I addressed the reason why other community's have more activity then here in previous post, Other sites have various other reasons for going there. This site is "Come here to talk/do things about/post Forge Maps in Halo 4" That is the only selling point. Your right "The game is bad" is no excuse for having 30 active members on a Halo forum, When combining "The game is bad" and "The forge is lackluster and boring" Is pretty good reason for why a "Halo" "Forge" forum has only has 30 active members. The reason no one cares is because the only selling point and entire point of this forum is Halo 4 forge and no one cares about Halo 4 forge, Well not no one but hardcore forgers have always been the minority of Halo's fanbase and with Halo 4 numbers been only 60,000 how many of them do you seriously think will be willing to dedicate there time and effort to been part of a Halo 4 forge forum/community (which is all this site is) My guess is about 30 . You say the problem is this site needs people that care, I say problem is people want to care but when they see Halo 4 forge there like Nope.jpg How do you get people to care? Might be a few forge youtubers or streamers that care but the mass majority of people don't care about Halo 4 forge so you would have to get the streamers youtubers to get other people to care and bring them here. How to do that? idk.
There's plenty of Forge-related places that have far more activity than here. Look at THFE, look at THC, hell even look at my own site, it has more Forge activity than here does and it doesn't even have a Forge focus. The fact is that this site no longer has an intrinsic value like it once did. ForgeHub isn't relevant; why would it be? Nobody's done anything to make it worth coming to, so it won't be. They've been saying "we're too big and important!" for years now, as the site crumbles into nothingness. If this site had been properly managed and maintained, it would be useful and have a point. But instead, they JUST pushed out an update to software that came out in 2008, and did nothing else. I mean like... where's the effort? Look, ForgeHub is an old version of the vBulletin forum software -- that's all it is. Not only is there practically nothing custom or even customized, it's just the same exact thing as every single other fan forum out there. Of course ForgeHub is irrelevant, it's never bothered being relevant. And yes, I know that "we don't have root access", but it's been like that since the beginning. There are solutions other than sitting around, putting your hands up, and going "I'm just going to sit here until it gets fixed for me". Radical, maybe, but it's better than watching this slow-motion train wreck. When other sites are showing far higher numbers, especially in the Forge department. Why don't you take a look? Expected decreased numbers, sometimes pretty significant? Sure. 30 members? Absolutely not. People are still interested and creating great Forge pieces; thinking you're part of some special club of "people who bother to use Forge" is just silly, honestly. And like I said, the way to fix things isn't to run a contest or have somebody advertise you. Those things are only useful when you have the backbone of the site there, and that is not something this site has. If it got 10,000 new members tomorrow, they'd all file out as soon as the initial excitement was over
I do want to step in here a little bit, agree with most things you're saying but when the site was bought, control was taken out of the staff's hand. You're a little biased in this regard since you own your website and have tech admin who is an active part of the site. Here, since the site was bought the owner and it's tech admin were removed from the process as they only cared about revenue and keeping the site up, not necessarily well run. So let's not gloss over that like it's a simple fix.
Unless I'm missing something or something going over my head, I feel like your saying pretty much what I'm saying except in different ways. I use to come here everyday during reach there was always, Discussions I was interested in, Interesting news, TGIF's, Featured maps, bunch of people who where all interested in forging. Now what does it have Threads and nothing else. THFE is pretty much centered around a youtube channel all people have to do it click and watch which is easy to do and THC is more ingrained into the "official" side of things and has more things to do there like news,etc besides forge. Like you said "look at my own site, it has more Forge activity than here does and it doesn't even have a Forge focus" Which should be worded like "look at my own site, it has more Forge activity than here does BECAUSE it doesn't have a forge focus" Hardly anyone has the passion for Halo 4's forge like they did for 3 and Reach there not gonna activity seek out a forging community if anything there gonna seek out a Halo community with forging aspects. "I've always wondered why someone didn't do something about that... Then I realized I am somebody." Fit's in this situation I think. I don't have enough passion with Halo 4 forge to host customs and rate maps and forge and be active and encourage activity from others. Its all good to say "we need a passionate caring leaders to inspire activity in Halo 4's forge to come to forgehub and bring it back to life" but who is this hypothetical person? It's not me, It's not you, Who? (I don't there a person who exists who cares enough about halo 4's forge and is able and willing to spend time and effort on this Forgehub to embed that passion and care though the population of this forum)
Right. In fact it's the opposite of a simple fix - it's an impossible one. Nobody has kajin's ear anymore, he's just ignoring us. Tz seemed to talk to him occasionally but right now no one has Tz's ear, either. We have two broken links in the chain of command to even get to the guy who could do something - and he's the same guy who is currently MIA and not doing anything. So at a certain point, if you think this is a real problem (and I do), your choices are clear: 1. suck it up because it's not going to change; or 2. start your own site elsewhere (or migrate to some other site if you think there's one that meets your needs). I'm not trying to be all "Viva la revolucion!" here, but this is the conundrum. There doesn't seem to be a middle ground. Unless Insane's comments were delivered to kajin somehow and he took them seriously, this is just another circular iteration of the conversation the staff have been having behind closed doors for months now.
Remember that time about all the journos cried out "viva la revolucion!" a few weeks ago? Good times.
It was basically about half of us expressing what has already been said in this thread. I copied the Skype conversation into the Staff forum to get the rest of the staff's thoughts on it, and even sent an PM to all staff to comment, but everyone proceeded to ignore it. Which is largely why we've now all quit XD
We were getting fed up with some of the restrictions. Which, I can't remember. A few of us jokingly said something about revolution, despite our growing frustrations with our limitations. Somebody, maybe Teddy(?), posted our skype conversation in the staff forum. We never really went anywhere with it all, but we were text-yelling "Viva la revolucion!" a lot. I would have liked it to turn into a discussion on what needed to be fixed, but as I said, it never really went anywhere. We all expressed some concerns, and TZ focused on something else if I remember right. I think it was about then I started to lose hope in our ability to really do anything.
Half of us didn't ignore it. Tz was the one that said no without reason. Pretty much everyone else said yes to the plan.
Yeah, there were some supportive responses. Once Tz got to it though, he shut it down with his response. Which was awesome, by the way. I loved how he could end a conversation in one post. Good stuff. What was the plan, again? I forget.
I've actually discussed a lot of that stuff with TZ and RST over skype. RST didn't seem opposed to more cooperation with HaloCustoms in our conversations
As much as they'll make it seem like "it's not a simple fix", it really is. If you're not CONSTANTLY moving forward, something is wrong. Sometimes that means taking radical action, moving to a new site, demanding root from the owners, etc etc. There's always somewhere to go, but its not necessarily comfortable or easy. For example, TZ shot down leaving and forming your own site, but sometimes you have to go do it anyway. What benefit does staying here have if your owners are unwilling to work with you? So, it's simple -- create your own website, or get root. Instead, the administration took the "sitting around waiting for our owners to fix things" approach, and now we're here. Not really. This site could EASILY succeed as the Forge location. It used to be that way, because we cultivated it to become that. Once the administration became complacent with "we're the place to go for Forge!" they stopped caring to keep moving forward, and now we're here. So, yes, ForgeHub could be and SHOULD be bigger than any other site regarding Forge. But they're not, 100% because of administrative decisions to not do a single thing. The site had chances for leaders, and didn't take them. And now, it's going to be a hell of a lot harder to fix the issues because of that. Also, I should note that I had pushed for certain things to be done when I was Admin. Even after I left, well before Halo 4 came out, I came to Shock and others, and proposed changes (very similar to what I'm doing on my own website now). They decided to not do anything, just keep the forum the same. So, the forum doesn't just happen to end up this way, it was active inaction. As for RST, he came to me and seemed open to working together, I was happy to see what looked like an attempt to fix things. However, something I felt was important was making sure he understood: that FH isn't relevant anymore. Low activity plus low new registrations means that you're not on equal footing as a more active site, regardless of if you have lots of old, inactive accounts or not. The attempt was to get him in the proper mindset to consider where FH is right now; without the mindset of "oh ****, we really need to work to get other people to help us grow", you're never going to grow. We talked once and didn't again, the mindset unfortuantely wasn't there to make realistic things happen; there's much more to proper cooperation than talking about "working together", and it involves putting yourself in a realistic mindset. Also guys, just as a note, things aren't getting done unless they are showing some kind of results at minimum once every 3 weeks (in the software engineering field, we call this an "agile development methodology"). So, demand results from your administration! You should expect to be shown what's going on -- you don't necessarily need complete transparency, but knowing that things are moving is VITAL to things actually happening. The worst thing you can do is wait for months and let administration get away with "we're working on it".
Social media, since the early 1900s, went through radical change every thirty or so years did it adapt widely. Think about where FH was just three months ago. Six? Not a lot of activity in that time.
It really isn't though. It sounds simple to say, "let's just form a new website" and you're right, it is easy to just form a new website. The problem is all the data is here. Years of forge maps dating back to Halo 3 are stored in servers attached to this site. Then there's the name recognition. What do you call the "new" forgehub? Forgehub2.com, thenewforgehub.com, potatoes.com? Sure the site has become stagnant but as Vincent pointed out in the first post in this thread, when a person types "halo forge" into google, this site is either the top search result or among the top. Moving to a new site does not give that kind of SEO (search engine optimization) support. Can it be done, sure, should it be done, maybe? It would basically amount to a complete system reset where everyone would have to repost their maps, servers would have to be bought and managed since it's a lot of data to keep track of, and you'd have to let everyone in the old community know where the new one is meaning a tiny startup community. Again, all of this is doable but it is not simple. You and I are of completely two minds on that and the situation is not one where necessitating change is easy. So let's go with the second option, "ask for root access". If TZ or past admins haven't done that before (and by the way insane, you count in that group, did you ask for root access back then?) then sure there is some blame there but if they have and it was never given then that is a problem in itself (and again that most likely stems from the fact that the ownership of forgehub was not in line with the people running it, they just cared about revenue and keeping the site up, so giving people who care about the site the ability to edit it might have been seen as an unnecessary risk to revenue since they owned the servers). In my "things that need doing/fixing" thread in the community service board I stressed my belief that we need 3 admins all with root access to the site to enact changes. Chicken and the egg situation again. Did the administrators not do anything because they had no power to do so (shock barely being around since Halo Reach, and kajin around just when it suits him to be) or did not having control make them complacent to not want to change things? I agree and I've mentioned this kind of thing to numerous staff through skype over the last year or so.
Oh yeah, you're right. I forget, and it's hard to reference now that the thread is hidden to me. Thanks for copying that in.