I think they're all very good ideas. I would be all for doing any of the things mentioned. Although I'm new, I like the idea of the awards, they sound like fun. I'm for movies, tv shows, books, comics, games, whatever you want to throw at me! We can make threads and do a different movie every week or two, discuss it, with spoilers because you wouldn't be there if you haven't watched it and really have some good discussions.

It wouldn't be to get randoms involved and watching. It could be something we do with ourselves. So one week you play and we discuss your style, the next week I could play (or just have kjjcarpenter play on my behalf, because we always play together and he's better) and you discuss his techniques/tricks (remember when I wouldn't let him kill animals - that was a bitch, and it's fun to watch) and it goes down a list and so forth. No one would have to vote or donate or whatever it is Twitch does, and if we do get interested parties we simply direct them here and explain that we are a small community of fans and that they're welcome to join.

If it is to gain more members, it could be a slow trickle but once Soulstorm comes closer and the ARG becomes more and more active, you could find that new members who joined briefly ages ago could come back and stay.

I have a serious question. Nepsotic, what was the magic horse incident?

I can answer that. It all leads back to that dreadful thread we're all trying to forget.

That was a great thread. Maybe I'll go back to being him again, you all loved me so much.

It might not be as clear now, but around the third page we started changing our avatars to My Little Ponies. That was before Nep took it way too far.

lol my face when i read my posts from 2009 http://emojipedia-us.s3.amazonaws.co...594e39fa84.pnghttp://emojipedia-us.s3.amazonaws.co...594e39fa84.pnghttp://emojipedia-us.s3.amazonaws.co...594e39fa84.pnghttp://emojipedia-us.s3.amazonaws.co...594e39fa84.png

I think the core of getting the forum active is to have regular discussions and content happening on the forums – so Clubs, Game Nights, Member Appreciation stuff is all great and contributes to that; but the key is going to be keeping it sustained. We’ve had attempts to revive the forums before, and even a couple of attempts to set up gaming sessions etc, but they’ve all stalled at various stages. How do we keep that sustained?

I like the ideas that revolve around games – this is a forum based on a game series, after all. We already have the Steam group, a few members already run streams, and I’m sure we could come up with ways to make it interesting.

Then there’s the diaspora of other Oddworld fans and the places they are – how do we encourage people to come here and post, instead of going to other places? TOL, the wiki, fan art sites, Reddit, social media – what do we do to engage with them and bring people from there to here? What do we offer that they don’t?

It comes down to keeping sustained, regular content going up. That will over time lead to more activity, meaning more users, and so on.

And no offense to anyone, but if the goal is to get the forums active then any ideas need to focus around content on the forums or using the forums to facilitate activities – setting up separate chats is more a distraction than a help to that end. You could use a chat app to coordinate gaming sessions or whatever, but otherwise they won’t drive people back to the forums on their own.

There’s a lot we can do without even touching the forum software or the hosting, but it does come down to a sustained effort.

e: regular friendly competitions could be nice, too. You could offer little prizes or something, I dunno.


guess who found their old files motherfucker

Thank you for clarifying that. It would have been very hard to tell.

EDIT: Nevermind. Page 20 summed it all up. And I mean all.

EDIT 2: Hahahahahahahahaha. Chuck Norris closed it. That was great! He waited ten years to make his first post. Saving the day by closing that thread.

Thanks for taking the time to reply, Manco!

I firmly believe one of our major handicaps is the aesthetic state of the forum. Mobile optimisation is quintessential for any successful website of the past five years, or so. The majority of folk access the internet with a mobile device now, and if a website isn't optimised properly, most will just leave. Unfortunately, most people do judge a book by its cover, which repels—in my opinion—a large percentage of potential members.

That being said, however, there's absolutely nothing we can do about it. Ergo, we need to employ a greater effort at our end. I firmly agree with everything you have said: We need unity, and we need to sustain that unity, but there's one thing standing in our way.

This forum has a penchant for negativity. Whether it's the hazing of new members; fulminating against each other; or acting so bellicose that fellow members—including some from the OI staff—have pulled the Harold Holt, never to be heard from again. For too many years, while Oddworld was in a stage of great uncertainty, the forum became a lawless playground as everyone waited for it to inevitably die. I don't think anyone actually expected Oddworld to return. Alas, when it did return, this forum remained cold and callous, and even though the atmosphere has improved tremendously over the past couple of years, from my perspective, there's still an all-too-occasional air of hubris.

I think the negativity can be purged. I think a revival, with new content, and a sustained effort from our regular members to create a warm, inviting atmosphere, with plenty of activities to bide us over between entries in the Oddworld universe, could be the saving grace for these forums. And it needs to happen now, otherwise this place will fade into obscurity, until the day Alcar decides he doesn't want to front the bills anymore.

All the ideas I mentioned are preliminary, of course, but I'll spend some time over the next few days creating something more concrete.

OWF isn't really dead. That was a joke bandwagon. It's like that lie getting repeated a thousand times.

You can't post on most of these places. Facebook and reddit are our only true competitors.

I disagree. Our discord made a few lurkers step out of the shadows and actually communicate with others. Plus it keeps the forums clean from the shit posts (it's not like we're talking about anything worth posting on OWF there anyway)

You're gonna become the second coming of Nepsotic before you know it.
Nepsotic's gonna have a second coming when he sees this avatar

What do you mean? They're exactly the same as your current posts.

In the end, I think kjjcarpenter's right: we have to try!

i once lurked - now i am better than ever

also varrok my posts now are way better than my old ones, you can't even deny that for a second

It is pretty darn dead, except for the occasional thread that gets a handful of posts for a few days. There are subforums that barely see a few posts a month. If it wasn’t dead we wouldn’t be posting in this thread.


They’re pretty much all communities with their own boards, comment systems and whatnot, and people use them to talk about Oddworld or share content about Oddworld. They’re all competition in some way, so we should be looking to win people from them.


A couple of lurkers might have joined your Discord, but that hasn’t had a noticeable effect on the activity on the forum, is what I’m saying. A casual chatroom is fine, but it won’t solve the problem of the forums being dead. The forums being active will benefit the chatroom; an active chatroom won’t attract new people to a forum.

Besides, the shitposts are some of the best content to come out of these forums.


gross

I like the idea of game nights, mostly because I do play tabletop roleplaying games through the internet. However, in my experience these games progress extremely slowly due to conflicting schedules, especially when taking into account time differences. They required extremely dedicated players who are willing to sacrifice 2-3 hours of their own time. The setup usually takes a long while and often it's better and faster to play some simple online game.

I haven't been here even a fraction as long as some of you, but I'm torn on whether or not it would be better for OWF to stay where it is or migrate to a new forum. It's not a question of whether it could, IMO, but if it should. There are lots of free forum hosts out there (I can personally vouch for Icyboards if you're looking for a MyBB forum) and this site's appearance has dated so much it's not even funny. I love this place but it's ugly as sin :P A shiny new forum with some new plugins and whatnot might help reinvigorate things. The issue is that I don't see any way of migrating posts and threads over from this decrepit old site onto a new one, it would be a completely fresh start, and I'm not sure if that would help the community or just destabilize it further.

We have to find Alcar!

...and beat the crap out of him!

the best part of this site is that i am on it

Well, it's definitely *a* part.

Sometimes the setup is the best part!

Yup. If we opt for a new forum, it's essentially all or nothing. I could see a number of members being overly bitter about a shift, and another forum would most likely fracture this community. I'm undecided if that's a good thing or not, because while I'm striving for a sense of perpetual unity, perhaps, like a phoenix, something better could rise from the ashes. Maybe we need to burn down the old, forgotten forest, so a fresh, verdant field can grow in its place.

He lives in Sydney, doesn't he? I'm sure I can arrange something ... :chairhit:

The biggest reason not to move is simple: moving would obsolete decades worth of Google indexing, and you’d lose the domain name and reputation. You’d essentially be building a brand new forum from scratch.

Again, the design and features of the forum aren’t what’s killing this place, it’s lack of content.

I agree.

Though a mobile friendly version *would help*.

varrok do you not like inconsistently sized text when viewing this forum on a phhone?

if you said no, can i please request a reason from you for being so rude?

I don't browse OWF on mobile. I've never seen how it looks on mobile, and I don't think I want to. What I know, however, is multiple people complaining about it, and I know the forums are really, really old now, technologically.

It's not awful on mobile. I can get around fine, though it's certainly not optimized. Not many forums are.

Although I agree with you, I don't particularly think any of this is a bad thing. For example, the reputation of this forum is on par with the Belanglo State Forest, and while not everyone who wanders into that vast web ends up butchered, people still avoid it just the same.

A new forum wouldn't flourish immediately, but it would have a fighting chance, especially with OI supporting its fandom. I have no doubts they'd advertise an HD Remaster of Oddworld Forums. We could call it Oddworld Forums: New 'n' Tasty, and it can be built upon Unity!

Joking aside, it's a speed bump, not a stop sign, and I wouldn't say it's completely out of the question.

I'll agree to disagree on that one. There's a whole spectrum of catalysts, not least of which are the aesthetics and features. We definitely need to focus on content, yes, but I see no reason not to discuss the elephant in the room when it's sitting on all of our faces, especially since several members have cited moving to a new forum—where the administrators would have unfettered access—as a possibility they'd also consider.

EDIT: Also, this website is borderline unbearable when accessed on an iPad. For whatever reason, it signs me out after five minutes every single time, and often deleted my posts when I hit 'reply'. It just did it to me with this post, though I've gotten into a habit of saving most things I type up before submitting them.

Does anyone know of a good vBulletin mobile theme? I don't mind spending a bit of cash on it. It might be possible to convince Peter to upload a theme from scratch, given that would mean limited fiddling on his part.

Annual Rewards thread? What is that?

Imagine the Oscars, but for the forums and everyone has a chance to vote.

Slog made a full on forum theme recently and it was never integrated....
I wouldn't risk paying for a mobile theme that'll never get to see the light of day.

So where is it? I would vote.

I'm writing it faggot
chill

OWF isn't that bad on mobile. Then again, this is my first time using a phone for anything besides texting and calls.