Fellow Armor Gamers, I bring to your attention an impending crisis: the death of the forums. No, the forums are not totally dead, but it is dying. Yes, there is plenty of activity in the Tavern and in other places in the Forums, but the quality of the threads are slowly deteriorating and the activity of the forums is dwindling.
Yes, the forums of Armor Games are dying. Many Veteran forum users have left, and I do not blame them. Yes, we all have things to do besides go on Armor Games, and that is understandable. But, if we do not do something to rectify this crisis, then Armor Games will cease to become the best gaming website on the Internet. How does this even apply to Armor Games as a whole? If we improve the quality of the forums on Armor Games, then there will be more traffic coming in to Armor Games, which means more people visit the website and play the games here, and we will continue to be the best gaming website in the Internet.
My fellow Forum Users, this is what we must do: We must revive the Forums. There needs to be better quality threads in the Tavern, better Forum Games, compelling topics and debates in the WEPR and above all, more activity. In doing this, we will bring back the forums to its former glory. We will bring the Forums into a new Golden Age. Yes, it will be hard. It will take a long time. But we can all do this, for we are Armor Games, and we are Armor Games Strong.
Currently, the forum button is at the top right corner of the website. It's kind of hard to see the button, so I'm pretty sure that most people don't even see the button. That's one thing that needs to change.
Sigh, I guess I will post here. Isn't like I should be studying for my 5 quizzes/tests I have this week, o wait.
The forums have been in this 'dying' phase for a while now
Such a true statement. Literally at least once a year, probably more like twice a year, a thread like this pops up complaining that we need more activity in the forums. Then almost all the time after a week or month people lose interest in the thread and nothing changes.
but ultimately we should remember that most people come here for the games, and not Forums sadly. I'm glad that you and the others still care though.
Nicho brings up a good point about the fact that most people come here for the games, not forums. AG could probably get rid of the forums and do just fine. Most people just want to play games when they come here, not talk with other users about random topics. Nicho also mentioned how quests could raise activity but I doubt it would be the type of activity that we would want here.
I was also thinking about petitioning the Admins to make a Exclusive Forum for the users who hit 2k posts. That, I'm sure, would spark activity.
Why would this spark activity? Sure maybe a few people would care but the vast majority would just complain about it and it would be not worth the hassle.
You know, play for a certain amount of time and then pay for crystals or energy to continue playing.
*twitch, twitch* People would all just go to other flash game sites where they could play for however long they wanted for free then.
Anyways, just throwing out my three cents out there.
*Throws 3 cents back at Rip*
First, all I ask from you all (the moderators) is your blessing to carry this out.
Carry what out? You do know that the mods cannot really do much, you would have to go bug the admins and they already know that the forum isn't as alive as it used to be.
You know where it should go? Right beside "My Games" at the top in white text, just above Quests. That would be a really good place for it: you'd see it when you log in and out, it would be in large text on a dark background and it would be relatively isolated, which is what it needs to be, rather than wedged into the third bar down beside "Devs."
Anyone else agree?
I think they still need to update the whole look of the site personally. The site looks so 2008 still.
Anyway, my ideas would be two ways, get more users to the site in general or just make more people notice the forums.
For getting more users to the site I think AG should adopt more forms of games, not just flash. Diversify a bit and there would be lots of new games that could come in and would make AG different that other flash game sites. In general, more users would be coming to the site and therefore more people would stumble across the forums.
For getting a higher percent of users to come to the forums I think the forums need to be on the front page somewhere. If/When the front page is redone make sure the forums are there somewhere. Quests for forums could be an option but it would be hard to get people not to spam, and we don't want the forums to be full of spam messages.
Eh, I could probably write more and might later but I am hungry and lunch sounds good. Plus studying and stuff.
The usual result of them all was a quick burst of activity that then settled down again and once again had the forums in a sort of low activity slump.
We aren't in THAT bad of shape. We all can agree changing the "Community" link to "Forums" has plateaued activity, but it's by no means in a severe slump.
It will work. I will bring activity back to the Forums.
You are to be commended @apldeap123, but I wouldn't take this on as a singular task. If you need help, I'm glad to help you out.
Being involved in the last few attempts at increasing activity, I feel qualified to say that activity is NOT at a low. It's not the glory days of 2008-10, but it's definitely improved. In 2011, I believe we only had like 8-10 users regularly using the forums (pang, storm, and sal can vouch for that.) We are talking less then 20 posts per day. Forum games was down to a handful of active threads, WEPR was pretty much dead, AMW was dead, ETC... So, taking all of this into consideration (including past attempts, successful and failure), and acknowledging probable causes of activity lag, we can determine that this is not a simple task, and at present, activity is not declining, nor are the forums or community near death at the moment.
Our many musings back in 2012 determined that AGv3's severely delayed (Newcomers or users past 2012 wont know about this, but AGv3 (current site layout) was supposed to be released in the spring-summer of 2011, but failed to arrive until the end of 2012, and not fully implemented until 2013) release led to many users becoming disgruntled and impatient with current AG staff, and led to an exodus of pretty much all of users from the "glory days," hence is why you don't see many users from prior to 2010-11 active now. In all reasonable thought, this is a pretty logical reason as to the cause of declined activity for the time. Whether the effects of this are still felt now is purely speculation.
As for the present, I would say we are having to compete with Smart phones/tablets and Social networking. Not that many people have/use desktop computers anymore. Hence the decline of flash gamers as desktops go away.
We did acquire ferret as a community manager with past attempts like this, among other things, so those doubters who assume or feel that these attempts are futile or a waste of time should acknowledge that good things can come out of it. (Not there are any doubters, but HEY, what if one shows up?) Thus is the end of my historic rant. -
@apldeap123 if you would like, you can look at our past threads on this topic and get an idea of different approaches we took.
Pickle, Pickle2, A.G.C.A.I. (My approaches were highly unethical and risky, so you might want to avoid those LOL.)
That's not what I meant. Flash games require you to use a desktop or laptop, right? But since Apple doesn't support Flash on any of its mobile devices, then that means that you won't be able to play most of the games on Armor Games (Yes, I know that AG has made games on the App Store), which means that most people visiting AG on their phones won't even consider visiting the forums, let alone see the Forum link.
Here is what I plan on doing. (This is subject to future revision)
Operation Golden Armor
Purpose: To bring back the Forums of Armor Games.
Method: 1. Petition the Administrators to revise the Navigation system, making the 'Forums' button more visible. 2. Increase activity in the Forums How? -Create high-quality threads -Increase promotion of Forums in games
How about finding ways to @ classic users into threads they may care about and get them talking again. Also being nice to new users is the way to get more of them involved.
Method: 1. Petition the Administrators to revise the Navigation system, making the 'Forums' button more visible. 2. Increase activity in the Forums How? -Create high-quality threads -Increase promotion of Forums in games -Encourage new and veteran users to frequent the Forums more often
