TA community I still had respect for you and your site as a whole. Pissing you off was and is something I never wanted to do. I hold you at the same level of a Strav, shards, Tonurics, Ratster, and all other very senior members of the Arcanum community.

    Sorry for the long dull boring post but in my semiconscious state I have lost my ability to fluently type, bullshit, and word my post in a very elegant manner. What you are getting here is a very blunt, and truthful post that sounds very cheesy in some places.

    P.S. At times like these, I thank whoever invented spell check.

    <font size=-1>[ This Message was edited by: colonel_mortimer on 2001-11-27 15:23 ]</font>
     
  12. Calis

    Calis Member

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    I actually agree with you, Morty. I'm not in this to "outcompete" other fansites, or boycot them or anything. I'm all for a living, breathing community with lots of fansites coexisting. In fact, when another fansite has something new & cool, I'll link to them in our news. Same goes for giving credit with news and such.
    Check out a few of our affiliate sites. Do I force them to put up a big "Click here and support the glory of the evil T-A empire" banner at the top of their sites? No, I don't. Just the standard ad banner (a requirement of our host).

    I have, however, set a clear set of rules for myself when it comes to promotion and other sites' turf. Maybe you're right, though, and it's unreasonable of me to get annoyed when other people don't stick to the rules I have set for myself.
     
  13. Calis

    Calis Member

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    One more thing, C_M: Most of the above was based on the assumption that you're still a staff member at TD. You're still listed on the staff page there. Are you still doing work for TD?
     
  14. colonel_mortimer

    colonel_mortimer New Member

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    Well personally most of my TD reference posts were in response to a "what the hell" type of emotion similar to the one you experienced when you saw my last reference.

    As far as your standards, my standards may be the same if we had as popular of a site as you have here, and your standards may be quite different in our situation. I never remember a time in the last year or so when TA was not the most traveled and well-known fansite. Plus you had the Planescape Torment site that still has people asking for the link today.

    I will do my best to ensure that I do not promote that site in anyway on this forum.
     
  15. Calis

    Calis Member

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    Hey, if people ask for a certain kind of information, and that info is presented on TD, you're perfectly welcome to give out a link. If TD has something new & cool, you're perfectly welcome to give a link to that and/or promote it a bit in your posts. However, in the frame of reference I use, posting a link to a competing forum and telling about it's features is a lack of courtesy if you are in fact a staff member at the other forum. Two key points here being courtesy and staff member. It's not even about me being afraid of losing regulars (because it generally doesn't work that way, in my experience). If this were a case of a forum regular discussing feature differences between this forum and another, I'd have less of a problem with it. If this were a case of you posting a link to some cool article found on TD, I'd have no problem with it either.

    As for me behaving differently if the situation were different, I don't think so. T-A did in fact have a fairly unpopular board (based on WWWBoard) in the past, for months and months on end.

    This board got to where it is because we first built up a large user base through reliable news and lots and lots of content, and then we opened this board. With that Torment fansite (which still runs WWWBoard, by the way), the forum became popular because people were looking for the content on the site itself, saw that the site was in fact very active, and therefore joined the boards.

    <font size=-1>[ This Message was edited by: Calis on 2001-11-27 16:14 ]</font>
     
  16. Jinxed

    Jinxed Active Member

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    That reminds me of the referer Ton put up a while ago.
     
  17. Sheriff Fatman

    Sheriff Fatman Active Member

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    Going back to the initial subject, Sierra's multiplayer board on the official site gets almost no traffic (or didn't a month ago when I was there last).

    It's a morgue, like the RPG forum here :wink:

    I dunnno about TD, since I have never been there.
     
  18. Jinxed

    Jinxed Active Member

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  19. Milo

    Milo New Member

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    Jinxed - Just out of curiousity, have you ever admined a board? You seem to really want to be on staff here.

    The reason I ask is because I have admined at messageboards, and in my experience, it's not all that fun. It's more fun to be a regular poster. You don't have to deal with any of the headaches. No dealing with hosting issues. No worrying about ironing out all the bugs. No thinking people are kissing your ass for "special favors". No "PLS CAN I GET A CUSTOM AVATAR?! KTHXBYE" e-mails.

    When shit goes wrong, you're the one who gets all the complaints and demands to get things fixed, is my point. All the behind the scenes hastle and almost none of the actual fun of participating.

    And besides, do they really need another admin here? Or a mod for that matter. Calis seems to handle the hosting issues. The board seems pretty well off running phpBB 1.4.1. If they (the admins) needed help setting up phpBB 2 in the future then I could see them looking for another admin, but setting up a phpBB board isn't very hard in the first place. And judging by the level of customizing done to this board, the current admins shouldn't have any trouble handling the upgrade if in fact they decide to do it.
     
  20. Calis

    Calis Member

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    Milo,

    You summed up the bad points of being an admin quite nicely, and I've experienced most of them over the course of running two fansites. :smile:
    It's the hardest thing to do while recruiting new staff members, too: separate the people who are actually interested in doing *work* and dealing with stuff from the people who just want to be listed as an admin.

    As for not needing any more mods for this board, I don't entirely agree. I seem to be the only staff member who's even pretending to watch the board on a permanent basis, and I have to confess that I stopped reading every single thread a long time ago. So maybe another mod who is willing and able to give this board the time it deserves isn't such a bad idea. Having said that, I'll give you guys the same statement I have up to now: I'll take a long, good look at it all after tomorrow (last of this series of uni tests... blergh)
     
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