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.

I find it very hard to navigate and tiny. It could in fact be, a forum for ants when on my phone screen.

Oh, the thread is going to be hosted by fresher people. I am voting.

Nate, are the stats at the bottom of the forum accurate? Are we still running vBulletin 3.8.7? I did a bit of sleuthing and found a Mobile Suite available for vBulletin 3.8.10 and up. I'm not a techno-wiz, so I'm not sure if this would be compatible or not. The link is here: http://www.vbulletin.com/en/mobile/

It's 150 USD.

Apparently, vBulletin 4 and up comes standard with a Mobile Suite.

When this award system does come into fruition, please vote. The single vote from a sane person could put it in good graces.

I'm not saying that being mobile-unfriendly isn't a factor, but that it's not the biggest factor. It's like this: an active forum without mobile accessibility would still be active, but adding mobile features to an inactive forum won't rejuvenate it by itself - the problem is how active the forum is in the first place.

Most of the issues with this forum are a result of a stagnant community and a lack of activity. That can be solved without ditching the current site and starting a new one, and without touching a single line of code.

I'd suggest that people here focus on coming up with ideas for content to stir up activity, and plan out how those would work out. Several good ideas have already been suggested here; there should be more discussion about those.


I'm writing this post on an iPad and I can't say I've ever experienced that. At worst, the buttons and links aren't really finger-friendly, but the issues you're describing are way worse than anything I've seen.

I think we should unite instead of dividing ourselves into two forums

I agree with everything you said, Manco. :) In a fair world, we would have both a strong, united community and a flashy forum, but I guess, for the time being, we have to make do.

Hell, we survived this long.

I never have an issue on my iMac, and I don't have a smart phone to test it with, so I can only assume it's because the iPad is a remote device. It's annoying as crap, and one of the main reasons I'm an infrequent poster.


@Varrok, I agree.

Being a strong, flashy forum is the antithesis of what this community was always about. This is our quiet corner of the internet. If we blew up it'd go to shit and lose the closeness we've built up over the years.

We've been so close that most of our veteran members left.

I don’t think anyone’s looking for this place to blow up, but it’s certainly reasonable to expect this place to be larger and busier than it is now.


For the record I use an iPad Mini 2 running iOS 10, and I use Safari. All I can suggest is maybe taking a look at your cookie settings, or if you’re using a different browser then try Safari instead.

varrok am i a veteran yet? i got the mile high club achievement on cod4 :o)

Depends. Have you left yet?

varrok have you ever answered the question "why is varrok so sour?" because it is a great mystery to all the cool kids like OddMan360

varrok has been a sour puss lately

mans gonna have to change his name to Sourrok

at least that's better than oddman360

at least that's better than being fired from subway

Ironically, I'm using the exact same iPad model, with iOS 10 and I use Safari. Cookie settings are on always allow. I don't visit any other forums, so maybe it's not unique to OWF. Reddit never seemed to pose a problem though. :fuzconf:

As I said, I've gotten into a habit of copying each post before I submit it. It's not the end of the world. :p


@Everyone else: Try to stay on-topic guys. We should be discussing the forum and brainstorming concepts to make it more active.

... because integration would involve more than simply copying over some files. It would have needed Peter to do work. Significant levels of work.

Yes, 3.8.7. That link is for vBulletin 5, though.

He never got back to me regarding what needed to be done to implement the theme. I'm still more than willing to integrate everything into the source code myself so all that needs to be done is some copying and pasting into the appropriate places, but I need the source code of either the Industrial or the Native themes before I can do that. I learned JS and PHP proper in the time since I made the theme and it's assets, so anything there that's busted I can fix up if I'm pointed in the right direction.

I'm not willing to start on a better theme for the other skin style until the Necrum skin is implemented because if I can't get one skin going, what's the point in doing another that'll never see any use either, right?