Feedback

[King Atem]

I hate to be THAT GUY. But, your team of 3 workaholic's & 0 moderator for the night shift or day shift, isn't really cutting it. I've seen more ads on here then on tch by comparison. You guys/gals should hire on someone who can eradicate the spam while your away at work, with family, etc. I know the group of admins & mods are rl friends; but maybe you should expand your horizons & ask for help. You clearly need someone to mod, maybe run ads for here, or maybe even add twitch streams with members who stream that are willing to advertise to UG. But you guys can't bring in new blood alone, you kinda need some help.

Giving my thoughts. that is all. Thank you for your time.

[Karo]

To be honest I only ever notice an ad every few weeks luckily the spam bots don't really seem to be that aggressive that someone need to purge the whole forum.

How many ads have you noticed Atem?

[Dragon Lord]

Seems a little aggressive for what is really a non-issue. The 3-5 topics that a spam bot posts every now and then isn't such a huge issue that it's vital for another Moderator to be added. Especially considering that the spam bots usually show up in the middle of the night for the US, which most people aren't online for, and by the time people do start coming on, Elite usually has things cleaned up due to being in the UK.

Also your post goes from discussing the problem of the spam bots to discussing not having enough new members joining the forum. There's not a whole anyone can do about that. Forums have slowed down considerably over the years and unless you're a huge website like Gamefaqs, you're not going to find yourself having much activity. Social Media and the rise of things like Discord have really done a number to forums, especially in the gaming category. Why sit on a forum and discuss gaming when you can join Discord servers revolving around gaming and have the option to not only discuss games via either text chat or voice chat, but also join groups of other gamers to play games with.

I'm not trying to put words in the mouths of Moon, Shira or Elite here, and they can correct me if I'm wrong here, but it seems like they've realized this and have decided to go down the path of having this forum as a place where they and their group of friends can chill out together, rather than trying to go out and make this a huge gaming website that can compete among the other giants. Which there's nothing wrong with that. Especially since trying to get that big would require a huge time sink and a lot more monetary investment, which as a recently married young couple, Moon and Shira can't really invest either of those things into a forum. Hiring someone else to come in an do all that for them would be pointless as well. No point wasting money paying someone to run their forum for them, they'd be better off just giving the forum away to that person instead.

Also I don't know in any scenario where advertising a forum via a Twitch stream would ever work. Why join the forum when you can just watch the stream and interact with other people in the chat there? I've seen streamers try to start forums and it fails horribly every time. Twitch is another factor in the death of gaming forums, so using it to try to advertise would go no where and likely just hurt the forum more than help.

tl;dr version: The forum is fine as is, the spam bots are not nearly as bad as you're making them out to be, and there's absolutely no point in Moon wasting money by hiring someone to come in here just to clean up a few spam topics every now and then. If people want the huge userbase (and all the toxicity that goes with it), there are places like Gamefaqs for you.

[Moonface]

I can't comment on the spam frequency because the posts and topics are entirely purged upon discovery, so for all I know there could have been none in the past month or 100 just today. The most I see is the banned accounts, but I do not know how much they do before someone grabs them. I had given Yuri the ability to purge spam too in the hopes that would help (this was before the recent influx of spam accounts, and I gave him the ability because he used to be a moderator) in the event an actual staff member wasn't available to remove spam.

New blood is definitely an issue, and a big cause when it comes to advertising is that out of all the staff, I'm basically the only one who advertises anywhere. The reason for that is simply neither EL or Shira visit other forums (and I won't force them to do it for the sake of this board), and except for the social media that's the only other notable outlet that comes to mind for advertising a website that doesn't involve paying money for ads on some website, i.e. Facebook. Dragon Lord is correct when he says we're not necessarily striving to be some huge forum. Don't get me wrong, I would love to see a nice stream of new blood rolling in the door and sticking around, but I drew a line in the sand on stressing too heavily on it when I started to get so hooked on numbers (the ZB board literally had a thread where I compared stats on a monthly basis and even had a monthly goal chart) that I would get constantly disheartened by not meeting them and got to a point where I was treating the rest of the staff team as if they were employees who had to meet quotas like they were working the desk of a Gamestop. I care a lot, but sometimes it has gotten to a point where I have reached tears from failing to hit lofty goals and for the sake of mental stability, I drew a line in the sand so to speak to realise that if I care about numbers too much, I'm going to lose focus on the people who actually come here and care more for how much the numbers went up today.

Now of course I do still focus on the numbers and the advertising and all that, I'm not saying I waved all that off because of what I just wrote. Rather, I'm trying to work on doing it in a way that doesn't become unhealthy, which I'll admit I'm not very well versed on how to do and it is a learning process. Sometimes I'll be very pumped to advertise, but then get self conscious that people will get annoyed seeing me constantly advertising even though places like TCH wouldn't actually bat an eyelid at it because their advertising area encourages frequent advertising. That's a personal hurdle I have to get over, and it isn't one I've really managed to work out with myself personally yet, despite it being a pretty stupid thing to worry about.

What I'm trying to say in regards to size, is that whether it's 10 people, or 100 people, I want whoever is here to have a good time and stuff. I don't want to be so focused on what I don't have that I get disheartened about the forum, because then I end up feeling like nothing is worth doing and then that isn't fair to everyone who does come here. I've taken some things harder than an admin really should about a website, and those sort of things are issues I know I have to work on in a way that allows me to do the best I can for all of you here and do what I can to bring people in. Speaking for myself, I'm sorry for any shortcomings I've done, whether it's the spam, the advertising, the board, the members, or anything else. I don't say that for sympathy or anything, just as a staff member who doesn't want you to feel frustrated at spam or us. Sure, I'm human and things happen that certainly excuse those things (not necessarily all the time because I don't want to take the piss at all) but I don't want to use an excuse to downplay you because I agree that seeing spam (which again I have no clue how much of) and it taking perhaps too long to be dealt with can start to arouse questions and concerns that are very much valid, and I want to rectify them and a first step to that is acknowledging them.

I can't give any solutions right now on the spam thing because it's tough to get a plan without knowing the full extent of the problem first hand, but I have this in mind and will see what I can come up with to make this less of an issue in future.

[Karo]

Moony you blew my cover! D: I've been working undercover for so long to have my cover blown....I don't know what to think... Jokes aside I find that their really isn't much of a spam issue really. The spam does happen I think in the past few months I have used the purge spammer button maybe once a month? It really isn't that bad that I noticed.

As for the new members thing...I'm not quite sure how we could go about raising awareness of UG? I honestly don't really use many websites besides the like of UG, Youtube, and rarely twitch. If I do start using more social media type platforms I could put a little UG banner on my profile or something just to raise a little awareness?

[queenzelda]

Like say for those of us who are on other websites, we could add a small 'ug' banner to our signatures if the forum allows it. If we don't have a forum of our own; advertise to UG by having it linked in your profile as your 'website'. I've had people join my forum just by having a link to it on my profile after joining & posting. Can advertise on twitter, facebook, instagram, & even maybe when one of us streams a game on youtube or twitch post a link to UG, mention it, or something. I plan to stream LiS2 soon & have been thinking of advertising to UG in the description since I don't plan to utilize discord since I'm not a fan of their t.o.s for discord server creation. I'm just not ready to play yet, I wanted a chill day before I prepare to rage.