My Concerns For The Forums and The Forum Community

Hi,

I been around for years. Actually, I been here since the VBULLETIN darkorbit forum was created years ago. I been here since before whitelazer was hired and steeltoe was fired. I seen the best and the worst of this forum.

I'm creating this thread not to rant or report any staff. I am creating this because I am concerned. I have not been able to participate on this new forum as much as I did on the old forum due to military deployments and real life events. For those who knew me, I was the guy who went from 700 post count to over 4,000 in two months and it was all from helping players with their problem and posting in my popular signature thread and I was highly recognizable on many different servers in the chats. I have created and participated extremely populated forums with hundreds of active users. I seen forums and communities grow and die.

But this thread is not about me, I just wanted to broadcast to the newer unfamiliar members.

I am concerned about the state of the community and how too many things have changed on the forums.

Years ago. Players had easy access to the forum. The staff were highly involved with the community and the users were highly active in helping and communicating with each other. Players worked together with the staff and the staff was active. The staff would go above and beyond their volunteer capabilities to get things done for the community.

Over the years. I have defended darkorbit staff. Every forum and community I visited, I bragged about darkorbit's awesome community and near perfect staff.

I have to sadly say, I'm not completely satisfied and my perspective towards the way the staff is now and how the forum is administered is too strict and being here as a user is very uncomfortable.

I know the staff's intentions are not bad but the rules and regulations needs to be revised.

A forum is meant to be created for a user to have easy access to a community of other members where they can speak their minds and get info they need as well as communicate with each other and enjoy detailed discussions while following the rules of the forum.

This forum had that years ago. There were about 120,000 active users with dozens of new posts every 30 minutes. Today, it is too strict and no one can enjoy posting since it is always moderated or the thread gets closed even though the discussion is not done and no one broke any forum rule. These threads I'm talking about are not "one word answer question" threads or "support" threads. They are threads for discussions. And because if these strict actions, the forums is becoming inactive and a ghost and dead.

In a discussion, there will be a bit of over talking. But that is what a discussion is. Basically, it is a debate. Yes, there is one or two posts that will be considered spam, but that will not be a reason to close a thread. If anything, the only reason to close a discussion thread is because that thread went off topic and the users are refusing to bring it back on topic or had no quality to the overall topic. Pretty much like having a thread that was created about how to cook a potato but the topic was drifted off course and people started making fun of Jackie's pants.

I seen successful forums. These forums had a set of rules. And the staff just made sure everything was organized and answered questions and they even participated in discussions. The forum had a support area for questions and problems and the other dozen sections were areas where members can discuss random things according to the section name. For example. You can have a Cadillac forum and there was a section on the forum where Cadillac members can discuss things about movies and music or sports and then they had the main sections that were strictly about the car.

Here. Every single section is about darkorbit and if you dare speak about anything else, you face consequences. I remember I received an infraction and got Banned a couple years ago right before we switched forums because my signature had a link to another big point forum thread. Really?

I seen popular forums die. Reasons? Users were limited to what they can post. They were told more about what they can't do than what they can. Every other popular discussion was closed after a few hours and players got mad. The staff did not participate in discussions and acted like robots.

To be honest. Darkorbit forums are starting to act like this. Lately, I been seeing staff act like robots. Good god, put some personality in your posts instead of just saying "above is correct, any further questions before I close?" You are a volunteer. You are a player just like the rest of us. You should post like us as well. I get it. You represent bigpoint. Rules are there, but it should not be enforced extremely. If someone is out of line, then point them to the right direction instead of just punishing everyone.

Also, remember that this is a gaming community. With games, no one likes it when you are told you not allowed to do this and that. Especially since you pay for the product.

Players should be allowed to post their opinions. Those opinions should be allowed to be expressed as long as they do not break any major rules such as flaming and vulgar insults.

If changes are not made for the community freedom. You will continue to see an inactive community.

VintageAion

 

Finally, someone who understands the big picture here -_- . I agree with you VintagAion. Hopefully Forumers and Moderators will recognize this and realize that there is a problem in Dark Orbit Forums. I feel bad seeing players come on here and make a genuine opinion and then getting bashed for doing so and some getting punished for weird reasons. I'm always anxious to make any post or opinion on here because of this, it seems like there's more attacking and punishing going on here than pointing people in the right direction But that's my opinion. So I just always come on and read anything and everything on this forum instead of putting my 2 cents in. Hopefully Mods will take your post the right way and not be offended by it.

 

worse bit is when you post ideas etc, you get no repsonse from the mods and devs etc. if they post anything in your thread it will 90% of the time be about closing the thread

 

I can only think of 1 forum mod who doesn't act like a robot and they don't post too much anymore probably due to being busy with other aspects of the game, however the way mods act has been pretty much the same from what I can remember - I still remember being surprised when a moderator actually gave their opinion on something. However like you said, it's not like that's a reason report worthy for mods, they still do the job, just not as friendly about it as the other teams.

The English forums used to be more active before they split up the languages (It was regarded as the best one to use by many non-native speakers) in the last update but ultimately the activity is dictated by how popular the game is, a off-topic section will only be a short term solution. Also a more active forum doesn't mean its a better one. The DarkOrbit forum was at it's peak in activity when we had the forum games such as "count to 1 million" which had absolutely nothing to DarkOrbit and resulted in thousands and thousands of posts made of pure spam.
I think if we want a better forum in terms of player activity then we just need more players, a common issue with DO.

Would be nice if the devs actually showed some interest in the forum once in a while though. They can't even post their own blogs, they have to send them down through the mods teams instead which is laughable at best.

 

When I say robot. I'm more on the lines of copy and paste answers and non emotional actions.

There are a few mods I can name off the top of my head that I can give more details about. As an old and curious player with connects. I know alot about alot of mods and what they have done.

A good mod can use the etiquettes that they have to use but also connect and communicate with a player like humans. Vorlon, Thewhitehat, astraea, Darkslide, whitelazer, etc.

I know Vorlon was always active talking to players in speakers corner and chats. People loved him because he would understand and communicate with players on a deeper level.

Darkslide used to talk to people who had problems like they were in a chat room. He would ask the users questions about their problems and based on their answers, he would give them advice and suggestions that would usually solve their problem. I also heard from an ex smod that he once spent 2 hours in a private chat room with this guy who was talking about committing suicide and he talked to this guy the entire time, trying to calm him till the suicide prevention team came and took over.

I know TheWhiteHat would spend hours at a time in the tech support section trying to help people with problems. With a few, he would not go offline till this one player's problem was fixed. I would see the "new posts" page flooded with his name for pages.

Saraph would over detail all his responses. Made sure that all points were covered. Alot of his posts were wall of texts and was awesome at making detailed and clear guides.

Everyone knows who whitelazer is and what she did for the community and no one can be better than her.

My point is. Astraea's signature is key here. It is about the quality of the posts. I don't see much quality anymore.

Today. I talk to a CM in private chat and every response just seems like a copy and paste answer. Personally. I want to talk to a person, not a machine.

 

Fact of the matter is Bigpoint know that the remaining players are disgruntled by one thing or another and in the interest of not deterring new players away from a negative-looking forum, most posts of actual opinions are deleted or moved to the sinkhole "Speaker Corner/Update and Idea pool" forums.

 

I would say that the vBulletin forums was better then this forum or the previous version in terms of player-Mod interaction and activity. I had been there from the time I began this game, 2 years ago. Though I didn't participate much there as opposed to here, I have seen, generally, a better and more fun and energized community there.

 

The community was more flourished and better from 2008 - 2011. After that, it slowly Started to reduce. Dec 2006 - early 2008, it was growing rapidly.

 

Hello,

In the interest of showing multiple points of view for a debate, I will offer my opinion (yes we have those albeit more subdued in the interest of objectivity)

To begin, the rules of the forums have changed very little over the years, even between the two formats. How much is removed or moderated in the forums is dictated by the content of the posts, not by our personal decisions. If a post is on topic and viable it will remain open while it is sorted, and then closed to allow others to receive the same help in a timely fashion. If anything, the spam has been worse here as players try to up their new post counts in various fashions, and that will indeed not be permitted as far as we can control it. We do not discourage postings, or ban or infract any more now then before, and I have seen more then most from both sides. But yes, this is the Darkorbit forums, and if you want to discuss in depth things of another nature then perhaps its best if you find the appropriate forums to do so, I do not believe this out of line here or from what I have seen in a number of other forums I lurk in.

The "business sections" (general questions, tech section, newbie section) are handled as efficiently as possible. There is much to do, and a limited amount of people to do it. Every mod may be different in their amount of "personality", but I do not believe the quality of the answers has diminished, and that is our main concern. I would rather have each post answered correctly and sorted as soon as possible, then have them sit there while overly "personable" answers are given. In my opinion (which may differ from yours but you asked for some) the main intent of the forums is to pass game info, and to help players and support the game, not be the game. We all play the game to have fun, and mod to help and offer the best assistance we can within our roles. I feel more of our personality comes through in the chat, and here in forums we work to be professional. I wish to see the mods be good and correct, you wish to see them have more fun and be personable, hopefully the results lie in a good place in the middle.

Moving on, we do provide a number of sections were posts are looser, and various things can be discussed. We have the speakers corner, and a number of threads there (okapi's info thread for one) which I think is a pretty nice thing to have which is not required but allowed to be. There are the meet the players/team threads, clan threads and update section among others as well. This does not mean we will allow, nor have we ever allowed, nor would I for one support simply allowing whatever to be discussed. As above, if a discussion thread is viable its allowed to go on, but just as before we are going to stop them if and when they cross the line (and they often do).

We generally do not use copy/paste answers here besides the general variations of the closing "does the OP have any further questions" as that is simply the best way to handle a thread that needs it, and if you have answered thousands of posts that require that, that is one reply that will be given many times and I do not see the need to waste time/energy in going overboard on it. In the chat, usually the only time you will see a copy/paste posting in when a new cm is starting out and uses the specific things we have to get a feel for the chat and how it flows. In some cases a mod will like one of the basic ones and use it afterwards, but I rarely see older cm's or higher using the strict copy versions of warnings, and I cant recall in the past 4 years seeing any admins using them as we have by that time developed our own methods to handle the chats. If by chance you encountered a new cm and saw this, then be glad as you may have helped them learn

All of the above are my opinions, most likely they differ from yours, as we are on two different ends of the discussion. We see and deal with alot more then you or most realize, have less effect on the game itself then you may think, help more then some believe we do, all the while trying to be objective and "fun". I will never say we are perfect, but I have seen many who have given countless hours and care to making our community better, and still do. There are many things behind the scenes to help the community which we do that you do not see, and in most times the mods get little credit for any of it, but such is the role and I myself am happy to do so. I think we have a great group now, and you will hopefully see us improve as we all continue to work (myself included) to be the best we can be on a daily basis. This does go with the community itself putting the same work in to sometimes allow the good things to come out, and not always dwell on the negative (opinion 6 if your counting)

Hopefully a bit of me comes through here, and I will leave with my last thoughts which are wholly mine and hopefully dispel that I am a robot (beeeep.....whuuuurrrr......buzzzzz) ahem excuse me......

The few of you who read all of this, and actually recall me over my years here,(nobody?) will know I have said the same thing most of my time here and still hold to it. If my time comes to leave, I could care less if people remember me as fun, or friendly (tho I am both I swear). My only concern is that I am remembered as being fair and honest, and above all a good mod who did their best as that is what I value and is harder to come by then fun..........and wrote a longer reply then vintage

Best regard

Hyp

 

Well to start off I'll say that I haven't been around these forums as long as some, but long enough to know or have figured out how things work around here. After having read every single thread in General Questions and Speakers' Corner for the past 3 years and many before my time, I can say that the tone and overall ambiance of this place has changed.

Supposedly, the problem lies with how passionate members of the Team are about the game. Back then the posts were less standardised or 'professional' in their format. Back when I first joined these forums I had great respect for mod/admin posts (for the most part) as even though they were authoritative, they maintained a informative nature and managed to give off a feeling of individuality - showing that they cared and wanted to improve a specific users' situation. Whether that be due to the individual personality behind the posts; I don't believe so. Why? Because it could be seen in different posts from a variety of Team members, not just a select few that went above and beyond.

With the current state of the forums, when 50% of visible posts are contributed by a single Team member and the other half are still hardly distinguishable from each other then the place feels pretty bland.

Let's be honest here. These forums have seen better days in the past where there have been 5 or 10 times more posts per day than there are now. And there was a smaller team to cover all those.

In years such as 2011 when paid Support staff/red names had pretty much vanished off the face of the forums it was up to extremely dedicated members of the Team to pick up the slack. At times there were backlogs but the quality is probably on par with the replies we are getting today. And it was all done with much less copy & paste than today.

With all due respect, no one is expecting for moderators to find a new and extravagant way of saying "clear your browser cache" for every single thread but dropping a line to voice a 'professional' opinion or taking the time to write up a new response for a unique thread every once in awhile doesn't go unappreciated or unnoticed.

-bobmyself

 

Hello Everyone,

I would agree with what Hypnotik has pointed out.

Although I have been around in this team for sometime now, I would like to share my thoughts on this subject.
Well somethings did change when we moved from old one (vBulletin) to new one, we do have professional approach in handling some of the section. We try to cover all the section in best way possible, I know sometimes we do have to reply certain posts which are in similar lines to another similar post in a same manner.

Since I have joined the team, I have seen some popular forums moderators resign who were my idols and they still inspire me a lot, nobody can replace their contribution and their hard work in forums.
We all learn from our mistakes and nobody can say that they know everything and I personally feel that I learn something new from each day being here in forums.

Some of the section are still functioning how it used to be on old forums its just something little which has changed. The old threads are still being answered rather being archived or closed directly.
We started using this "Does the OP have any further questions" line after the thread was being answered just to make the post more relevant to the original poster because thread hijacking was also another thing that needed attention.
After moving here to new forums we had many things to work and it needed some attention.
There were many players who were spamming the forums to increase their post count and some of them are still doing it.
Players, Moderators, Support & Development Team are those elements which forms Darkorbit community and therefore it is really important to co-operate with each other.

In recent times the activity in forums have increased in section likes Speaker's Corner and Update Idea Section along with some other section, some players do receive infraction but they continue with what they were still doing, therefore it is really necessary to close some of the threads, if things go overboard and handle those kind of threads.
Players are not being restricted to post on this forums, we are more then happy to help you guys.
Keeping forums up to date and clear is our goal and answering each and every post is important sometime a moderator might answer many threads that does not mean others are not around or not doing what they should or the one who is answering the question does not care about the thread and the issue or question raised by a player. Each and every player's post and their thread is valuable to us and we are trying our best to make you all happy and satisfied in resolving your issues.

We are here for you players and contribution from all old players like VintageAion, Okapi32 and bobmyself is very much appreciated and also all the new ones and each everyone amongst you players who contribute on daily basis in helping one and another.

Thanks for reading thats all I wanted to say.

Wish you all a very Happy New Year.

 

Whatever state forums are is not down to either players or mods ..if you wish to blame somebody...here is address:

Bigpoint GmbH
Christoph-Probst-Weg 3

• Hamburg
• Post Code20251
• CountryGermany

 

You have been around a long time indeed. I remember when you were a regular mod.

Though you may be right about people getting their post count up. Let it be. There are dozens of different types of players. Some young, some old. Some mature, others not so much.

You got to let some freedom of post bypass the rules. Yes, there will be that kid who wants to get the "All knowing Oracle" and he posts like there is no tomorrow. . There will be that other guy who could care less about his post count but love to read what this kid posts.

On every popular forum, will you notice who the readers and writers are. And you will notice that there are 3 times more readers than posters. And even though the readers don't post as much, they are probably the most important members. And you know what they love the most? Opinions. They love to read things that are nonsense. I can the game all day and not need the forums. If i have a question, I'll ask a friend ingame who has experience or contact support or use Google.

Some people join a forum to be part of a community. Not everything has to be all about darkorbit. Some people just want to talk to each other. Not everyone plays the same server. They can't just go in chat and talk each other. They can't because they play different servers. In chats, people don't always want to talk about darkorbit. That is what the forum can help players do. Talk to other players about random things such as hobbies.

I understand that there's a lack of staff and they cannot be there all the time. And yes there are kids who post just to get post count but who really cares? Let it be, these people are the ones who make the forum look active. It is up to the moderator to make sure they are not breaking the major rules. If you lack moderators, then get more or replace any you think is not doing the job well enough. I know that there are alot of users who want to help out as a moderator. I personally applied. Of course I got denied though for some reason.

You also got to remember that some people just post what they have in their head. To you, they look like they trying to get their post count up. To themselves, they are just posting ideas and opinions.

Alot of people don't know how a forum works. They don't know how to post new threads. I bet you there are members asking questions on their own profile page because they believe that these forums work just like Facebook or Twitter. They think you can just post where you want and it is ok. That is when you explain to them how a forum works and what it is.

That is why we need private messaging.

Also, I understand how customer service works; I been working as a customer support representative for 7 years. Yes, I do have to say the same greeting such as "Good (Morning, Afternoon, Evening), my name is ::::::, How may I help you! " But as soon as I finish that line, I'm a human again. I talk to that customer as I would talk to a friend. Of course more tact since I don't really know them.

If you only want to have support and professional responses, then get rid of the forums and stick with the ticket system.

Also. We need to bring back the old login system. Logging in through the game, then have to go to help, then click forum is annoying. Especially since you get logged off every 10 minutes. I'll be on the middle of creating a thread or detailed post to answer a question but when I click preview, it says I been logged off and everything I did was a waste of time. So it forces me to write very incomplete messages. Which I hate since I love to make long detailed answers to questions.

This is not a report and it is not needed to be sent to support. It is an opinion I wanted to express about the community and staff of the community and it is a dis5cussion for anyone to join in.

I would write more but my fingers hurt and I use my phone to post and navigate the forums and not a computer and keyboard. @Hypnotik

 

oh wow mods replied and gave their views in this thread, my faith in them has been restored

 

Personally, I have had no problem with Support whatsoever. I haven't sent in many tickets, but those I did sent, were answered completely by none other then Kara

 

I think this is one important reason for the lack of Forum activity. The change to a new style was enough of a leap, but the forced login through the game platform has probably turned off a lot of contributors. I realise that the developers had their reasons for it, and it does sort of make sense that you should have "players" rather than just "posters" on your official game Forums, but I think an external login process would help encourage more Forum activity. Sometimes, you just aren't in the mood to play, but you still want to keep in touch by maybe reading a few posts, etc... logging in at that point becomes a bit of a chore. Would it have been too hard to simply add a "User ID" field as a requirement for login to ensure that you are linked to a game account, rather than needing to boot up the entire game?

It also wouldn't hurt to make the Forums more accessible from the game page (especially since it's the only way currently). I suspect that most new players probably don't even have a clue that this Forum exists, because you would never find it unless you happened to click the question mark icon which brings up the link. A nice big shiny blue button on the landing page (rather than some of the redundant ones currently there) would be a massive step in the right direction.

Other than that, we simply need more players. A declining "regular player" population has been the main issue with the game for a while, and the dwindling activity here is only a reflection of that.

 

Personally, I don't spend much attention on the forums as when they switched my main account was not migrated to the new platform even though I followed the process. Four rounds of dealing with Support from both DO and BigPoint with nothing done to fix it has just reinforced my scorn for Support. How freaking hard is it to insert a record in a database table for goodness sake? I just don't feel like always having to post through one of my secondary accounts which I don't actively play anymore.

 

Nobodies account was migrated over and they never said any of them would be. So I'm not too sure where you have got that idea from.

The old forum was hosted by Vbulletin and this one is done by XenForo so since they are difference the old data cannot be migrated over without asking the mods to spend thousands of hours going through everyone's forum account and individually editing in the post counts, which is daft just for the sake of a number.

 

Actually, transferring all the data from vBulletin to Xenforo is not hard and I have done it and it only takes about 4 hours. Well, 6 hours for this forum since the old forum had alot of threads and posts.

All it takes is knowing how the database works. The database control panel has an import feature. Where you import data saved and it loads it. thats how they backup and rollback the servers or forums if they need to due to problems.

 

DO forums supports like 12 languages though, and English is nowhere near the biggest.
Even if it could just be a copy and paste job, its a lot of effort for things that would mostly be useless, we still have all the same FAQs etc here as we did there. The only "big" thing missing is people post count which is a fairly pointless number.