Response to my thread

TIL You can assume facts based on one small sampling.
Being a Science major, this is going to make labs much easier.

x339: I agree with a lot of what your saying but your execution is awful and immature. The community development criticism is very valid but because of the childish stunt of posting a Feedback thread consisting of puush links no one is listening and instead argue about what your 'suggestion' even means. I understand that you've tried to make a couple hundred suggestions in the past and I would be frustrated as well if they didn't get as much attention as you thought they deserved. But this is going no where.

 

The fact that you're saying the staff are doing nothing to help with activity is absolutely asinine.

I've been spreading the word of sythe through the CS server as well as RotMG, and occasionally on RS. I've also been spreading the word through friends who I'm trying to push into further getting their friends to join. I've been working daily on bringing in new members.

You're accusing us of doing nothing when in fact, it's entirely the opposite.

 

What's been the largest change in the past two weeks(in fact the largest change in a long time)? Your market redesign? Honestly maybe you're the one, x339, who stabbed Sythe.org with a spear.

 

Oh please, that is the excuse every time. No matter how I word my posts someone always claims it's childish. No, it's blunt, and I'm sorry if it makes you upset, but it needs to be said.

Well that's obviously not nearly enough. Those things are all nice to do, and they should be done, but it's not going to save the site. Perhaps if everyone was doing that it would be a different story, but they're not. There is a lot more that

My market design? What? I wasn't the one who did that, and either way what are you even saying? Are you saying it hurt the site or what?

Guys, I know you don't want to hear this, but it's the truth. Other people are echoing my concerns as well, I just chose to be more vocal about it. You can't deny what's happening to the site, and there needs to start being some drastic changes to fix that.

 

You're welcome to help rather than spending all of your time complaining.

 

Are you kidding me? I put so much time in to this site it's not even funny. Every chance I get I'm thinking of something new on how we can grow the site. I've poured so much time in to community dev related things only to be shut down by all of you who refuse to participate in my plans. I am constantly doing something to get sythe growing again, and you know it.

 

I skimmed through most of this thread, but did not read the other, or even see it, but I have a few things to add.

You point out problems, but you offer up few solutions. Make mods more active? How the hell will that make more people post in the community? Mods =/= gods, they can't magically conjure up hundreds of new, dedicated members.

Also, what is wrong with fewer members connected to the site besides the market area? The sole reason for this site is the market, some people(myself included) choose to use it for other reasons, however not everyone has to do it.

 

I have plenty of possible solutions on how we could fix this problem, such as a staff restructuring, but things like that can't happen when they refuse to put their positions in harms way. I just hope that everyone will see that something like that needs to be done, and this is one way of getting that point out there.

Also, this sites purpose isn't solely to be a market. It is a forum, and without the community, the market will die (and vice versa). There is no reason why we shouldn't be trying to grow both areas of the site, so why not?

 

i have a great idea lets pay people to browse our forum so it keeps x339 happy.

 

Firstly, my post was obviously more informative than yours.

Secondly, page views are up 45% over the last seven days. Page views per user is up 40%. Bounce is down 4%. Time on site is up 54%. It's up 18% over the last three months. Your opinion that the site has been dead over the last two weeks is subjective and useless shit.

Thirdly, I told you the com. dev. team was going to fail. I specifically said I would help out to give guidance because I knew I could offer insight into how to make it run smoothly. If my thoughts are not going to be taken seriously and thought about fully then there isn't a point to me continuing to post. It isn't my creation to try to save.

Fourthly, the staff have never been explicitly tasked with coming up with things to keep the site growing and prospering and I would appreciate it if you didn't take it out on the staff team, especially on the sectionals. Their main objective is mainly dealing with the robotic moderating tasks and they deserve a lot of credit for doing everything they do and do not deserve being called out. If you're going to call anyone out, call out the upper staff. Leave the sectionals out of it.

Fifthly, fuck you. I've got a whole bunch of stuff on my plate recently and its all far more important than Sythe. I try to contribute as much as I can but I'm busy and don't have a lot of time so its hard. We have lives other than Sythe and that isn't an excuse. That's just a fact that we all have to deal with.

 

Laughed my ass of when i read that lol.

But i agree with the points you are making, especially that staff does what they are appointed to do, and they do it well.

Personally a small community with a large market section sounds good to me. I would rather there 75 dedicated members that i know good, than 750 memebers i dont know shit about.

 

we need to figure something out to get more traffic, but i dont feel its the staffs fault or anything presented outside of advertising is going to help. in the mean time imma eat my popcorn

 

What?

Page views means nothing, just as time on site means nothing, it's what they actually do there that matters. Look at every section we have, posts are being made hours, and sometimes days apart. That may not sound like much, but you have to realize that active forums have posts within 30 minutes at most. 5 hours - 2 days apart is horrible.

Actually, I followed what you said, and did almost all the things you thought would be required to make the team work, and now it's failing because none of the staff members want to participate. Maybe things would work better if people actually decided to get involved with each plan. You for example, have done nothing other than make that post about what you think we're doing wrong, which I in fact complied with. So maybe you should evaluate what you're doing instead.

There's the biggest problem we have, "the staff have never been explicitly tasked with things to keep the site growing and prospering". I don't really blame sectionals for this, because you're right, their main task is just the day to day duties of keeping the forum clean. It's the upper staff who need to take the reigns and do something. Yet still we equate upper staff activity to also simply doing day to day duties. Admins applying TwC's is not helping the site grow, Globals posting on disputes is not helping the site grow, and sitting here doing spam reports is not helping the site grow. They are all necessary tasks, but relying on them as the means to keep the site afloat isn't going to work.

Ok, so everyone is busy, and we should just let Sythe die because of that fact. If you're busy, that's perfectly fine, but if you're not contributing to the site there is a problem.

 

1) Figure it out.

2) Every section? http://www.sythe.org/forumdisplay.php?f=375 - 5 minutes apart, then 8, then 3.

3) Yea... No you didn't.

4) If its a problem look at: http://www.sythe.org/showthread.php?t=856069 and suggest changes we could make to improve the structure or tasks of the staff to make the site better.

5) Everyone contributes a fair amount or they resign / get demoted / get put on suspended staff / get told they can be inactive for a bit to clear up their issues.

 

Ok you got me, the runescape markets aren't completely dead, but as it has been said time and time again, if we rely on runescape to keep the site alive, it's not going to last long.

If you think that there is anything I am missing why haven't you told me? I thought I did a pretty good job of getting things set up, but I can only go so far with out anyone backing me.

I have plenty of methods I would suggest for this, but I know that any sort of change in that department is instantly shut out and regarded as blasphemy. My threads, such as these, are all in the effort of trying to change that attitude so suggestions and ideas can happen to change that.

A fair amount, as in reaching the quota. Anyone can do that, if you can type, and if you can read, you can do spam reports. That's not what we should be judging moderator quality on, because 1) it's not an accurate judgement, and 2) it leads people to believe a staff member only needs to hit their quota to be beneficial to the site.

 

I think the problem you have is you make mods out to be some pillar of the community that should actively help the site grow. In reality however, mods are all volunteer, who are here to help within the forum by patrolling the forum and cleaning up spam/ banning scammers. They are like cops, they regulate the forum. Cops don't go out and try to get people to move to their city, they just help the ones already there.

 

You do realize that this site is actually incredibly active? It isn't "dying" there is nothing to worry about.

More events would be fun for some member retention, but most people will use this forum for it's main function: as a market. I think it's fine that only a fraction use it for community.

 

Then who does the responsibility of forum growth fall on?

 

You do realize that even regular members can encourage growth of a community? It's really no ones responsibility to do it.

 

And that's exactly what I am doing, but still, one can only get so far without the staff of the site backing him up. When the community development team was created, someone decided that it would be made up mainly of staff member, and now all those staff members are no where to be found as I try to keep things going.

If it's no ones responsibility then nothing is going to happen, which is where things are headed right now.