Why I am done, and why you deserve to know

I'm sorry to let you down community, but I have not been able to accomplish what I set out to do. I was hoping I could breathe life into a dying giant, but the wounds were too deep and refused to close.

My goals as a journalist were to fix the major glaring issues with the website; a theme that was from a different game, a forum engine from 2006, and a lack of interesting content. I would like to think I made an impact on the site. I believe my work behind the scenes spurred Kajin to go forward with an upgrade that has been in the making for nearly a year. I also led the drive to have the community submit their ideas for the forum theme. Trying to both create community involvement and hopefully instill a sense of pride in the website, knowing that it came from a member.

Note: Units are members/day averaged over a week.
The week when FH hit 9/day corresponds to the forum upgrade.​

I know I didn't put out as regular of content as I could have, but there are times where all you can do is rehash the same couple things over and over, which is dull. I hope my articles were at least somewhat engaging and informative. I enjoyed writing them and I hope you enjoyed reading them.

Those tasks were just a few of my goals as a journalist. I set out to bring changes into the way the forum worked. In my view ForgeHub should have been a community of people who enjoy creating, playing, and finding forge maps. It should also be a great place to receive advice from other forgers and map designers on how to improve. There was a time when this was the case, but something happened that caused it to stagnate.

There are a lot of variables to any problem, and ForgeHub is no different. We have a long history of hosting forge maps, and that's probably not going anywhere. This is why we have a constant stream of 60-80 guests, searching for interesting maps and also the reason why ForgeHub.com is the first hit on Google for "Forge maps". Though the thing is the people that are forging maps are bouncing around several communities. The authors’ whole intention is getting as much attention for their map as possible.

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That's the thing though; ForgeHub now is just another piece in the pie. People are noticing that less and less is being said on here, especially about maps. The incentive to post or stay on ForgeHub after posting their first map is gone. Thus while you see ForgeHub continues to grow slowly, it does not retain members and our typical online member count is between 5 and 15. These numbers are embarrassingly low for a community of "60,000".

Now I've heard plenty of comments like "The reason why the community is not growing is because Halo 4 is bad." I can't argue the facts that Halo 4 has steadily been declining in popularity and player count since launch, the numbers don’t lie. While I do agree that the lack of Halo 4's success directly affects the communities. Though just looking at the statistics from these websites it's clear to see that even a small community like The Halo Council still manages respectable growth. Halo 4 is not as popular, but it still is a game that offers the most creative flexibility in a FPS. People are still out there forging and creating mini-games. They're just not posting it to ForgeHub.

This is the problem on the surface. That is to say, these are the glaring problem that almost anyone who looks at ForgeHub can see. I've been told this plenty of times by plenty of people. I'm not the only one that sees it by any mean, and the real problems are deeper than that.

For those of you that don't know ForgeHub is owned by Real Military Network. They own several communities outside of Halo and don't have a very big concern what goes on here. They only care if the websites they own continue to get hits. Every hit they get is ad-revenue. Since it's not a big cost difference between hosting one website vs. hosting 15, they don't mind continuing to pay the bills. Especially when you have something as nice as a top search hit like they have. They don't even care that it says Halo Reach maps. They have one person that I assume is on their payroll, Kajin, whose job it is to ensure that the site is stable and reliable. He is one of two people with root access.

The other person with root access is Shock Theta. He's been the admin of ForgeHub for as long as I've been here. He actually had started work on VB4 and a new theme long time ago, but then he abandoned the project. He never got around to updating the homepage to say Halo 4 because the assumption was that VB4's homepage would be used instead of Wordpress. Now I don't know if it was lack of interest in Halo 4 or suddenly he gained a much busier life. Whatever the answer is he's vanished for a long time.

Now no one has the ability to make quick changes to the forum. We can do small things like add/remove individual sub forums, but nothing complex like adding plugins to enhance the forum experience. This means that we are stuck with what we have. We don't even have the ability to remove where it says "Articles" in the themes. It's embarrassing to put content when we don't even have a fully functioning website.

The lack of plugins means our map discussion offers no improvements on any other forum. There are no ranking, voting, or enhanced discussions options, and no way to add them either. It's boring and uninteresting so it's clear why people don't feel it necessary to post their maps here.

Now those are just the things we can't control. What about the things we can? Surely we can launch contests and feature maps without plugins or root access, why can't we just continue to do that? Well remember that thing I said about not much discussion happens here, thus people aren't really interested in suggesting features to us. The bigger issue is that much of the staff doesn't contribute at all to this. That leaves the journalist team to handle the whole of the responsibility. Sure some mods help out on occasion, but only when it's convenient to them, and not with any sort of conviction and regularity. We all have lives and can only spend a few hours a week for the forums at max. This means that when we do get a chance to do anything, it's mostly discussing and debating plan of actions and not actually accomplishing anything. We do have a chance to playtest on the rare occasion, but we're faced with such high expectations we have difficulty coming to a group conclusion and most of our opinions are negative. It's not fun to try and find a feature hoping not to fail.

As for dust up, again it's a lack of effort by the team. We had one admin who was dedicated to branching out to other communities to work on projects together. Though he was not interested in giving up control on them, by refusal to admit we didn't offer very much to anyone. This also meant that he was the only one felt worthy enough to branch out to companies on sponsorship. If we couldn't get some meaningful prizes for dust-up why would anyone come here to play it? It's destined to fail otherwise. Then he vanished for almost a month. Now we're in limbo, trying to test the awesome maps that you all made (while being insanely critical of them, sorry). We probably couldn't pick a half dozen maps from the list that we actually liked as a group, but would take playing another 30 or so maps. Judging by the fact that it has taken forever just to test them all, I can't imagine having the time to do it all again but with an even finer tooth comb. And again, no one but 2-3 people out of the staff were even interested in testing.

The journalists have been dropping like flies, because we were the only one accomplishing anything and we know it. The mods tend to just view it as their job to get mod actions to meet their quota of actions. That's right, the moderators are shown their monthly statistic to compare them with the other moderators. This is their only metric on keeping the job, so all they have to do is get on for a little while, poke around and do some mod actions, and they can keep their Orange name. I don't necessarily think they do it out of ill intent, as most of these are good guys who are just trying to help keep the site clean. I know I've been there before, but it was a different time.

Now one final question remains, why Kajin has not just given root access to someone? I think part of it was because he was waiting to get the theme content from the contest, but then nothing really ever happened with it. He disappeared for over a month now and I don't know how to contact him. There is someone who could contact him, but he doesn't want to. I think the reason for this is that this person is the only one with the "privileges" of getting root access, but what would he do with this ability? I don't think he's ever run a website from its core to understand what to do to modify it. Maybe I'm wrong and he does, but I'm hesitant to believe it. There is one person on staff who does have the skills to code the website, but he's far too busy with school and working on his YouTube channel to deal with that. He also hasn't been viewed worthy enough to get the rank needed for root access, even though he's a long time staff member.

If you were part of a Halo community wouldn't you appreciate administrators that branched out to the community in games and conversation? Well imagine that you were on staff, wouldn't you want someone that helped out on projects and content? Tested maps and played the game? Yeah well I would too. Unfortunately our one remaining admin doesn't even have Halo 4 anymore. Nor does he help share the burden, but rather commands actions . He treats the staff as if they were his child, rather than adults and equals. He comments that he's "learning our personality" instead of trusting us to operate the site unhindered. He prefers to maintain complete control, even though the stagnation is driving the site into the ground.

Now I realize this is a lot of information, but I feel that the community deserves to know. I was shocked when I got selected to be put on staff by the lack of happening behind the scenes. They always talk big, but the big secret is almost nothing is happening.

The questions I have for the staff is, are you here because you actually care about ForgeHub? Or are you here because you just like having a colored name, and getting attention from it?