Lack of new people is killing the backroom and the entire forum

[TinCow]

Despite posting here for nearly 7 years, I have no attachment whatsoever to my avatar. In fact, I've always been a little annoyed that I couldn't use my standard avatar on this forum (which I am attached to and use everywhere but here). As I understand it, the reasons we force people to use these avatars are (1) uniformity of site layout and (2) tradition. (1) is no longer a good excuse, as the forum itself doesn't have any particularly glitzy or polished appearance. The 'popular' skins are popular simply due to tradition and not do to actual aesthetic value. The Org has always been a relatively ugly forum that was more about content than looks, so I don't think that keeping the current avatar rules are doing anything beneficial. For (2), tradition isn't worth squat if the site dies.

As for the retort that we have URL avatars available, that's a very poor option. URL avatars doesn't change the fact that I have to have a regular avatar as well. Who wants to look at two avatars in every post? That makes the site look even worse than it does normally.

[caravel]

As for the retort that we have URL avatars available, that's a very poor option. URL avatars doesn't change the fact that I have to have a regular avatar as well. Who wants to look at two avatars in every post? That makes the site look even worse than it does normally.

The URL avatars are pretty much pointless because guests cannot see them - they still see the portraits - and most users don't have them turned on or use them anyway. You can turn off the gallery avatars altogether and switch to the URL avatars, but as most members here aren't using them, it's pointless as you'll mostly only see the default one.

My whole argument about avatars is centred around improving perception of the .org and thus helping to bring new people in, what is the point in the URL avatars if they will achieve neither?

[Moros]

Avatars don't make the site less attractive to join. Actually I like the avatars the way they are. Not so disturbing or irritating, flashy or childlike as on many other forums. It gives the .org a more mature look IMO.

Personally I'm not completely pro junior membership. But I do think it might have some use. But abolishing might not be a bad idea. And I think it will indeed have a good influence on getting newcommers to stay.

[Togakure]

Re: Avatars,

There is a lot of confusion created by having three distinctly different types of avatars. Why have three? Are the benefits (not potential, but actual), of having three worth the cost of maintaining two additional sets of interface, process/function, and data requirements on the system side, and documentation/end-user support? Personally, I don't think so.

Having one type of avatar cuts down on the confusion considerably. What's important is granting patrons the flexibility to make or choose their own, and making that as easy and intuitive to do as possible to minimize support requirements. Having one set of interface processes and parameters to manage one function would make for less work for those supporting the system, and education/explanations easier for those supporting the patrons. Finally, it would be less confusing to patrons themselves.

My opinion is (taking into account all of your hard work, Tosa): instead of having three, use only one, preferably the "standard" avatar because it's the easiest to find and change via the interface. Assuming this is possible, set the "standard" avatar to behave as the "free" avatar does currently--so that patrons can select or create their own avatar and display it within set size/dimension limits, and stated guidelines. Set things up so that both the standard and urlavatar image libraries can be accessed if a patron prefers to select one from them.

We would simply stop using the other two avatar types. Any reference to them would best be removed from the Patron's view in the USER CP. Default account settings would remain as they are (with only the "standard" avatar displaying and being viewed--but now fully customizable).

If the standard avatar cannot support this functionality, then use the "free" avatar as is, and deactivate the other two after making their image libraries accessible via the "free" avatar interface. The downside to this method is that default display/view parameters on new accounts would have to be changed too.


Re: Sigs,

I feel the same way about sigs. Why two? Do actual benefits justify the costs associated with maintaining two discrete objects/functions which essentially serve the same purpose?

I agree with a previous poster, that large sigs can be very distracting. I recently tested the 'extra' sig, and when both were active, they took up a lot of space. If everyone did that ... it wouldn't be very practical.

Again, my opinion is, use one--the standard signature. Set the size/dimension limits to the max that we feel is appropriate for display in a post. The 'extra' sig/broadband option isn't needed and could be hidden and not used.

A lot of ideas come and go in these threads while we're on another subject--need to collect them somehow.

[Andres]

I second Togakure's suggestions.

The several avatar thingy is confusing. First, you have to find out which "avatar" you have to use to be able to implement your own. Then you have to find out how to set your profile so that you don't see all three avatars of all members. It's very confusing and kinda annoying (not anymore for me, since I figured out how I could get things back to "normal", but new members will find the forum very confusing and ugly).

I'd very much prefer one and only one avatar with, as Togakure suggested, the possiblity either to chose from the current TW avatars or to upload your own avatar.

Idem dito for the sigs. Only one sig, please.

I'm a strong believer in simplicity.

[caravel]

It's really very simple. There is no need for the URL avatars or the profile picture display as vbulletin (the software this forum runs on) supports avatar uploads by default.

There are three sections to the avatar config screen as seen in this example from the TWC (sorry I'm not on any other vbulletin forums at the moment hence why I have to use TWC as an example): "Your current avatar", "pre determined" and the third section, "custom avatar" which allows uploading or directly linking to an image hosted at an image hosting site (e.g. imageshack, photobucket etc).



At the .org the third section, "custom avatar", is clearly missing - not because something needs to be installed, but because it's simply been turned off at the admin panel.


There is no extra work involved in this, it's a built in feature that simply needs to be enabled in order to function.

[Subotan]

My thoughts on the issue:

I think it should be clear to all of us that the lack of custom avatars or swears is not the reason why the .Org is the Sick Man of Europe Forum of the Internet . I've seen forums die with custom avatars, and others thrive with a limited choice. The latter is, in fact, the Paradox Interactive forums. Why do the Paradox Forums thrive when ours do not? There are a number of reasons, and I'm going to state them in big type with elaborations in smaller print if you're too lazy to read explanations. This is going to be blunt and hard hitting, because, to be honest, the .Org as a community needs some blunt and hard hitting criticism

PROBLEM: SMALLER COMMUNITY GENERATES LESS CONTENT GENERATES SMALLER COMMUNITY - Were I to quit on the Paradox Forums, nobody would notice at all. The amount of content produced by me as a percentage of content produced on the forum is insignificantly small. However, when I quit the .Org for a few months this year, and I had a feeling that I was missed, and not just because I'm a really cool guy, but because I was a guy who filled up slots on mafia, hosted games, debated in the backroom and was noticed for it. If, say, ten relatively frequent Orgers quit this forum, it would be the kiss of death for the .Org. How do we resolve this, in the short term at least? Simple; poach people from Total War Centre. Find people who look exasperated with the nationalist rants, the juvenile atmosphere and the inability for serious discussion and kidnap them and stuff them in a sack invite them over here and introduce them to the Backroom, mafia etc. But wait, I hear you say, that's a horrible thing to do to the TWC forum you jerk! Sure it is. But desperate times call for desperate measures. If you want, you can sit here hoping that people will pop in for a few posts once SII:TW is released and stick around for a reason you can't really articulate to them or to me. Or we can take action. SOLUTION: RECRUIT NEW FORUM MEMBERS FROM TWC

PROBLEM: LACK OF GAME RELATED ACTIVITY- This, in case we all forgot, is a Total War forum. And yet, nobody discusses the games. This is in huuuuuge contrast to the Paradox fora. They're not even mentioned on the sub-fora I frequent. If this was called the "TotalTangerine.Org" or "TotalZappa.Org" it would not make any impact on the activities the vast majority of people are involved in. Were it not for the Gameroom, Backroom, and the Wikipedia Article on Europa Barbarorum this place would have died a sad little death all alone a year or so after MII:TW was released. This is not because there is nothing to write about; MAA's AAR with Makedonia in EB was awesome! Although I simply do not have the time to write an AAR or something similar, there must be people on the forum who call themselves fans who do. Can those people please spare the time to talk more about the series? I would help now, and will during the summer holidays. SOLUTION: MAKE MORE GAME RELATED ACTIVITY

PROBLEM:THE LAYOUT OF THE FORUM IS CONFUSING, WEIRD AND ANTI-SOCIAL - The separation of the Tavern into various sub-fora means that all my time at the .Org is spent in the Tavern. Once I have checked out all the threads I want to in the Backroom, I press the Tavern link, and see the three different rooms, and anything else I might be interested in commenting on. It could surely be redesigned to be made more accessible, as I feel very restrained to the Tavern by the nature of the design. There are also too many sub-fora as it is; Why are there S:TW, M:TW etc. Multiplayer sub-sub-fora when there is already a sub-fora for TW multiplayer, the Throne Room? The main page feels really long and drawn out, and not comfortable to navigate. A Classic Games sub-forum should be created, with all the S:TW, M:TW and Battle for X (LOL) games relegated to this to save space on the main page. The modifications fora can surely be reorganised as well. SOLUTION - READ THIS PARAGRAPH, REDESIGN THE MAIN FORUM PAGE UNTIL IT IS COMFORTABLE TO BROWSE AGAIN

PROBLEM:LACK OF CONTACT BETWEEN CREATIVE ASSEMBLY AND THE .ORG - One of the best things, no, the best thing, about the Paradox Interactive forum is the amount of developer/player communication there is. Devs will drop in onto the offtopic fora, comment on AARs, and more importantly, TALK ABOUT THE GAMES. I honestly had no idea about what the devs' vision for SII:TW was until I found a random link on the .ORG Homepage for a Youtube video that doesn't really say that much apart from what looks like a cool new system for forts. This is wrong and silly, and harmful to both sides. I am not at all hyped up about SII:TW; maybe I would be interested in buying it if the devs said "Right, what we want our game to look like is X", "We're implementing Y feature now, to make the game more fun and more historically realistic", "We really want to improve the Z, as we thought this feature could really be expanded upon". This happens all the time at Paradox; can you believe that the devs, when making Victoria II released THIRTY THREE developer diaries (Basically, posts about an A4 Page long talking about some new mechanic complete with a screenie), and that the index for these has been viewed over 70,000 times? It's a win-win situation for CA and us; we get interested in the game and happy about it's release and CA makes money, and retains a loyal fan-base for minimal effort. Also, if we can grab some exclusive player/dev communication, we will surely get other people who are interested in the game visiting, and hopefully staying SOLUTION: ARRANGE FOR MORE DEV/PLAYER CONTACT ON THE ORG

PROBLEM: THE NEW TOTAL WAR GAMES HAVE ALL SUCKED - This is something which is beyond our control, I admit, but it is unfortunately true. Sure, I was younger when I started playing R:TW, but I remember being absolutely entranced by it, even before EB.* This was because it was absolutely ground-shattering for its time, blowing conventional RTS out of the water through actual diplomacy, epic battles, historical realism and depth (compared to AoE at least) and the equivalent of a "Hero" system you cared about without all the goofy powers in Warcraft III.
And yet, I played MII:TW for a very short time period, and although I have subsequently played E:TW a bit and found it more fun than I remembered, both were poor games. Why was this? Was it because of gunpowder? No, clearly not. Gunpowder made the tactical level more challenging by forcing you to consider position and alignment, making the tactical level much more interesting for me than simple Melee. The problem lies on the campaign map, with the sheer and utter boneheaded-ness of the diplomatic ai. I'm sympathetic to programmers, I know that creating a diplomatic AI is incredibly, amazingly difficult. But, the game needs a diplomatic AI that works for the game to be enjoyable. The occasional stupid or non-sensical move by the AI, I can tolerate. But having an AI which is mates with you for a hundred years and then stabs you in the back the instant you gain a border with them is not an AI at all! If this was resolved, I would buy SII:TW the day it came out. SOLUTION: PRAY FOR AN AMAZING SII:TW, OR, FAILING THAT, ABSOLUTELY GODLY MOD TOOLS.

These are the main problems IMHO. Sure, there's probably others, like what are we going to do once EBII finishes development, but that's for another thread another day.

*That said, we should not spend all our time whining and complaining about how bad the new ones are and how much better it would be if CA just released S:TW or M:TW again in a different box.

[Andres]

Tosa, wouldn't the default thingy be worth a try?

See:

It's really very simple. There is no need for the URL avatars or the profile picture display as vbulletin (the software this forum runs on) supports avatar uploads by default.

There are three sections to the avatar config screen as seen in this example from the TWC (sorry I'm not on any other vbulletin forums at the moment hence why I have to use TWC as an example): "Your current avatar", "pre determined" and the third section, "custom avatar" which allows uploading or directly linking to an image hosted at an image hosting site (e.g. imageshack, photobucket etc).



At the .org the third section, "custom avatar", is clearly missing - not because something needs to be installed, but because it's simply been turned off at the admin panel.


There is no extra work involved in this, it's a built in feature that simply needs to be enabled in order to function.

One avatar (no "profile pic" or "url avatar"). The default system, where you can chose between a) a pre-defined avatar; b) upload your custom avatar (certain rules can be applied, about size and the usual "no pr0n, nothing offensive (racist avatar) etc.).

If I understand it well, the default system means no work at all. It's also simple, easy to use and allows more freedom for the membership.

[TosaInu]

Re: Avatars,

There is a lot of confusion created by having three distinctly different types of avatars. Why have three?

The forum supported one type of picture, that was some years ago. There were already different requests back then, to accommodate the two main ones, we sticked to the system avatars and created additional ones. At some point we had system avatars, Urlavatars, profilepictures, signature pictures.

Now we are some years further, the upgrade to the vbulletin Suite knocked out many hacks, including the option to have extra pictures.


Today we have a new discussion about avatars. If I read it correctly, some people still want the systemavatars, the reason is an easy reading experience, others want more choice.

I do recall the discussion about the URLavatars from some years ago. People wanted a wider theme, bigger avatars yet still a theme. To say you the truth: I wasn't all too happy with that decision because it meant I had to do a lot of extra administration, instead of setting it up just once.

But that was the mission: three avatar systems: old-style, new style theme and freedom.

I got the coding done after figuring out how bits had to be called. It was working nicely too: each user could decide to turn each of the three on or off. So, nothing like being forced to see three pictures against your will.

Something itched though and after some chat I decided to simplify it. The people being attached to URlavatars may get very angry at me, mea culpa.

Now we have two systems left, both built in, just tweaked a little in how they work. Every user can choose from the start whether they want old-style or new style pictures. I posted about this here: https://forums.totalwar.org/vb/showt...?132544-Avatar

Are the benefits (not potential, but actual), of having three worth the cost of maintaining two additional sets of interface, process/function, and data requirements on the system side, and documentation/end-user support? Personally, I don't think so.

Not really, one of the three was dropped. There's only some data still in the database, when a user doesn't have a profile picture set, the code will grab that one (quite a few people used the old systems). The user won't be able to find anything about it in his settings though. It's confusing and only serves for internal legacy. The two systems left are standard and built in functionality of this software.

Having one type of avatar cuts down on the confusion considerably. What's important is granting patrons the flexibility to make or choose their own, and making that as easy and intuitive to do as possible to minimize support requirements. Having one set of interface processes and parameters to manage one function would make for less work for those supporting the system, and education/explanations easier for those supporting the patrons. Finally, it would be less confusing to patrons themselves.

Surely, but there are clashing expectations. Some won't like the mix of shapes, sizes, themes and so on.

My opinion is (taking into account all of your hard work, Tosa): instead of having three

Two.

, use only one, preferably the "standard" avatar because it's the easiest to find and change via the interface.

The profile is as easy, it's a built in function of the board today.

Assuming this is possible, set the "standard" avatar to behave as the "free" avatar does currently--so that patrons can select or create their own avatar and display it within set size/dimension limits, and stated guidelines.

It will use maximum dimension limits, nothing stops it from having all kinds of shapes and dimensions. And I don't think any of us wants to moderate avatars every day. Of course we'll remove offensive ones, but that's it.

Set things up so that both the standard and urlavatar image libraries can be accessed if a patron prefers to select one from them.

There's an image library: https://forums.totalwar.org/vb/local....php?catid=206

We would simply stop using the other two avatar types.

One is removed. I don't know whether the other can be removed. Telling the tidy guys to turn it off completely sounds harsh. In terms of operation, and support, I'm fine with the two systems we have now.

Any reference to them would best be removed from the Patron's view in the USER CP.

It's confusing indeed, thus dropped and thus also cleaned from the UserCP.
I was hesitating to mention URL avatars in my post, but some users might wonder why they have a custom picture, while not having selected any. So, just to be complete I mentioned it. I'll probably remove that message after some time.

Default account settings would remain as they are (with only the "standard" avatar displaying and being viewed--but now fully customizable).

I think that is the interesting question. I haven't tried it yet, but I guess it's fairly easy to have one or the other being default.

Re: Sigs,

I feel the same way about sigs. Why two? Do actual benefits justify the costs associated with maintaining two discrete objects/functions which essentially serve the same purpose?

I know. The number of discussion about signatures equals the ones about avatars. A couple of years back it still was clear that some people suffered from loading large graphical images, yet others wanted big and bigger. Images beyond 100 kb weren't rare (just included).

I agree with a previous poster, that large sigs can be very distracting. I recently tested the 'extra' sig, and when both were active, they took up a lot of space. If everyone did that ... it wouldn't be very practical.

I don't recall we ever set restrictions on that. Apart from the question whether it would be of much use.

Again, my opinion is, use one--the standard signature. Set the size/dimension limits to the max that we feel is appropriate for display in a post. The 'extra' sig/broadband option isn't needed and could be hidden and not used.

We have a new discussion about it, the 10 kb limit is from 2002. Posters mentioned something I haven't thought of. We'll see how that discussion goes.

A lot of ideas come and go in these threads while we're on another subject--need to collect them somehow.

I think we always did, not that we have a database file with ideas though. But there are these topics. Point is just that:

-a it should be possible to make
-b not clash with other needs
-c not create a security risk or bring discomfort (not really the issue here)
-d has to be durable
-e not create loads of work for months to come

[caravel]