A forum in disrepair

[Bannor]

Uh, personaly I am having a few problems with the writers corner. Besides the fact that most of the stories dont get any readers, besides the fact that the most amount of votes we ever got in a competition was 9, I am more concerned about the forum itself. First of all, have you seen how many threads there are? And how many of those threads are in there. Do you know that everything past page 3 is over 3 months old? That is an incredible amount of JUNK just sitting around. Come on... i thought we were pruning. Hell, I think that both the artist forum and writers forum deserve mods that are purely for that forum, for things like deleting old threads and posting and most stories. Kind make it like a job.

Then secondly(and I know this has been brought up alot) for Heaven sakes make a poetry corner. I mean, slightly more than half the stuff is poetry, and it tends to push stuff down. We might lost readers you claim... well I highly doubt it, hell poetry seems to be getting most of the posts anyway, and if you look at the writers corner is terms of fan fics we really dont have very many readers to lose.

To sum up, I really hope that we can fix up the writers corner just a little. I think it is just a little ignored and needs to be tuned up a little. Thank you for your consideration.

-Bannor

[Kumo]

I support Bannor 100%. I've been saying this for months now . . . the forum has become useless, and the mods are crap. I've visited many other forums, and at least the moderators there take time to read and reply to the works in progress. I'm so disillusioned now . . . I wonder if any of the admins have ever set foot in those forums. I wonder if the first mods had to do anything, or if they even wanted to mod those forums in the first place.

You admins don't give a trout, and that's why it's doing so horribly. There are people that are serious about writing, but you must think they are losers and aren't important enough to have their own voice. If you do create a new forum, because you have a miraculous change of heart, I nominate Bannor to be one of the new moderators for it. And if I could have a second pick, it would be Tokkiquil.

And btw, sorry if I posted 10 times in a row in my thread there. I have been posting new chapters for about 5 months now, and nobody is replying. I wonder why . . .

[Heath]

I beleive the mods voted not to Prune the writers corner because of the stuff there was good enough to save. Can't back this up as much as I'd like. I don't stop in that forum as much as I'd like but I beleive that the Staff forum, the writers corner and the artists gallery (maybe more?) weren't pruned. Not 100% sure though, but...

*awaits to be corrected*

[I Love Shoyku]

I actually agree with you guys. I really think the study forum, and that other writers forum should be delted. I still think we should have a food forums though..

Later
Cheffie

[Dr Unne]

First of all,

...the mods are crap...

I wonder if any of the admins have ever set foot in those forums...

Things like that aren't going to make us eager to jump and help you. We're people, you know, we're not your MB-slaves, and we're not robots who can take insults and happily continue about our business without caring. Try posting that kind of crap at an another MB sometime and see what kind of responses you get. Then come back and tell us about how bad we are. But thankfully for you, we are good people, and we continue to work to make this place as good as we can, so I'm going to address your concerns, even though you're not going to like the answer, and even though I'm going to get no thanks for the time I spend typing it up. I hope you realize that I owe you absolutely nothing, and the fact that I'm even bothering to respond instead of closing this thread with a simple "No", which is well within my right to do, means that I DO care about this place, and I care about everyone's opinion.

Kuja Trance is partly right, there were some forums we agreed not to prune at all so that we wouldn't lose any important threads. Not sure which threads we ended up not pruning, Bleys would know better than I do since he's the one who did the pruning.

In any case, check any forum, three pages back, and see how many threads there are good. Look at general chat for example. Dead threads die for a reason, and closed threads tend to end up together as the good threads stay alive while the closed ones die. We're not going to prune every forum manually so that all the spam threads get deleted. First of all, that would be a huge burden on us, and it'd take a great deal of time that could be better spent on other things. Secondly, if it was really important to do so maybe we would invest the time anyways, but make the writer's corner look pretty three pages into the dead threads isn't high on my list of priorities.

I can tell you that yes, the staff does read most / all of the threads in there. However, we're human beings, and there are limited numbers of us, and we're not omniscient, and we do miss things. As we said the last time people complained about this, if someone is doing something wrong in there, feel free to PM anyone on staff and the problem will be taken care of within a few hours.

About the forum not getting any traffic, exactly what does that have to do with the staff? There are 4000 members here, of which exactly 20 are staff. We're not going to force people to go read everyone's stories. If people were interested they'd go read on their own. Obviously people just aren't that interested. Speaking for myself, I don't like fanfics at all, so I'm not going to go read every fanfic everyone writes just because I'm on staff.

About the poetry thing, well, the forum is for writings of all kinds. This is a gaming forum remember. The primary function of the MB is to talk about games. We could give fanfics their own forum I guess, but we need somewhere to put all the other writings, and, this being a gaming forum, it would be ridiculous to make a seperate forum just for non-gaming poetry. I would agree that fanfics should be more important to the site, in a way, since this is a gaming site, and fanfics are about gaming. But we are left with the following options.

1) Seperate poetery forum. Not going to happen. It would get no traffic, and what little traffic the fanfic forum gets now would be cut in less than half. Dead forums are not something we enjoy having around.
2) Recombine Fanfics/poetry and Fanart into one forum, as it was before. But I can assure you, fanfics will be buried far more quickly by art than by poetry, because a lot of people here draw.
3) Move poetry and non-fanfic writing into the Lounge. We tried this once too, and it didn't work. Movies, music, TV, AND books/poetry makes the Lounge too chaotic, and once again, the writing threads will be buried.
4) Just don't let people post any writing that's non-game related. Not sure what that would accomplish.
4) Leave things as they are now.

Leaving things as they are is probably how it's going to be. If fanfics were popular, they would get plenty of posts no matter what else was in the forum. Moving stuff around isn't going to make people suddenly come post there. Take my word that we get a lot more writing-related threads with the forums set up as they are now than we used to when the fanfics were parts of other forums. I think we've done just about as much as we can to give that forum some life.

A side note, the fanfic forum is part of EoFF as a whole. Some people seem to regard it as some sort of sub-culture within EoFF, seperate from the rest of the MB or something. It's not. It's not going to get its own mods or anything either. I fail to see why that would be necessary. You yourselves have said that the forum doesn't get much traffic. No traffic = no need for more mods.

That having been said, I'd love to see the fanfic forum get more traffic. Fanfics are popular in some places, we just don't seem to have many fanfic fans around here. I don't know what we can do about it though. Go try to find people who like to talk about writing and get them to register here. That's your best hope. Barring that, if you love fanfics that much maybe you can make a fanfic-devoted site or MB yourself, or go to one where they talk about nothing but fanfics. EoFF has never been big on writing and fanfics and whatnot. I don't forsee a time when they're going to become popular.

PS: No food forum. General Chat serves that purpose well enough. You realize, if we made a new forum every time a couple people wanted one, we'd have a Newbie forum, an Intro forum, a Spam forum, an RPG-maker forum, a Happy Birthday forum, a Seiken Densetsu forum, a Xenogears forum (which we just merged, because it was dead), probably seperate GameCube, PS2, XBox, Nintendo forums, a Strategy game forum, seperate forums for FF1 through FF4, a forum where people could go to insult each other (don't ask me...), a Food forum, a Computer forum, an Anime forum, a Sports forum, a seperate forum for Books, Fanfics AND Poetry, etc., etc. This is Eyes on Final Fantasy, not Eyes on Everything in the Known Universe.

I will ask the rest of the staff about making a poetry forum, or a food forum. But the answer is probably no.

[Citizen Bleys]

Just to confirm: Yes, I did make the Writer's Corner immune from the prune--For all I know, some writers posted their work on EoFF and it's not saved anywhere else--I know how hard writing is, and I don't want to be responsible for the destruction of hours and hours of someone else's hard work.

Kumo and Bannor: Again, I don't think you're going to get your way here, but I'm glad that we've got you on-board trying to keep the Writer's Corner alive.

And a final note: If EoFF doesn't serve your needs as a writing forum, you might be happier going to Legardinia, as that site's primary focus is writing, both fanfiction and original works.

Good luck.

[Bannor]

Well taken, but I do have a rebbutal.

First of all, you say that you save it because some writers only post their work here. Not to dispute the honesty of your word but doesnt it seem a little unlikely that someone would sit down to this tiny little white screen and type out a chapter of something? I am certain that most people save their writings to their hard drive and copy and paste from their.

Secondly, if we were to make a poetry corner, nothing would be affected. In all honesty poetry gets a hell of alot more post do to the fact that it is short, easy to read and doesnt require long term commitment. I highly doubt we would lose any readers.

This is Eyes on Final Fantasy, not Eyes on Everything in the Known Universe.

Oh that is great.. LMAO.

In any case, check any forum, three pages back, and see how many threads there are good. Look at general chat for example. Dead threads die for a reason, and closed threads tend to end up together as the good threads stay alive while the closed ones die.

But my point was that the stuff that was their was Old . I mean like really old. And obviously if the stuff is there and it is old then no one will prolly have any interest in it at all.

I can tell you that yes, the staff does read most / all of the threads in there. However, we're human beings, and there are limited numbers of us, and we're not omniscient, and we do miss things. As we said the last time people complained about this, if someone is doing something wrong in there, feel free to PM anyone on staff and the problem will be taken care of within a few hours.

I dont think there are any actual "problems" per se ie. flaming, spamming and such( I do believe those left with whats-her-face... ALenita, thats it)

About the forum not getting any traffic, exactly what does that have to do with the staff? There are 4000 members here, of which exactly 20 are staff. We're not going to force people to go read everyone's stories. If people were interested they'd go read on their own. Obviously people just aren't that interested. Speaking for myself, I don't like fanfics at all, so I'm not going to go read every fanfic everyone writes just because I'm on staff.

Actually I dont think that it is the staffs fault at all. I am not asking for you to change that. Hell, we cant help it that some of the stuff in there is hardly worth a glance. But if we could install neon lights... or hookers. Thats it! Hookers in the writers corner. Damn I'm brilliant.

A side note, the fanfic forum is part of EoFF as a whole. Some people seem to regard it as some sort of sub-culture within EoFF, seperate from the rest of the MB or something. It's not. It's not going to get its own mods or anything either. I fail to see why that would be necessary. You yourselves have said that the forum doesn't get much traffic. No traffic = no need for more mods.

Kinda agree, kinda of disagree. First of all, it really is a subculture per se. Or was. I dont know. But the point is assign the mod to do the pruning of the useless junk that is backed up. Hell, I dont mean like a roaming mod, but a temporary one for the corner.

The primary function of the MB is to talk about games

Are you sure? Because the 60 thousand post in General seems to rival the 80 odd thousand in all of the ff gaming ones. And there 13 FF ones while I only counted General, EoEo , Lounge and Art in my scope of general. So is this really about gaming?

But in the end I do see were you are coming from. If we make one sub-forum then we open the flood gates. You guys would get pressured to make ever more fora. But either way, I still hope you consider making a seperate forum for poetry. Thanx

-Bannor

P.S.

And a final note: If EoFF doesn't serve your needs as a writing forum, you might be happier going to Legardinia, as that site's primary focus is writing, both fanfiction and original works.

True, but I would rather stay with eoff, I have been here much longer and feel that the writers corner deserves better.

[Daryl]

Originally posted by Bannor

First of all, you say that you save it because some writers only post their work here. Not to dispute the honesty of your word but doesnt it seem a little unlikely that someone would sit down to this tiny little white screen and type out a chapter of something? I am certain that most people save their writings to their hard drive and copy and paste from their.

A lot of things I post (although, admittedly, I haven't posted many writings here, especially in recent months) are posted as the idea hits me - examples being the poems I wrote last winter. This was the first place they were saved, and I hadn't saved a copy to my hard drive until last month. They'd've been lost if the prune happened.

On top of that, what if people who do love fanfic would like to go through and read the EoFF authors' old stuff?

I don't see a problem with us not pruning the writing and art forums. Creative efforts may be chronologically old, but to forum newcomers, they are new and interesting.

Secondly, if we were to make a poetry corner, nothing would be affected. In all honesty poetry gets a hell of alot more post do to the fact that it is short, easy to read and doesnt require long term commitment. I highly doubt we would lose any readers.

I hardly think a subforum is the answer to the traffic problems. If people don't want to read and post responses to fanfic, seperating it from poetry will hardly change that.

But my point was that the stuff that was their was Old . I mean like really old. And obviously if the stuff is there and it is old then no one will prolly have any interest in it at all.

Au contraire. Shortly after I joined, I read all the old threads in the (at that time) Fanfic/Fanart forum. Just because old things aren't of interest to you, don't assume the same of all newly registered EoFFers (and older members, for that matter).

Kinda agree, kinda of disagree. First of all, it really is a subculture per se. Or was. I dont know. But the point is assign the mod to do the pruning of the useless junk that is backed up. Hell, I dont mean like a roaming mod, but a temporary one for the corner.

I don't think that would solve any problems, either. If you need staff assistance in the writer's corner, simply instant message or Private Message us and we'll take care of things.

Are you sure? Because the 60 thousand post in General seems to rival the 80 odd thousand in all of the ff gaming ones. And there 13 FF ones while I only counted General, EoEo , Lounge and Art in my scope of general. So is this really about gaming?

The primary focus has always been gaming, but since it's hardly to be expected that we all devote ourselves 100% to video games, no matter how engaging they may be, I think it makes sense that we add a couple non-gaming fora, yes?

Sorry if I stepped in where you were hoping Unne would again respond, but, those're my opinions on the matter.

[Bannor]

A lot of things I post (although, admittedly, I haven't posted many writings here, especially in recent months) are posted as the idea hits me - examples being the poems I wrote last winter. This was the first place they were saved, and I hadn't saved a copy to my hard drive until last month.

Ok true. But in all honesty, that is one in maybe a hundred case. Sure people make alot of reference to old stuff in other forum but not in WC. I mean, if that is a problem then post an announcement that you are clearing out writers corner and all work that is past such and such a date is being deleted. Then give them a week or two to save their stuff.

I hardly think a subforum is the answer to the traffic problems. If people don't want to read and post responses to fanfic, seperating it from poetry will hardly change that.

Well that is exactly my point. It wont affect traffic, but it will help with pushing stuff down. I understand that a Long time ago it was different, but times change dont they? Dont focus on the past.

Au contraire. Shortly after I joined, I read all the old threads in the (at that time) Fanfic/Fanart forum. Just because old things aren't of interest to you, don't assume the same of all newly registered EoFFers (and older members, for that matter).

So we are saving a bunch of old stuff for nostalgia sake. Dont they have a forum for that? And really Daryl, how many people actually check out the old stuff? I am not saying delete it ALL, I am saying reduce the massizeness of it.

I don't think that would solve any problems, either. If you need staff assistance in the writer's corner, simply instant message or Private Message us and we'll take care of things.

But the whole point is you want to weed out the good stuff from the bad from the past right? Assign some one to do that then.

The primary focus has always been gaming, but since it's hardly to be expected that we all devote ourselves 100% to video games, no matter how engaging they may be, I think it makes sense that we add a couple non-gaming fora, yes?

True, but it doesnt seem all that engaging or all the primary if it becomes secondary to a smaller sub-forum(that being General(not genral chat)) But indeed this entire mb is based off of ff and therefore it tis centered on gaming. Newho I eagerly wait to to torn down, my argument to be dismissed as mindless prattle and to be throughly hosed and schooled by Dr Unne.(Heh)

-Bannor

[Dr Unne]

We're considering a sub-forum, which wouldn't be a seperate forum, since it'd still be technically part of the Writer's Corner, but it'd help seperate stuff. Sub-forum isn't the same as "seperate" forum. When you say "seperate" I think of a new forum on the main page. I see no reason why we couldn't have a sub-forum. You are right about the floodgates though. But we're discussing it.

[The Man]

I, personally, am not in favour of deleting any threads from the Writer's Corner at all. I think the judgment of whether writing is ace or crap should be left up to the people who read it, and I think they shouldn't be deprived of the opportunity to read it just because someone else thought it was crap.

I personally disapprove of the idea of subfora, since it means more clicking for me, but if it would make more people post to the Writer's Corner, I'd be in favour of it. I've been a bad WC supporter though. I haven't even looked in there in a long time. Then again, I haven't had time to do more than browse General Chat, Feedback and FFVI for about a month each time I come on EoFF anyhow. C'est la vie, I guess.

Peace
Kilgore Trout

[Bannor]

Oh, you thought I mean an entire new forum? No no no, just a sub-forum.

[Zypher]

To subforums: I say no. All my reasons have been said already, and I'm to lazy to point out which ones are mine. But just put my vote that way, or something.

The other thing I wanted to say: people do go back through old threads in the creative forums. I've done it. Just because those threads are old doesn't mean that they're worse, or not worth reading. There's some good stuff 'three pages back.'

[Kumo]

Well, if the readers (actually there are no readers anymore in the WC, they are all posters) are the ones that decide if a fic is crap or not, then I guess my fic is utter crap. It hasn't had a repsonse (where somebody actually read it) since just about January. SO what if it's 27 chapters long . . . so what if I put my heart and soul and two years of work into it . . . Nobody is reading it, so it must be crap.

Really, the staff should care about stuff like this . . . especially the forum moderators for WC. Weren't they picked because they loved literature or read a lot in the WC? Weren't they picked for their merit and devotion to that forum? Or were they just given that forum as a benefit for being friends with other mods and admins . . .

I'm sorry, but I'm a mod at another fanfic forum, and I've never shirked off my responsibility as a mod. And I have never stopped loving fanfics and other originals. If I ever did, I would quit. If the mods are busy doing other things . . . spending their time elsewhere, then they should step down and perhaps let somebody else take a shot at modding the WC. This is why it angers me that you guys seemingly don't care, and this is why I fight for the conditions to improve. Do I have to prove to you admins that a subforum works? Do I have to prove that good moderating actually improves the traffic in forums? If so, I will.

The Great Experiment

http://www.ffwa.org/forums/forumdisp...?s=&forumid=63

Take a look . . . browse around. There are two forums, one for originals and poetry, and the other for fanfic. They exist separately and function separately. Traffic is relatively good (we had about 100 posts in fanfic during peak times this summer), and the quality is improving with each day. I'm not saying that EOFF should become this, but I am saying that Bannor's idea could work, and work well. All it needs is a little work and patience. Again, nobody is asking that this all be done overnight, but over a period of time.

I'm willing to be a temp mod and to clean up everything if you want me too. I'm willing to put hundreds of hours into making the WC great, but you have to take a leap of faith. If nothing is done, then I will just leave . .. cause I'm sick of it all. I've been a member here for about two years with different accounts (damn crash), but dammit all to hell if I stay here any longer with the way things are.

And I'm sorry that I'm yelling at you mods and admins, and I know that it will get me nowhere, but I don't think you are seeing the benefits to some of my suggestions. Or . . if you really care.

[Citizen Bleys]

The Staff discussion so far seems to be in favor of a subforum for poetry, and against promoting a moderator

I'd actually like to see a moderator dedicated to the Writer's Corner, but ultimately, EoFF's policy has been "Supermods, not mods" for a long time, and I don't see that changing.