What's wrong with Shades?

[Lig]

I had to ask.

A couple of days ago, there were loads of new posts, and lots to read. Now, it's dead. This seems to happen all the time - things get interesting, and just fade away.

Why does this happen? On Pagga, we have slightly less users, but I could spend an entire day going through the posts on Pagga. That's on a daily basis, you understand.

So, what's happening here? One issue is, I think, community - we have little to bind us, except larp. The chances are that if I run a larp, most other Shades users will be at best in a different country, and at worst, on a different continental landmass. So it's unlikely that I will get a chance to attend your events, or you mine. If I do something, it is likely to have little direct impact on your event. Or you mine. Solving this is, of course, another thread entirely.

Can we solve this problem? At what point will the content of the forum be self-sustaining? It happens in other forums, but not here, to my great regret.

The people here are cool, the conversations are limited in number, but interesting, and the site is fairly reliable. What's missing?

[zombielarp]

I think the size of the active membership is a big cause. Sure, we may have almost 1500 people registered, but I would be willing to guess that there are 30-40 active members on this board, and that may even be stretching it. Im defining 'active' as someone who posts more than once a month, or more than 10 times total. You have poeple that come on to advertise their game, then leave. Or advertise that they are looking for games and, not finding one in their area, get discouraged and leave. Im not sure of Pagga's total membership, but I'm pretty sure that there are more active posters than there are here.

I think location, as you pointed out, is another big issue. Pagga is centered in the UK, which is a relatively small area, compared to the whole world, which Shades seems to cover. Not only transportation, but time differences are a large factor. At Pagga, most people are in the same time zone, so there is little latency in responce. Its interesting though, Lig. Ive got an 8 hours time difference, so my experience surfing Pagga is somewhat different. Most of the time, people reply to my posts while I am asleep, and vice versa. So, I dont really get the constant dialogue that someone in the UK might experience. With a global forum, that time difference is amplified, and fluid communication is sometimes difficult.

Perhaps some regional forums could be added? Have a space for UK LARPs, North American LARPs, European LARPS, ect. Or maybe making some forums for each genre of LARP?

One thing i seem to be noticing (and maybe im the only one) is that we seem to have two 'General LARP Discussion' boards here, with pretty much the same discussions being held within each. In some instances, we have the same topics being posted multiple times in each. I understand that there are slight differences in the stated purposes of those boards, but I dont feel the differences are big enough to warrant two sparate ones.
Over at Pagga, there are distinct boards for various 'general but specific' topics, such as game design, prop and costume making, ect. I think that is one of the things that keeps people talking. They can just go to the section that interests them, instead of having to sift through alot of material to find something that interests them.

Solutions:
At the very least, I think the first two forums should be merged into one "General LARP" forum. There should be a "Frequently Discussed Topics" sticky at the top, so people dont have to wade through a ton of posts to find something useful. Perhaps a little more moderation of not-using-the-search-function needs to be done as well.
I would also like to see more specific sub-forums, like Pagga, especially genre-specific discussion.
It would require alot more moderation, but I think opening up the forum to allow guests to post would cut down on the number of "One Hit Wonders" on the forum. If someone feels strongly enough about LARP to want to join a global LARP community to want to register, then they should do that. If they are going to show up to advertize, then leave, they should have the option of not registering. I would also not be apposed to sending out warnings after 6 months of innactivity, then banning after the 9th or 12th month. If someone wants to re-join the forum after that, they can just re-register.

One issue that is preventing large changes from taking place is that the only one with Admin privelages, i beleive, is Shade. Shade is the only one, as of now, that can make such changes to the forum. Shade also isnt very active. Im not picking on him/her, but i dont think that anything is going to get done without an active admin. Ryan Paddy seems to be the most active mod. I wouldnt be opposed to letting him (or even Lig) have Admin privelages, but they aren't mine to give.
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[Lig]

Some very good points there.

Opening to guests may be an idea, and appears to work for Pagga. You do risk more spamming and trolling, but lets face it, if someone really wants to do it, they'll register. It's happened before. I do wonder how many people have come on here, read the forums, wanted to reply, but doesn't like registration forms, or whatever. Or just want to reply immediately, not after they've had to faff with registering. Those who become regular users will no doubt register eventually. So, it gets my vote, for what it's worth.

What I was meaning with Pagga was not the potential for immediate conversation (although it does happen - I've had some good theory debates that way), but rather the sheer number of posts that get made in a day - hundreds, if it's busy. That will mainly come downt to "sense of community", but I do think that there's a critical post mass, where a busy site keeps busy by virtue of being busy

We need something to bring us together. Perhaps the system/resource project being discussed on General could help - alas, I have no time to run it myself, so we need to find some other hapless fool to do it

I like the idea of changing the forums around, making them more specific. I don't like the idea of splitting into geographical area - I think there are usually national forums for each country (are there?), and Shade's strength lies in it's international status.

I do try and big up the site on any UK forums I come across, but as you'll see, there aren't a lot - the majority of UK larpers on here seem to come across Shades first, and then get drawn to Pagga because it's local to them. So, Shade's can't compete on a local/national level, but maybe we can on an international level.

I'm not talking about formal organisations here, but instead, building more links between countries, and larpers. We should attempt to contact not just our usual crowd of UK, US, NZ, Oz, Canada and Scandanavia, but also South African freeform writers, and Singaporean vampire players, and Russian steel fighters.

Maybe we should be bigging up international events and conferences, like Knudpunkt (or whatever it is this time round ) and Dragonbane (now postponed, unfortunately).

Thoughts?

[LARPfan]

I personally don't post much because I either don't have much to say or what has been said already reflects my opinion very well, I don't find much use for redundancy unless I can expand or further clarify an already stated point. When I do, I post.

I would vote against separating the regions as I derive a great deal of value from both US and Non-US LARPers who post here. I've learned a lot from our non-US cousins and would like to continue to do so.

In short I like the board very much as well as the general community of it, I simply don't have a great deal to say. I imagine others are similar in this regard?
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I'd rather be LARPing

[zombielarp]

[Shade]

I appreciate any input on the forums section. To tell you the truth, I put up the forums as an "added" feature for the LARP List. I never thought it would get anywhere. Boy was I wrong. I'm horrible with the board. But the support of the people who are active in this website community, that has made the forums what it is today. I appreciate it. Now that it's been around this long, I think you guys are right in finding ways to improve it so we get more input and discussions going on an on-going basis, instead of the sporadic spurts of post we have now.

As for members, I wanted registration more for the LARP List than the forums. If I open up the forums to "guests", It will mean a lot more work for the admins/moderators. I'm open to suggestions. I really have no stand on this issue. I was looking to make my life a bit easier

I think the site has matured a lot. It amazes me that April 2005 signifies 10 years of presence on the Web. I remember submitting the website on Yahoo! back when it was just a huge list of websites back in 1995.

We also can say that Shade's LARP List has been on the Internet for over 15 years with the first postings of the list on the newsgroups.

Thanks for all the input guys. I appreciate it that you care enough about the site to find things to make it better.

NOw I'm going to get some sleep... I'm so tired from my vacation at Star Wars Celebrations 3 in Indianapolis, Indiana. I had a blast!

- Shade

[Lig]

Note: When I said "it gets my vote", it might have caused some confusion. It's an analogy for "I agree". Presumably limited to English English usage

I'm struggling for ideas, to be honest. We should invite more people, from all over the place. There are lots of mailing lists, and we all know lots of larpers, or at least ways of contacting them.

Pagga admin recently did a similar thing, and there has been some interest from it, so I reckon it could work. But the key is reaching out to the places we don't usually think about. There are larps in just about every country in the world, from what I can see.

There doesn't seem to be anywhere else like this on the net. We should big it up. I'll go and add Shades to all my forum sigs

[Grimace_Reaper]

I would make more interesting posts but, I just don't want to risk offending anyone with my veiws as per usual with me and apparent boredam that sets in usually. No seriously, there is a lul on here, sometimes its buzzing with posts and activity, then ghost town....
I'll try to think of something contreversial to post if you want just to spice things up....hmmmmm.....Hookers and LARP discussion anyone?

[Anthraxus]

I think the idea about breaking the forums into more specific topics would be good. I think it would help cut down a lot on dup threads, if we had one forums specifically for prop/weapon design, and one for costumes, and one for plot writing, and one for larp logistics. It would cause a bit of work for me and the other moderators to go through the old forum and move the posts around to where they are supposed to be, but in the long run it would probably be worth it.

[RyanPaddy]

Increasing the active community on Shade's is a great idea. Personally, I find that I will sometimes post somewhere else because I know I'll get more feedback on my ideas. So I agree that the amount of activity is self-fulfilling. The more good posts there are, the more people will feel inclined to post.

Shade's strength is definitely its internationality. We should remember that strength when looking for ways to improve Shades. It is not enough to do what other successful forums do, we must help Shade's fill its unique niche the best way it can.

Suggestions so far:

Regional forums. I don't think this is a good idea, that niche is already well and truly filled as has been pointed out.

Subject-based forums. Good idea. I talked to a Shade's user the other day who said he doesn't visit much because most of the discussion seemed to be about live combat systems and he's not interested in that. If that sort of discussion was all in one forum he could more easily ignore it. I think discussion about this should be extensive and deserves a topic of its own or it will derail the other issues on this thread. I'm happy to help with the topic relocation effort.

Guest posting. I'm not sure if the forum can actually be set to allow this. It's based on phpBB, which I don't think has the option. I would have no objection to moderating it though. If rpg.net can hack it, we can too. This would enable around people who have cookie/firewall issues with loggin in to post, as well as people who don't want to commit to registration.

Giving more people admin rights. I don't see a need for this. Stability is a good thing, so changes to the structure of the forum should be rare. Shade has made them when a need has arisen, and I'm sure he can do so again.

Outreach to international larpers. This is a great idea, and it's one of the reasons I came up with the LARP Photo Awards. It gave me an excuse to go around the various international larp forums and make a fuss about Shade's. Promoting international larp events is another great idea. I believe shade's needs an "International LARP site" brand. What else can we do to achieve this?

Projects. The Shade's community can't share war-stories about games, because they haven't been to the same ones. War-stories provide a great common context for discussion. What can we replace this with? "Virtual" LARP projects that we work on as a community may be one answer. However, these projects have a tendency to putter out unless their management is carefully thought out and they have clear-cut and easily achievable aims. Can Shade's provide some way of helping such projects to succeed? Perhaps one of the issues with these projects is that they aim too high, for goals that are difficult to reach even when the collaborators are face-to-face. Here's an alternative idea: what if people on other sides of the world got together and wrote not hihg-reaching "global systems," but scenarios? Then they could all run the scenario in their own parts of the world, and compare war-stories about how the same scenario turned out differently in different parts of the world? I think these kinds of smaller, more practical collaborations would make the community ties more real. At the same time, each scenario project would need to run on some common system framework, so part of the project may involve coming up with ideas for one. Those are suitable types of collaborative projects for organisers. Are there any for players?

One last point. Much of the appeal of Shade's is its diversity. Discovering new types of larp you didn't know about, or larp in places of the world you had no idea about. I think we should find ways to emphasise that.

Any more suggestions?

[Lig]

Could you list the various international forums you're aware of? Perhaps more presence would work both ways.