Activity and Styles

[Cyric]

Two things I've noticed since returning to post actively: The rate of new posts is significantly lower than it use to be (on my various other attempts at activity). Hold on, distracted by a smiley jerking his turkey

I don't intend to be rude in any way, but thus far I like it here and intend on trying to stay. I'm a member of at least 2 other FF fan sites (one is much more active with posts, but they're insanely cliquey and I'm not a fan of that and the other doesn't update FF related things anymore and deteriorated into a torrent site) and I see this one as a fantastic replacement for both. I've seen that LocoColt04 (or is it just 4?) has gone to at least one SE meet and greet (dressed for success), so maybe working a bit more closely with them would yield swag to give away to members of the forums that meet certain giveaway criteria (promoting posts!). I do a giveaway on my own game related fan site, but that comes out of my pocket since the developer isn't all that worried about supporting fan sites and what have you.

Secondly, why only two forum styles? Why no simplified style? I took a look at the forum leaders and there's a huge number of them and I don't see any of them post, are none of them able/willing to create new skins? There's a vbulletin community at vbulletin.org that has a ridiculously number of cool styles, mods and other hacks that have proven to be fantastically useful.

Thoughts?

[loaf]

You don't have to post everyday to Moderate the site.

Our styles are custom. Custom tends to mess up sometimes. That's why guess as to there are only 2 forum style.

Also activity is low? Activity has been this steady since 2010. It may have gone down slightly but this is nowhere close to 2010-2011 when it was just dead.

Sorry but I don't feel the need to pay out of my pocket for a prize someone can easily win by just constantly being on the forums all day and night. Even if it's not out of my pocket that's how I feel for a prize give-away for posting? Maybe for a different kind of competition.

Also we have had competitions for prizes such as Final Fantasy Tactics for a tablet and I know at least one more prize. Can't force people to post mang :C

We gave away tickets to a FF concert I believe.

Another competition we had was your Job choice for FF games. We had 2 entries.

[Cyric]

You may not have to post to moderate, but it's hard to moderate if you haven't logged in since April

Custom styles aren't too hard to maintain, it's mostly a matter of remembering how and where changes are/were made. I keep notes to keep myself from forgetting how/why. xD

By low activity I mean that I've seen 4-5 updated threads a day, which is much lower than when I registered way back when. This place updates the front site regularly, which is awesome. I know vB4 has a way to integrate articles from a front site to threads on the forum side, there's hope that there would be an increase in activity due to discussion of articles from the front site.

I wasn't suggesting that anyone necessarily pay out of pocket for a give away, haha. It's not about just posting, it's about quality posts related to Final Fantasy. If that makes sense. One entry for posting in the Giveaway thread, another entry for starting a worth while Final Fantasy thread and one more for each post in a final fantasy thread (where the post is related to the topic). You bait them into posting and eventually they do it themselves (in theory).

I recall the Tactics and Concert giveaways, but I never bothered to enter because I didn't have funds for travel nor do I have a tablet.


Also, the ads when you're not logged in are pretty shady. Just got an add for a game for males only with a busty lady flashing her dirty pillows in my face. Not a fan and had those been around when I was contemplating registration, I'd have moved on.

[loaf]

Yeah but if you give points for threads and posts you will eventually have people coming up with random topics and then necorposting on some topic 5 years ago. That is bring up activity but it's also creating spam imo. A thread dead for years is dead for a reason because people were done with it. Cool make a new thread and then it'll get 1 or 2 replies because people have done that thread before.

My thing is it's Square Enix. They don't release enough games that everybody will enjoy all the time. The latest games are XIII and XIV. XIV is MMO so not much to talk in the forums when you can discuss it in game. FFXIII that not many people like so they tend to not talk about it. Almost EVERYTHING has been brought up from FF1-FF12 it's kind of hard to create more original topics of the games. They also don't release games that everyone wants to be like 7 and 8 in terms of HOLY SHIT THIS GAME IS SO OOOOOOOO COOL MATERIA JUNCTION 1OMGOMGOMGOMGOGMOGMO SQUALL? GUNBLADE? CLOUD LOOK AT CLOUD.

Like people expect that and I'm not joking, I have met countless people who were like. I was expecting XIII to be more like 7 because they said Lightning was a female cloud. But it's not like 7. I almost just walked away.

Those 2 competitions for the game and concert I dont have a tablet. I also have Tactics on PSP and I couldn't travel. I'm not saying this isn't good ideas it's just kind of hard to bring back activity on a subject not as exciting as it was 10 years ago when everyone was in the process of playing these and still playing them. I mean I play FF8 randomly again and doing the card games all the time but I'm not making a thread of necroposting a thread because I know that thread has been discussed people multiple times.

[Cyric]

If your reasoning for not starting a thread is because people have already talked about it you should probably get off the internet, because unfortunately nearly every thread you'll ever find on here has been discussed somewhere, some how. What needs to be considered is that there are new individuals finding and falling in love with the Final Fantasy series all the time. It should be important that we share our love by discussing everything again and again until people stop loving Final Fantasy. Who cares if the more recent titles aren't as popular, that happens with games all the time. I-XII (except XI it's hard to want to play a game where parties are hard to come by in early levels) are hallmarks of story telling that are going to be great plays for years. People are still finding their way to the very first Final Fantasy and are loving it. The main idea of having a fan site or a fan forum about a particular subject is to discuss it regardless of how many times it's been discussed. Sure, necroposting is a shit idea, but starting a new topic on a topic can bring people to reconsider prior theories or perceptions or even cause them to discuss those theories and perceptions with people whose views differ.

There should be a focus on procuring new members, with new ideas, new views and a brand new perception of what Final Fantasy is.

Blaming SE over the fact that people aren't posting on a Final Fantasy forum is like getting pissed at the sun every winter. Try to get the community more involved with itself.

[loaf]

Oh I forgot you have been mia, we had someone do what you just said in your first suggestion. He is MIA now. He brought activity. Honestly I feel this is the best we have had it since 2010. Sorry can't bring it back to 2005 or 2008 when I joined and joined again. Also Block is gone sorry.

We have been trying to get this community more involved. We had FFXIV beta keys, we had tons of sign ups! For a beta key and they left. Oops sorry no activity burst there. This whole year has been great here, we have had more community things than I have ever seen before. Loco going to San Francisco, that's what the front page is promoting as well as the latest FF stuff. It's more on the user willing to stay. Not everybody has the same mind set when they view these forums are like "yeah im going to visit multiple times out the day." Some don't even bookmark the site. I'm not trying to say what your ideas are not going to work it's just we can't force someone to do what we want.

My suggestion? Talk is cheap go do. Instead of waiting for another reply go make a thread on something that would bring conversation. If you can do it in the FF7 boards even cooler.

[Rowan]

I succesfully talked 2 of my friends into joining (not that they were opposed, they are both final fantasy fans and frequent the web daily), but after a couple of logins, they never logged back in. This is a clue, in my eye. I never bothered to ask them why they didnt log back in, although I think the reason is clear. They dont have a reason to stay/they dont feel welcome/there just isnt enough activity for them to care about coming back.

Im trying to remember the most recently active threads here.
-feminsm thread
-religious thread
-homocide thread
-sex thread
-fart thread
-phone thread
-martial arts thread
-FF14 thread

only a single ff thread in all of that. Also, I started 3 of them.

[Incognitus]

Why back in my day, I was shaking my TFF moderator cane at all of the young newbies to get off my lawn!

It was really active back in the early-to-mid 2000s. Good times. Forum activity will wax and wane---it's just the nature of things now. You'll see the odd flurry of activity on occasion. But plenty of people who joined these forums over the years have moved on from Final Fantasy, from RPGs... hell, maybe even from gaming. I know I have moved on from RPGs and the FF series, but I came back because I had a few friends who still posted here that requested my presence. Trust me, I have glowing or dissenting opinions on almost every thread topic that pops up, but I don't rush to post in every single one of them. These days I'm as active as I want to be.

The alleged forum demise you all are describing is most likely a combination of social media and games with social functions diverting attention and activity elsewhere. Back in 2001-2003, Twitter didn't exist. Tumblr didn't exist. Facebook was a fledgling, exclusive college-only network. To receive/provide help on FF6, I had to dial up my 56k modem, join a forum like this one and ask questions unless I wanted to call the SquareSoft help line at some ridiculous per-minute charge. Nowadays, broadband is commonplace. And even though they are entirely separate communications platforms, social networks battle with forums for activity because time is precious. These days, people hashtag game-related questions for quick tweetbacks and some prefer the friendly confines of Facebook for questions/camaraderie over a bunch of strangers registered at xyz forums who may or may not answer in time to find out where to steal that missable relic. Sucks.

I still prefer this place over social media, activity be damned.

Im trying to remember the most recently active threads here.
-feminsm thread
-religious thread
-homocide thread
-sex thread
-fart thread
-phone thread
-martial arts thread
-FF14 thread

only a single ff thread in all of that. Also, I started 3 of them.

If you watch the Who's Online as often as I do, you can see what the guests and spiders like to see (hint: they jiggle). More boob threads! The great equation: boobs = activity!

(I'm of course kidding.)

[LocoColt04]

That's actually another fair point there.

Facebook and such have a really strong presence, and the existence of groups and official fan pages has impacted message boards all over the internet for all kinds of topics. Now, I semi-stalk another forum that maintains a much higher activity level than ours, but even then it doesn't hit anywhere near what ours did in the "active" days, nor what it did in its active days either. (For the sake of avoiding vagueness, I'm talking about EyesOnFF.)

Something different about their community is how openly willing everyone is to absorb new members, whereas sometimes I feel like our userbase is full of crotchety old people. The average age on their boards is a lot lower than ours, so I think a lot of us were already in high school when TFF reached peak activity levels a decade ago, and their average age was significantly younger. As more of our users moved out of high school and into college, the standard activity expectation lowered.

That's not to say that everyone left; in fact, many of our users still log in on a very regular basis! But we all lurk. We don't currently have the giant web presence we used to have, and most of us have had the same conversations with each other already. I don't stand by the idea of "don't make new topics of old conversations" but if the opinion hasn't changed in X years, I understand why people don't feel the need to participate.

Our recent experiences with Square Enix Community over the last year have been fantastic, but even with the influx of members received from these events, maybe 10% have actually stuck around, with maybe only half of them posting more than a dozen times. This could be attributed to various things, but...

Crotchety old man syndrome is the most likely culprit!

The only real downside, honestly, is when someone straightforward like you comes along and says "hey, I like this place, let's do things to spruce it up!" and all the old members say "NO WAY THIS PLACE IS FINE GET THOSE NEWBIES OUT OF HERE." That kind of attitude is counterproductive, and even if nobody is being directly insulting to any new members, it's still a hostile air. THAT is what needs to go away, but I am not keen on censoring anyone's ideas, either. Conundrum.


Addendum:
I have a topic up in this section regarding input for a new, streamlined mobile skin that would double as a minimalist browser skin. If you have ideas, please share!

[Andromeda]

Yeah, I do what I can to keep our front page populated and active. 90% of the threads I make for it don't generate any activity, but some of them do end making something. I have my lull periods unfortunately, usually when a new JRPG comes out. So I don't have the consistency that I would prefer at times, but it's certainly a lot better than it was a year ago. I'd like to think the active front page helps pull in a member or two. Though we haven't written new articles for the rotating ones in a long time. Need to talk to Fuzz about doing something about that.

If I had a better understanding out how to customize styles for the forum on a coding level. I'd actually make some new ones, but I don't know how to do any of the coding required for any of the styles I want to make. Every time I look into figuring it out I find nothing helpful. Which is a shame, since I think people would like them if I could get them made.

But yeah, I hadn't really thought about it either, but it does make sense that social media didn't really exist in the way it did back in 2001-2 during the height of TFF's activity. It is true that a lot of the core members have been around for a long time. We got older and not nearly enough younger members replaced the age range we left. It means we have a strong community, but probably a more difficult one to fit into at times.

[LocoColt04]

By the way, I super duper appreciate everything you do - even just pulling news from other sources is more than awesome enough, because it keeps us populated with fresh news. I wish I had more timely opportunities to do the same myself.

If you have some artwork and ideas you want to incorporate into potential styles, just send the stuff to me or Fuzz! Either of us can incorporate them into new forum styles. Since we have a pair of custom bases up, it's really simple to place new things into them. The reason I haven't worked my mobile skin yet is because it requires a full redesign, and I wanted user input before I spent any time on it.

[Andromeda]

I've already show it to Fuzz and I got the feeling he couldn't make it happen. He gave me the go-ahead on it, but trying to make heads or tails of the coding nature of vB without anything more a Basic background (as in the programming language Basic), which isn't more than self-taught, hasn't really helped me. I know it requires more engineering than the basic drop in and press go, otherwise I would have muddled through it. Even Merlin gave up on it. If you want to take a stab it, I have the concept art you can look at to see if you think you can do it. I have the psd file elsewhere if you actually want to make a go of it.

I'd do my own news if I could, but we don't get press releases from anyone other than maybe Square and I suspect we don't get a lot of them or you'd probably be posting them or sending them my way. So my only recourse is to get the news from other news channels.

[Cyric]

Conundrum indeed!

The thing with EoFF is that their willingness to accept new members comes and goes in waves. There's a certain type of newbie they enjoy. They welcome all newbies, but if a newbie doesn't kiss the ass of at least one or more 'popular' member, at some point they're going to stop acknowledging that newbie. I can't tell you the number of threads in general chat or eyes on each other where it's the same 6-10 members chatting with each other ignoring any input from a member not of their clique. That's not to say that I hate EoFF, because that's far from the truth. That website got me through some of my toughest Final Fantasy moments and gave me an outlet as a growing teen and young adult.

I can absolutely wrap my head around the oldbie's feeling like someone is trying to come in and change what they perceive as a good thing, but more activity and new members is always a great thing to have. I don't want to give the idea that forcing oldbie's to accept changes to what they've become accustomed too (outside of the obvious more activity that I've been hankering for).

Also, if I can manage to come through with some front site news additions I'll be sure to push them your way.

Even more also, I'll take a look at your thread. C:

[Alpha]

Yeah but if you give points for threads and posts you will eventually have people coming up with random topics and then necorposting on some topic 5 years ago. That is bring up activity but it's also creating spam imo. A thread dead for years is dead for a reason because people were done with it. Cool make a new thread and then it'll get 1 or 2 replies because people have done that thread before.

My thing is it's Square Enix. They don't release enough games that everybody will enjoy all the time. The latest games are XIII and XIV. XIV is MMO so not much to talk in the forums when you can discuss it in game. FFXIII that not many people like so they tend to not talk about it. Almost EVERYTHING has been brought up from FF1-FF12 it's kind of hard to create more original topics of the games. They also don't release games that everyone wants to be like 7 and 8 in terms of HOLY SHIT THIS GAME IS SO OOOOOOOO COOL MATERIA JUNCTION 1OMGOMGOMGOMGOGMOGMO SQUALL? GUNBLADE? CLOUD LOOK AT CLOUD.

Like people expect that and I'm not joking, I have met countless people who were like. I was expecting XIII to be more like 7 because they said Lightning was a female cloud. But it's not like 7. I almost just walked away.

Those 2 competitions for the game and concert I dont have a tablet. I also have Tactics on PSP and I couldn't travel. I'm not saying this isn't good ideas it's just kind of hard to bring back activity on a subject not as exciting as it was 10 years ago when everyone was in the process of playing these and still playing them. I mean I play FF8 randomly again and doing the card games all the time but I'm not making a thread of necroposting a thread because I know that thread has been discussed people multiple times.

Just in terms of activity, can we all congratulate Loaf on what I estimate is his longest post ever.





Andro does a good job keeping an eye on FF and other gaming news. All the moderators are great. This is not and will never be the biggest forum, but small/medium forums are pretty cool places, IMO. Tight-knit.

The biggest problem, if you're aiming to increase the number of people coming here, is that people aren't as excited by a new Final Fantasy as they once were. Sort of peaked around X, I think. I wonder if there are stats.

EDIT: After staring at the fist GIF for about two minutes, I realised something. If the food just gets magic'd onto their plates, why can't they just magic it into their stomachs and then go smoke flavoured tobacco?

[Incognitus]

Just in terms of activity, can we all congratulate Loaf on what I estimate is his longest post ever.

Careful! You might encourage him!

Loaf is a simple man.
He prefers to skim when he can.
Once he did plead:
"Too long! Didn't read!"
Must have a short attention span.

(I kid, loaf. I kid!)

***

Slightly in my defense, I may have crotchety old man syndrome but I don't feel I afflict others with it directly---through a cudgel or otherwise. Only in threads like these do I ever mention it. I prefer instead to contribute to the forum wherever I feel is best, whenever I feel is a good time to contribute. There may be half-decade-long gaps of activity between contributions, but that is my prerogative as a regular member.

And for the record, I blame getting old more than social media. More responsibilities (and thus less time) are the main reasons most of my older, active TFF friends here moved on. Many of them moved on during their college years. Personally, I had to transfer all power from main engineering, so to speak, to write long dissertations about college course topics instead of writing long-winded posts about X controversial topic at TFF. Priorities.

[loaf]

My RP posts are shorter than that.

[che]

EDIT: After staring at the fist GIF for about two minutes, I realised something. If the food just gets magic'd onto their plates, why can't they just magic it into their stomachs and then go smoke flavoured tobacco?

Omg, and completely miss the amazingness of eating and tasting? Are you mad?

[Cyanist]

Ah, so if Cyanista mentions stuff like this mods clam up (maybe she'll go away?) but when Cyric talks about skins ya'll respond post-haste, eh? Awesome undiscriminating dedication, guys Don't worry, though, I won't make a stink (or is that why I'm being ignored...?)

[Cyric]

Very few people actually acknowledged the skins. For the most part, the entire thread revolved around activity.

[Cyanist]

Hmmm, maybe the activity went down because I left because I got T.O.ed after being ignored...

lol, that's so self-aggrandizing, obviously the blame lies on all of us...right? So, let's fix things!