Forums → The Tavern → Forum Activity

I say, for 2 weeks straight, the main page of AG be nothing but a link to the forums.

Lol^^

Uhm, so, I can probably be considered one of those people who was active in mid-2013, but then left.

I personally dislike this forum. Not the people, or the topics, but the forum itself is pretty sparse. It feels more like a "just quickly type your message, and get out".
I mean, this box I'm typing into right now is kinda weird to use. It's pretty sparse, and it's small. Typing anything long is imposing.

I think, advertising the forum might be too far, but making it a nicer and better place would be helpful. Maybe put a "Community" button (not "forum", "Community&quot next to the My Games button at the top.

Another thing is possibly increase the game situations. I know Armor Games is different from sites like NewGrounds and Kongregate, because unlike those sites, it only has larger, more popular games. Maybe there should be a Beta section, acessable only to registered users, where developers can upload less-good games, in the attempt to improve them, and get better. Having something like that that requires registration could help increase registrations. Also, having people discussing a game will make them more likely to want to move over to the forums, where they can further discuss things.


sorry if it's a dumb idea; just my 2 cents

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[quote=Riptizoid101]The only thing to really raise up activity is to not only focus on advertising the flash games, but advertising the diverse community itself. People may not come here for the games, but they might come here for the fun that is within the hypothetical walls of the forums.[/quote]

I dunno; I've said this before, but I'm afraid minus the gaming, there's too little to bind people to a forum like this.

I don't find it very inactive, btw, but then arguably I wasn't here to know how it may once have been.

Develop some worthwhile forum features rather than patching holes and putting in gimmicks. So far, the only things that have been valuable have been stripped away in favor of 'optimization' and the few put back in are very poorly designed.

I don't find it very inactive, btw, but then arguably I wasn't here to know how it may once have been.

I think, advertising the forum might be too far, but making it a nicer and better place would be helpful. Maybe put a "Community" button (not "forum", "Community&quot next to the My Games button at the top.

I haven't been a part of this community as long as most of you have, but before I jumped into the forums, I spent a bit of time in game comments. What if, and this might be a lot of work for the admins, but what if there was a link to the forums somewhere closer to the games or game comments? People who come here to play games aren't necessarily looking at the words in the corner of a grey bar near the top of the page.

I was here when AP was removed and I'm not sure it was related.

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I looked on the wayback machine website the "forums" used to be called community

"Community Forums" is a bit redundant.

I attempted creating a timeline of events but it fell through. Would anyone like to contribute dates and levels or changes?

The loss of AP didn't cause the forums to fall into some sort of disarray of inactivity, if that even makes sense. The forums were in rough shape for most of 2012, and the AP system was still in effect. The people who wanted points acquired them by rating and commenting on every game in existence, which in 2012 was enough to give you a Gold Prince badge, and by leaving annoying little comments on every profile they could find (not to mention the chat-spamming that went on), because those methods were far more effective than posting in a place that only gave out half the amount of AP as anywhere ese, and actually required some amount of thought if you didn't want your posts deleted, and, god forbid, your AP removed.

The people who wanted points got them, and the people who wanted to post posted. They usually weren't the same people. That was 2009.

However, one thing the loss of AP did seem to do was separate the slightly more hardcore gamers from the forum regulars (disregarding those of you who fall under both categories). With the old system, you'd see the same people in the game comments as you would in the community. Nobody really cared how much of a game you played just as long as you didn't click on the game and give it a rating without actually playing it, while proceeding to do the same with 2,000 other games.

Now, on the other hand, most of the people you see in game comments are people you've never seen before in the community or anywhere else. They could have played hundreds of games onsite and only left one comment on one game, because really, there's nothing motivating people to leave comments on games anymore. It's definitely a giant step in the right direction for eradicating comment-spammers, but you aren't seeing a lot of comments from people with over 100 posts either.

Meanwhile, you have the quest-fanatics who only want to talk about quests, which is fine, but they have much less interest in the rest of the community. The quest system has gotten active people very interested in games, but it's also causing many of them to channel all of their activity towards the games themselves instead of an ideal balance of games and community (and when I say ideal, I mean ideal for the community, not for them personally).

I'm not advocating at all that AP should be brought back, because that system eventually caused more problems that it solved, and I'm not saying that the new system is bringing forum activity down, because I have no reason to believe that it is. I also have no reason to believe that AG's new point system is anywhere near complete, and my belief is that quests are only the beginning of what AG will look like in the future. It's possible that the current lack of points could have put the community in a bit of a slump, but for those of you who were here in 2012, you'll understand why I'm optimistic about the future.

So what can we do about forum activity? There isn't much we can do in the way of other users, but back in 2012, or as I refer to them, the dark ages, @Skeleton_Pliot had this idea, which appeared to be an attempt to motivate forum regulars to push themselves harder to be more active in the community. It was horribly received and it never caught on, but I saw the logic behind it and I still think it's brilliant.

An eighter! All hail firetail!

Not only that; I have it on good authority that this change was made specifically because users found the term "community" to be misleading or confusing, which detracted from its success.

Skeleton_Pliot had this idea, which appeared to be an attempt to motivate forum regulars to push themselves harder to be more active in the community. It was horribly received and it never caught on, but I saw the logic behind it and I still think it's brilliant.

I used to whine and pout lots about this until.....I realised, heck, I'll just go out and start discussion-worthy threads that'll actually help instead of being a frowning bystander.

While we live the forums will never die.