The State of SW-Fans (?)

[TheHolo.Net]

I cannot answer that in a way that would be correct or even close to complete right now. We have somewhere on the order of 10 to 30 custom hacks in this software alone, not even mentioning the other three pieces of software which we have managed to successfully hack together with the forums. (Wiki, Gallery, Portal page)

Really, to be able to answer it would have to mean that we were 65% ready to launch the new software already and it was nearly setup and tested. The only way to know what features we cannot replicate is to actually try.

[Lilaena De'Ville]

I would guess it would be like when we upgraded last time and we lost the ability to have custom titles that were forum specific. Older hacks (the ones we use with our older board) aren't always updated to work with newer software.

But then again, there are newer hacks that could do similar things, or even different ones that we might want to add.

Like, I love the "who read this thread" hack, but if it has to be sacrificed to upgrade the board to modern standards then it's something I'll get used to.

[Crusader]

Since I never paid for the forums so far I went ahead and donated a bit for the necessary upgrade.

[Droo]

I'm willing to contribute dosh and time, I have a little experience with vBulletin 4.0.4 when we setup the short-lived website for the SWTOR guild.

Also, I'm willing to contribute more to this discussion, but first, food!

[Captain Untouchable]

I can probably contribute a little money, though how much depends entirely on when it actually needs contributing. I've got plenty of time I can contribute too - I've done a little bit of MediaWiki and vB before, so I'm happy to chip in as and where I can / am needed.

[TheHolo.Net]

Please use the "Donations" link in the left sidebar for any software update donations. Also, please send me a PM letting me know who donated what. We still get supporter requests/contributions via the donation link, and would prefer to keep them separate, at least logically, for now.


EDIT: Additional info -

I think software + mobile is the best option.

If we raise more funds than needed for the software, we should use the extra for advertising/promotion of our site once its all setup and running.

[Lilaena De'Ville]

Makes sense to me. I will be broaching the subject of possibly free money laying around our account once we figure out how we're paying rent.

[Dee]

I'll be able to make a decent contribution as soon as my tax refund comes in (hopefully within the next few days to a week).

[Lilaena De'Ville]

As every one knows My role playing here Is generally Set in or about star ship battles. I do not stray far from these settings. I have before on many many sites but here I concentrated on Fleeting. I fondly remember getting started here and Yog giving Resh his first command. And Telan... well I learned so much from him.

I don't deal with 90 percent of the members or stories here and there are many many members here I have never said two words too, for that I am sorry. I have been one of the worst about disappearing in the past. Life can kick you at times, but I always return because you are an amazing group of people.

When I started writing here I had just quit a short but eye opening music career and was looking for an outlet for my creativity. Now music has found me again. I guess it never left, just stalled. Now I am again throwing myself into my music and this is leaving me very little time to write. But I love this site and the people here. I know making myself take the time to post is the only way I can share with you. Hell I watched most of you grow up from the background here.

As for activity and the site. I have seen and met may people who have visited and shown interest in the site and role playing here and every one gets frustrated early on by the slow pace. My question is.

Is this something that can be fixed?

Has the site reached a pint to where it is no longer attractive to new writers. It would seem this is so. Most of us here scrap out what little time we can find to write. The fact I think is we need new and younger people. most of you were teens when you started here. Where are today's teens? Where are the bulk of young star wars fans hiding?

Another thought. Think about the exposure now. 12 years ago we had Star Wars and Star Trek. Now there are 25 other universes for writers to write in. Even we have set Star Wars as a back seat kind of universe to other more current and diverse settings. Not that this is bad. I love reading the general roleplay forum, it has saved me tons in book costs. lol

Another thought. Online gaming was almost non existent 10 years ago. This could be the biggest dagger in the back to forum base role playing. Now we can talk to our friend's and slay orks or sith in real time.


Sadlly Star Wars is just not as popular today as it was 12 years ago, not even here. The internet is alot bigger now. People have more outlets for creativity and networking. gaming is real time now. Point being Making a forum base site competitive now is nearly impossible. It is Hard work. With it taking hard work for us just to post, where do we find the time to work on making the site popular. I do not know if new blood will save Fans. But I do know it deserves to be saved.

The above are the delusional babblings of a crazy old fish.

There are a lot of good observations in here and one is that the advent of World of Warcraft put the first huge dent into our member base and many people who got wrapped up in that never came back, and some did but it took years.

Attracting teens and young college students should be (I sound like an old person but I'm in my 30s now) a priority if we want to stay viable as a community.

[Captain Untouchable]

Most of the people I've roleplayed with over the last decade or so have been adults. They've been people who work in offices and like to sneak off a post or two when work gets dull. They're people who have kids, and want something to do in the evenings when they can't leave the house. A fair chunk of those people have been guys, whereas by contrast quite a lot of Fans roleplayers are women who started at younger ages.

Like Resh says, people nowadays have all manner of other outlets to soak up their time. Rather than targeting a specific age bracket, maybe we should look at exploiting some of those other outlets. A lot of people roleplay using Tumblr, which isn't all that different from roleplaying on a forum. The SWTOR community has a whole bunch of Star Wars fans who use the internet to interact: maybe there's a way we can appeal to them. Maybe there's a way we can work Youtube to our advantage.

Also, like Resh points out, "Now there are 25 other universes for writers to write in." Yes, we are "Star Wars" Fans, but we roleplay in other settings as well: perhaps we need to embrace and advertise that a bit more prominently - forum themes based on other settings, more roleplaying settings out on display, targeting fans on game sites for other franchises, setting up "affiliates" with roleplaying sites that aren't just about Star Wars.

And lets not forget where the site started out either: we seem very focused on pushing the roleplaying aspect of the community, but Fans began as a movie discussion thing. Maybe another approach would be to try and attract people to that side of the community, and then encourage people to give roleplaying a go once they're through the door.

Diversify and thrive. That's the sort of thing that marketing people would tell us to do.

[Zereth Lancer]

I see this discussions turning into two general sides here. One wants to innovate and step up; whatever it takes to bring in new members and get this place hopping again. The other side wants to change things too, but doesn't want to sacrifice what is already here; a long lived community where socializing trumps purpose. These are both really great things and both warrant a board devoted to just that. However, I feel that these are two very different boards and are not something that can coexist together.

In my ten years of internet roleplaying I've been all over, tasted a lot of flavors of roleplay and stuck my thumb in a lot of genre pies. The roleplays generally move to the flow of media, and right now the hip thing is Avengers. I've been roleplaying in and out of Marvel related roleplays for years now and I can tell you that the popularity comes and goes with the movies, and following the hot success of Avengers the genre is really pumping right now. Starwars hasn't had a new release in quite some time and I don't think the Clone Wars cartoon generated a new generation of Starwars writers. So beyond simply picking up new members we have to complete with the other genres with compelling worlds to write in. I mean, Science Fiction alone has quite a few worlds all it's own with strong followings; Firefly, Doctor Who, etc; all with their own roleplay boards.

If I had to say there was any single thing wrong with SW-Fans it's a lack of identity. We are a Starwars board. It's in the name. But we have the general roleplays and a strong focus on community at the price of everything else. So what are we, exactly? Are we a starwars roleplay, a community hangout, or a do everything board? I really think that, at the end of the day, that's the question that needs to be answered before we move on to anything else. Any attempt to strengthen the Starwars side of the board would likely damage the strong community side of the board.

I really don't know what the modern Starwars roleplayer looks like. I know in other genres I've written in the majority of the writers are college girls, and the ages of all members are usually between 18 and 24. Hell, I've been on boards where I'm the oldest person. At age 24, I'm the oldest. Sure, you get the rare old fart kicking around but the majority is fairly young. Also, the female to male is like 4 to 1. That's what my experience has been at least. I've written on something like... 15-20 boards over the last ten years, encompassing all kinds of genres including Starwars, Firefly, original Fantasy, Marvel/DC, and a few other original boards.

A face lift is a great idea, but at the same time I have to ask why we are paying for this service? This is the only board I have ever written on that people paid to host. I've wondered why we haven't just up and gone to a free host. Is it because we have so much archived on this host, are afraid to lose a few features, or something else? $200 a year isn't a terrible lot if spread out between the membership, but somehow I bet that Ogre has forked up most of the cost over the years. I'm pretty sure I've never contributing more than a hundred dollars total over the ten years I've been a member here, although granted I started when I was 14 and didn't have any money to my name.

Bottom line is we have a lot of members with different ideas of what they want out of this board, and I really don't think we can appeal to everyone. Me, I would love this board to be more focused on the Starwars roleplaying at the cost of everything else, but that's just me and how I feel about it. That's where my time has been invested. And there are people who prefer the community areas, or the general roleplay, or whatever. When you pan the camera back and look at it from afar it starts to look like there really isn't a single solution to this. I really don't think we should sacrifice the community; what this board was founded on, for the sake of strengthening any single quality. But if we want to pull in new members, writers especially, then we need to work on our image, our identity, and get us to the place where people can take a glance at our front page and thing "Hey, this is a cool looking starwars board." because every time I've suggested this board to a friend they come away not quite sure what they are looking at.

Perhaps to move in the direction of strengthening the identity of a starwars board, has anyone ever considered moving the general roleplay off site so we aren't drawing attention away from the Starwars? There are plenty of free hosts that could be utilized to host all of them, together or separately. This in itself could lead into creating entirely new communities of writers. The Mutant roleplay could probably ride the Avengers coattails into success and DC-themed roleplays are always favorites. With the proper advertisement they could easily pick up people unrelated to SW-Fans. And as a result it would clean up the face of SW-Fans and maintain that "this is a Starwars board" appearance at the cost of breaking up the community a bit. My two cents, anyways.

[Droo]

We haven't been just a Star Wars community for a long long time now, and I think it's too late, and too alienating, to change that now.

Going back to what I originally said about the wealth of interests we have across the community, this seems to have been picked up on a few times throughout this thread, so it seems there's quite a few of us on the same page. Speaking of pages (did you see what I did there?), the front page can be made to do a lot of the work in advertising the broad spectrum of activities that go on here. And it should get more love, and then consequently, more traffic. Maybe it would be an idea to establish a team to keep the front page updated with new articles and content as often as possible; members of such a team would specialise in one area, such as roleplaying, or art, or the book club, or Dark Banana. That way, we're immediately showing visitors that this is who we are and this is what we do; selling the community as a whole, not just for roleplaying, and not just for Star Wars.

Since we all seem to be in agreement with regards to software upgrades, portal and forums rearrangement, and boosting the sites overall swankiness, I'll say no more on the matter - it's great that we're heading in that directional already.

When I setup a guild for The Old Republic, I had a very specific idea about what I wanted to do with the website/forums, and it is relevant to what's going on here because the question I was asking myself was: what can we do, as a group, to show visitors that, of all the similar communities out there, this is the one to come back to? What can we offer that stands out and is different? There was going to be a gaming blog, Let's Plays, a Twitter feed, and a gaming livestream on top of all the usual features a gaming guild has to offer. The problem I faced was that I was over-ambitious and basically had too many balls in the air and not enough fellow jugglers. That is simply not the case here, we're up to our necks in people boasting remarkable talents, and it's time we showed that off a bit.

This would all be content created and submitted voluntarily, but to be honest, we create the content here anyway - look at the cooking threads, for example, and the presentation there. Why not show that off with a recipe of the week/month, complete with those wickedly mouth-watering pictures. We could even, with a little ingenuity, have a sci-fi, fantasy, or other-themed recipe of the month: there's a ton of Star Wars alcoholic beverages that have names but are yet to be invented! But on top of the cooking, there's film and football discussions, complete with predictions - why not feature that part of the community? I'm sure Peter would enjoy doing the occassional Let's Play video, too. And how about some photo albums for all those Nerd meetups to promote the social aspect of the community?

Back to roleplaying, so many interesting ideas have been proposed in the past that it would be a shame to let them fall by the wayside. I'm thinking of the character/roleplayer articles, or top five stories of the month, and I think at some point even the idea of news reports was raised. The community generates a great variety of content already, all we have to think of is how to re-package it and use it as a fun selling-point.

[Captain Untouchable]

+1 to what Droo has said.

What we seem to have done in the past is gone "this forum is not important: lets consolidate it with another forum". Star Wars Amalgam, for example. We very rarely go the opposite way however... but potentially, we could use that as a way to help advertise what we do. Maybe we need a separate Sports forum for football / baseball / car stuff / etc. Maybe we could split out the Dark Banana / Roleplaying / etc stuff into a Clubs & Activities forum. Maybe food appreciation threads could go in the "Starving" Artist's Department?

It doesn't necessarily matter if we numerically post more, but the more of those little yellow "This forum has new posts in it!" icons we have, the more active it's going to look like we are.

Another thought that Droo gave me: on a lot of gaming guild websites, they have a blog integrated into the website design. As it stands, our news articles are just a particular forum that's echoed on the front page. When we look into upgrading the forum software, could we perhaps investigate the idea of a blog for news purposes? That would keep any monthly character / roleplay focus stuff a little bit separate for the forums. And, if anyone wants to do Let's Plays, game reviews, or anything like that: we've got a place nestled in the community that can do that. Maybe someone wants to do a book review for all of the Book Club books, so it all ties together.

I'm guessing that adding a blog is probably one of those "I won't know if it's possible until I try and do it" questions for Ogre, but it might be worth considering at least.

We have a Facebook group, but we only ever use that if and when the forums go offline. Does anyone have any ideas on other ways we could use that, to beef up our multi-media platform?

Also, in the vein of beefing up our calendar... we went through a phase where we had a gargantuan AIM chat pretty much every weekend. Is this something that people are too busy for nowadays, or is it something that we could make a regular, scheduled thing? Is it something that we could perhaps look at migrating to a chat room, so that people can just stroll in rather than needing to get an AIM invite, (would be more accessible to new people) or perhaps something like Teamspeak so that we can voice chat instead of text chatting?

[Droo]

Publishing blogs was most definately a feature of the front page for vBulletin 4.0, it was quite an easy to use system, too. You could write and save numerous articles on the blog, and then assign each one a publish date, whereby they wouldn't appear until a certain day of the week/month, allowing you to organise your output.

[TheHolo.Net]

A face lift is a great idea, but at the same time I have to ask why we are paying for this service? This is the only board I have ever written on that people paid to host. I've wondered why we haven't just up and gone to a free host. Is it because we have so much archived on this host, are afraid to lose a few features, or something else? $200 a year isn't a terrible lot if spread out between the membership, but somehow I bet that Ogre has forked up most of the cost over the years. I'm pretty sure I've never contributing more than a hundred dollars total over the ten years I've been a member here, although granted I started when I was 14 and didn't have any money to my name.

We have tried to run these forums on 'free hosting' and 'close to free' hosting in the past and found it to be disastrous in both functionality and performance. Our combined site data footprint is too large and unwieldy for such a scenario. The host we have now is not very expensive compared to some of the choices we have made over the years, and is proving to be a very good fit for us.

Due to this reduced cost, I have been contemplating lowering what I label as the 'member forums hosting fees', the $200 annual donation drive we have each year, which members of our staff can confirm that I have not asked for in 2013 as of yet. All of this discussion regarding a facelift has steered me away from lowering that fee right away due to the additional software costs and time needed to do an awesome job of upgrading both our software and with it, our site feature list.

Yes, its true that over the years I have financially invested more funds and administrative time (server side) than anyone else, but I am not complaining. It is something I enjoy and would like to continue enjoying. I want to provide a place for this site's members where they are comfortable and have a good time. Change is part of high-tech and the Internet, therefore change is something that we must embrace and move forward with if we want to stay an active community.

My personal lack of social participation in either roleplay or standard discussions leaves me in a place where I cannot confidently make many of the decisions that need to be made regarding how to draw more people here, yet keep the site identity that we have established over the years, but I will listen to our members and do what I can to please as large a group as possible. This has to be done as a team.

Here are some quick personal thoughts on features that I am fairly certain the new vB versions brings to the table which will be good for our future.

1. Some kind of Facebook and/or other social media integration. Possibly Twitter, Linkedin and/or some others.
2. Better support for mobile and tablet platforms (iOS and Android)
3. A built in blogging system

I think the first two possibilities alone are enough to warrant the expenditure of funds and effort. While its true that things like Facebook and mobile platforms could drastically change in the near future, I believe we need to be in a place to better embrace these newer methods of capturing attention and providing options and site exposure to our site's users and the internet at large.

<b>Will there be some sacrifice of things we already have and are comfortable with? </b>

Yes, almost definitely, but change is inevitable and really must be embraced to foster new user participation and interest as well as provide the possibilities of generating new found interest from our existing and 'on hiatus' membership.

<b> Do I know now what those sacrifices may be? </b>

No, not yet, but I think the risk is justified.

[Loklorien s'Ilancy]

I'd just like to echo what Droo said. We've got a lot of talented people here from all walks of life, and it'd be criminal to not let them show off.

As for a sports forum, I know that at one point in the past I'd proposed it but at the time it was not a feasible addition. Perhaps now it's time to revisit the idea.

[José Luis Flores]

SW-FANS INC. Board Meeting must COME TO ORDER!

[Lilaena De'Ville]

<-- look what I found!

I like that we will be able to have blogs which will encourage articles and things like that.

Splitting the board into separate sites might be a good idea if we had twenty RPers who only RPed in the general settings and twenty others that RPed Star Wars, but we pretty much do it all. As it is we are what we are and making it more apparent what it is that happens here or CAN happen here is a step in the right direction.

Having a 'sports' forum and a "box office and other media" forum is a good idea. It's not readily apparent that we have sports discussion at all.

Cleaning up the topic tags/adding more is something to think about too. For instance if we had a sports forum we don't need a sports tag we might want individual tags (soccer/basketball/football/golf haha) instead. That is nitpicky stuff though, and not really important when we're just talking about the broad strokes of what we want the board to look like and function as.

[Kelly Perris]

Speaking of separate forums...

Don't you all think it's time that things like 'Mutants, Unite' and 'WoD' have their own forums? Here's my reasoning.

General RP is a breeding ground for new ideas. We're never going to stop coming up with things we want to play around in, we have such amazing, awesome imaginations. There have been countless new scenarios that have come up over the years and... well, a lot of them haven't had the staying power and have died off. But MU and WoD have.

They're not suited for General RP anymore. They are their own beasts. Sure, we stop writing them here and there, the attention of the board shifts, but they never die. Both MU and WoD have been with us since 2006 (beginning of '06 for WoD, end of '06 for MU) and they're still here. That's nearly EIGHT YEARS, people. They're not new anymore, not very 'general'. We still love them and still will for a long time to come.

What I'm saying here is that RPs that have proven themselves, ones that have staying power deserve their own space. Also, that we should have some sort of standard by which to judge if an RP in the General RP forum is ready to 'leave the nest and fly', so to speak. And let General RP be the 'breeding ground' that it is.

[Lilaena De'Ville]

^^^ This I like and am in favor of.