So on the back of this thread, I’ve been thinking a lot this week about all the different ways we could be improving the forums. We know this place has a lot of problems, but we’ve never had a proper look at the whole thing all together in one place.
So any time I’ve had an idea for something we could do to make OWF better, I’ve added it to a list I’ve built up over the past week. I’ve also taken a look back over this thread at some of the suggestions brought up by others, and had a skim through the rest of this subforum for complaints people have had.
Warning: there is a fukken long list below.
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General thoughts
This is the rational behind my list of suggestions, so I had an idea of what I thought would be most effective to focus on when trying to improve.
- Focus should be on encouraging more activity
- Get more people to join and stay
- People need a reason to join
- Content and activities will encourage activity
- Discussion threads generate active posting
- It’s an Oddworld forum, so more activity/content about Oddworld will help greatly
- Oddworld is a game series, so most members would be gamers of some kind
- Activity related to gaming would therefore be a good way to encourage activity
Basic plan:
- Create content and activities that people want to join to take part in
- Build a welcoming and friendly community that people aren’t scared away from and will stay to participate
So without further ado, the comprehensive list of suggestions I have compiled:
Content ideas
Since the main problem is a lack of activity, I’ve focused on coming up with ideas for different things we could be posting, discussing or doing through the forum. This is almost all stuff we could be doing right now, as Nate has pointed out, so it’s really a question of
are these good ideas that people would take part in, and
who would organize/maintain threads where needed.
- Club threads
- Movies
- TV shows
- Games
- Books
- Comics
- Member appreciation
- Member interviews
- Member of the month
- Pen and paper games (D&D etc)
- board/card games (e.g. Cards Against Humanity)
- Multiplayer games
- Member game streams
- Forum awards (more formalized and maintained, new host every year?)
- More about forum history:
- Highlight interesting discussions on the forum e.g. thread of the month
- Look back at older times in the forums’ past, expand the Classics thread
- Forum competitions e.g. for fan art
- Member-created podcasts
- Game tutorials/walkthroughs
- Game Technical Help/FAQs
- Regular Oddworld character/creature/location feature threads
- Let’s Learn Together threads? (lots of members have shared hobbies, we should get people talking together about them)
- more ‘evergreen’ threads (hobby threads etc)
- more resources in Fan Corner for creators to use – vectors, anatomy/proportion refs, sound files, official resources (rips etc); this can be a group effort
- bring back social groups and do some actual stuff with them (if we can’t build them into the forum skins we’d need to work out how else to make people aware of them)
- Competitions between social groups
- Stream/LP/speedrunning tech help (setup guides etc)
- Oddworld merch threads
- Merch highlights – someone such as Xavier could show off interesting parts of their collection in semi-regular threads
- Oddworld trivia
- ‘Let’s Draw Together’ regular threads – set a challenge for users to do their take on a subject; a way of encouraging people to go to Fan Corner
Organization
Here are some things we could do with admin assistance to update the forums’ structure/organization, to make some things easier to find and/or more visible, make things friendlier for new members, and encourage more posting.
- Improve on-boarding for new members – expand forum help, FAQ threads etc.
- Expand Non-Oddworld Art into a separate subforum:
- It feels really strange to have Non-Oddworld Art as a subforum to Fan Corner; if someone wants to share their own original content then having to do that in a hidden corner of the fan art subforum doesn’t inspire confidence.
- Move Welcomes & Birthdays and Non-Oddworld Gaming into main section of Zulag 2:
- Non-Oddworld Gaming is a large enough topic to be made more visible, and as a forum dedicated to a game series we should be able to generate more activity here than anywhere else
- making Welcomes & Birthdays more visible would help make this place feel a little more welcoming to newbies, and it’s reasonably active in its own right
- create another Zulag to help keep things organized - all of the forum themes allow the Zulags to be collapsed from view, so adding some length to the page would not be detrimental to browsing the index
I’d suggest the new forum structure would look something like this:
- Zulag 1 (Oddworld):
- Oddworld Discussion
- Mods & Hacks
- Let’s Plays and Speedruns
- Help
- Spoiler Forum (seasonal; can be closed for now)
- Zulag 2 (General):
- Forum Suggestions & Help
- Welcomes & Birthdays
- Off-Topic Discussion
- Non-Oddworld Gaming (rename for simplicity)
- Non-Oddworld Art & Literature (rename for simplicity)
- Zulag 3 (Fan Corner):
- Fan Art & Literature
- Oddworld RPG
- Zulag 4:
- Employee Lounge
- Necrum Burial Grounds
Forum attitudes
Possibly the hardest thing to change on this entire list, but if we want to be a more active community we need to be a friendlier and more welcoming community.
- Let’s improve the quality of posting here, to encourage less toxicity and shitposting. The forum has dried up over the years as it’s become more hostile. This might involve stricter moderation.
- Let’s be more welcoming to new members. This has been discussed many a time, and has gotten somewhat better recently, but we still need to do better. Let’s not have member welcome threads become shitpost central.
- Encourage activity in Fan Corner – I know, Fan Corner’s been the butt of many jokes over the years, but at the end of the day fan communities thrive on fan-made content. We should be more welcoming of fan content.
- More discussions about Oddworld – it’s tough when we’re still waiting on new games from OWI, but I’m sure we can come up with some topics of discussion.
Technical
A list of what we should be doing if Alcar ever comes back, or hands over the reigns to someone more active. I didn’t want to focus too much on these ideas since they’re likely not going to happen any time soon, but they’re important nonetheless.
- Update forum software (goes without saying)
- New themes; update old ones to work better
- Mobile/touch-friendly features
- Integrate with mobile forum apps e.g. Tapatalk
- Content-specific features (improve the blog feature, add galleries tied to fan art threads, etc)
- Connect to social media? Add social media to user profiles in more visible way
- Make avatars bigger – it’s 2017, guys
Relations with other sites
We’re not the only place on the internet where Oddworld is being discussed, so we should be working out how to get people from elsewhere in here, and how we can improve the forums’ reputation by being cool with other sites.
- Set up a wiki thread/improvement team to encourage forums users to get involved with improving the wiki
- Content from TOL could be shared (with permission) on a regular basis with highlight threads, e.g. Image of the Week
- Set up a TOL improvement team (with permission) to get people helping out with improving TOL
- Set up/cultivate game groups on online gaming platforms (Steam, PSN, Xbox Live etc)
- Interact in some way with other social media platforms e.g. Twitter, Facebook, Reddit that encourages users to visit and participate here
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So on the back of this, I would like to hear the following from people:
- What do you think of the above suggestions; are there any in particular that you find interesting and would like to see happen?
- Are there any of the suggestions above you would like to help work on if they were to happen?
- Are there any suggestions you disagree with/think would be a bad idea? Why?
- Do you have any other suggestions not included in the list that you would like to see?
