Review of Sythe Teams

This is my extensive review/opinions on the Sythe teams, what they are doing, and how they are doing it. Feel free to leave your own arguments/reviews/defenses.

CDT

I don't feel that CDT are accomplishing anything in the long run. The goal of the CDT is bring the community together and develop good relationships between the users. I have a couple problems with how the CDT is currently functioning.

One problem is that many crucial members (not all) are too concerned with just creating as many events as possible. By creating a plethora of events, they believe that they are benefiting Sythe and doing a good job. Very little thought is put into the quality of the events and designing the events correctly. My guess is that when the events are planned, ideas are just spitballed; the most unique and interesting ideas are chosen to be implemented. However, the consequences and good effects of different types of events are not considered. Why should each event be implemented? What does it bring to the table? How does it bring people closer together? i.e. The image search and raffle from this part Halloween. Just because an event is a competition does not mean that is brings the community together.

I would like to applaud @Mootrucks for his role in creating the weekly events. These events appear to be made with a purpose. Some have complained that the events are a little repetitive, but I would argue that the concept behind his events are very beneficial to the community; he is bringing groups of people who enjoy these niche .io games together and strengthening that sub community. Another problem with the big events is that they are just big gatherings of random people who are all competing for some prize with no awareness of the community around them. Mootrucks' smaller events do a wonderful job of avoiding that problem.

Other sub communities can also be worked on by the CDT. Runescape clans, LoL groups, etc, can all be simple ways of bringing people together.

PR Team

In my opinion, the PR Team is the team that needs the most work. Currently, I see very little being done to bring quality new members to Sythe. Mootrucks is blending his events with online advertising for Sythe, but the PR Team should be doing much more as well.

In terms of social media, very little is being accomplished; whatever content that is being produced is focused towards existing Sythe members and barely at all towards potential members. I also think that the Sythe community just doesn't have enough potential right now for the CDT to work effectively. The larger CDT events have done an okay job of bringing out less active members and lurkers, but these participants ultimately go back to lurking at the end of the day. In short, more people = heightened sense of community = more consistent site activity & participation.

Spoiler: PRs Response

ADT

Another example of how a niche group can display success for developing a [sub]community. The ADT, while a meme, focuses itself around Spam Forum participants and branches out to memers in all sections of the forum. I think they are doing a great job of tightening that community and growing those bonds. While not condoning any messages or intentions, I will say that the 'Destroy Sonia' event was a good example of how events should be designed, focused more on community cooperation and less on aimless competition. Good job @BumBum & @PlanBUK.

Tech Core

Not too sure what goes on here to be honest. I know that Tech Core is looking at continuing the development of the Sythe RSPS currently, which is great. But there are so many things that can be done for the site in general. For example, the Skype link in user description and the shared thread ownership are all projects that could use manpower. Seems like a lot of that burden is put on @Sythe and @Matthew . Perhaps, they can better comment on reasons that the Tech Core has limited involvement with these types of things. Also possible that I just don't understand what is really going on with this group.

They seem to be very open to ideas and members though.

Mods and Admins

All and all, I think the staff members are all well chosen and deserve their positions. They are are great people despite complaints from select users. Specific shoutouts to:
@video - always been lenient and friendly with his donation service and recent holiday special is a blessing. Thumbs up
@Shin - just a funny guy in general and has a great temperament. His posts that I frequently stumble upon display that he truely cares about the site
@Excelont & @Tmoe - seem to be the most active with handling post/scam reports. The former being a super chill guy, and the latter being more strict and exceptionally knowledgeable of the rules; both contribute key qualities we need within the moderators.

One thing that I've noticed is that scam reports sometimes take a while to be processed. Personally, I'm browsing the site for the majority of the day and have it open on some device 24/7, so I find this slightly off, but I understand that everyone has their lives.

 

Thanks for the feedback.

 

> In my opinion, the PR Team is the team that needs the most work.

Couldn't agree more, I've individually already done more PR than the whole team combined, step the game up.

 

include my boy @PlanBUK fam. he's the idiot behind most of these shit threads XD.

edit: fr tho thx for the good vibes. gives us a reason to make adt more than just a meme team.

 

It's hard to really understand what each group is doing without actually viewing their forum. With that being said, thanks for the feedback.

 

Curious as to what you've done that is "more than the whole team".

 

Thank you so much for feedback!!!

 

Yeah @Tmoe is literally the worst moderator to hit this site. So you missed the boat there.

CDT has never gotten anything done lol. Giving away a minirank and a few donated bucks every so often isn't how you "develop" the community, if we want to rank it based on it's definition.

Tech core was a great idea but fell through because every developer doesn't know what a community will need and only feeds on their personal ideas, and then they end up going MIA.

PR Team has done nothing. They have been out for what, 3-4 months? Since then they have grown by 30 follows on twitter, with no flow on their tweets. Facebook has barely risen at all, again very limited if any feedback on any of their posts. Both platforms producing the same content, day after day. It's worthless. Get someone in that knows how to work social media to rake in unique viewers rather than the same person over and over simply scrolling past your tweet unless it's giving away $.

ADT has sadly done more in 3 weeks than the rest of the teams combined. Regardless of the nature of the activities, it is ACTIVITY.

 

Fake referrals go a long way /s


The community will start to see more activity from the PR team in the next few weeks. We have been planning things and we are very close to being able to put things into action, but we have been barricaded by a few factors that we are very close to solving. Thank you for the feedback

also regarding the twitter only richard currently had access to it because it was locked a few times due to frequent ip changes. we have a solution for this and are currently working on this. I cannot speak for the facebook.

 

Thanks for this.

 

Possible fake referrals? Didnt know where to post

I hope so, gl.

 

its a joke haha did you not see the /s. i think you are doing a great deal of good for the community and I thank you for that

 

gl with the pr things

 

Nice that someone finally takes us seriously

 

@Sythe maybe for events u can mass message all users active within 1 week? just a little preset like, "hey, the CDT or whatever is running an event where u can get awesome prizes, check it out!" @Mootrucks

 

That's what this thread used to be used for (still a sticky): [LIVE] New CDT Event now! [LIVE]

 

I think he meant that it would be cool for users to receive an alert to notify them of events.

 

Personally, I think a mass notification would really help for events as I seem to not know about a lot of them or simply forget about them.

 

>assuming people read threads

As for tech core, the RSPS isn't getting off the ground because there isn't a proper team for it. There's a source and one or two devs have offered to help, but the leader of the project has gone MIA on it so there's no coherent unity regarding work. We also don't have access to any Sythe.org code (and honestly giving us access would be really, really stupid). So, the Sythe.org issues you've posted there inevitably fall on Sythe and Matthew's shoulders because they're the ones who develop the site.

As for me, Sythe and I have been working on a scriptable bot for games (not just for Runescape). It's gone a bit slow as of late because I'm in school and Richard has other things on his plate, but the development environment is more-or-less complete and the library itself really just needs documentation. Progress is slow, but there is progress.

 

This was something I suggested a while back, (before I was CDT - see quote below), was to tag people in events or a subscription service etc, they did it once for sotm then stopped... Not sure if this is something TC can work on to implement or Matthew/Sythe Discord became more popular if anyone knows, you will know I always advertised all events discord.. skype. it got annoying even once in a while.

Alternatively to that I also wanted CDT to have a sub-section so you guys could see exactly what was happening.. everything else gets topped on and there's no time to dedicate to actual things that need to be done around the site, other than events.

Can't please everyone :\. Too busy to even come on sythe let alone volunteer my time to help a community that just dislikes everything CDT does... It's a shame.

I think @Artur in TC was going to take care of SytheRSPS but I have no idea what happened with that.

I think @iFreshMez does a great job with youtube in PR.