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Status of da forums

PostPosted: August 19th, 2015, 5:23 pm
by Jesse Smith
I got the old original vBulletin posts converted to phpBB, but then had trouble trying to merge just a tiny phpBB database with this one. Tiny as in just a few members, posts, PMs, and threads, just to see if I could get two small databases merged, since if I can't even get a tiny database added to this one, I definitely wouldn't ever be able to merge a massively huge database with this one and have no problems!! So I was then just going to switch over to the old vBulletin database, and it turned out spammers had found those forums, and I then discovered another problem. You can delete the threads, but the forums then looked like the threads were still there, the forums still had the thread titles and links to the threads!!! So I just gave up with the merging idea!!!!

Since even summer does nothing to generate activity, the only idea I got left for trying to resurrect the forums from the grave, is social networks. I got

https://www.pinterest.com/VideoGamesRock/

set-up with 14,600 followers, and got one group board with 7,100 pins added so far. Next I'll see if I can get content posted here in the form of posts, and post links to them on Pinterest. Lists do *very* well on Pinterest.

One other idea was having a posting contest, with the first four posters to get 1,000 or maybe just 500 posts, made in the video game category, getting $50 each. Though since no ones even posting during the summer, obviously the only reason any one would then post, if they did, would be posting for money, and once they made the posts, would probably just high-tale it out of here!!! If I *ever* do the contest, it'll be when I'm generating traffic from social networks, so I can also have a bunch of new members from the social networks here working on winning the cash.


If any one has any traffic generating suggestions, or social network ideas, especially for Pinterest or Facebook, post away.

If any one is in any Pinterest group boards that accept Video Game pins, follow

https://www.pinterest.com/VideoGamesRock/

and send an invite to videogames@vgchat.com! If you want an invite to post at

https://www.pinterest.com/VideoGamesRoc ... deo-games/

post here with a link to your profile.

My idea for Facebook is creating a Facebook page, but about the only way to get fans to it is doing advertising, unless I can get good traffic here and add Facebook buttons to the forums. Advertising definitely won't happen when the forums look like a graveyard, but might happen if I get it set-up so Pinterest sends enough traffic to make the forums look active, so I'm not paying to get Facebook fans, just to send them to a dead forum!!!! (That was one reason for trying to merge the old vBulletin posts, so it wouldn't look like a dead forum!!!!)

Re: Status of da forums

PostPosted: August 20th, 2015, 10:34 pm
by Omni
I hope you can fix it. This is beyond dead now.

Re: Status of da forums

PostPosted: August 22nd, 2015, 2:16 am
by Saiki
I feel bad for this place...shame it's the way it is now...

Re: Status of da forums

PostPosted: August 22nd, 2015, 4:44 am
by Infyrin
I was actually going to make a thread about asking for the status of VGChat, but this has pretty much answered my concerns completely.

I don't know how I can help, except maybe point ya over to a couple places video game related. Mostly it's trading businesses and I don't know what a site like this could mean to either of them other possibly fishing for crowds to join their end. I think it should be a win-win situation for both sides. We get members, they get members.

Another thing is, Steam Group. We could have a VGChat Steam group. I think I'll work on making that as soon as possible and see what we can gather from that.

Anywho, the places I was thinking of when I spoke of trading sites earlier are:

CheapAssGamer
GameTZ

CheapAssGamer has a wider populace than GTZ by comparison, but GTZ seems to have more passion out of the two. Either way, I hold no doubt that we could get some sort of traffic from either out of concern here. If you're up for the idea, Jesse, perhaps you could make a marketplace forum here like you had many years ago. It would give these people from either of those sites, more reason to come here and possibly keep coming back here if things turn out as good as expected.

Anyways, just thought I'd put in my suggestions. It really does suck knowing that your efforts have gone to waste like that, but, we can't lose all hope now, can we? Not a chance.

Re: Status of da forums

PostPosted: September 1st, 2015, 2:00 pm
by Crazy K
I would love to see this place rise again. As for a posting contest I think what would work best is to do a giveaway for a game. I think most people like the idea of winning a game over $50 or something along those lines. Just an idea.

Re: Status of da forums

PostPosted: September 17th, 2015, 8:19 am
by Jesse Smith
Uggg, Pinterest is *quick* to ban accounts!!! I didn't do anything with https://www.pinterest.com/VideoGamesRock/ yet, but first tested it out with a food account. Created a web site, and then made just 10 pins linking to recipes. *Bam* With in seconds some one showed up, viewed the site, and banned it and the account!!!

Now I'll test it out with a normal account, which doesn't verify that it owns the domain, and upload the content to another domain.

Re: Status of da forums

PostPosted: November 8th, 2015, 5:59 pm
by Vivisect
So how much is this website worth?

Re: Status of da forums

PostPosted: November 9th, 2015, 9:18 am
by Infyrin
Vivisect wrote:So how much is this website worth?


Probably a tenth of what it was worth.

Re: Status of da forums

PostPosted: November 9th, 2015, 5:05 pm
by Vivisect
Fate, I know you're interested in buying it and so am I. I really liked your idea about redesigning it and molding it up to a site where reviews are made and so forth. I also share this dream for VGC. I wish there was a way to work something out with the proprietor of this website.

Re: Status of da forums

PostPosted: November 11th, 2015, 9:47 am
by Strato
It's pretty amazing to me how much the web has changed since we were making sites. I remember back in the early days there were thousands of small game sites that all were somewhat relevant. I used to have hundreds of sites bookmarked to go to for game information. Now if I want info on a game, I go to the game's subreddit or maybe Wikia. Most of the independent 'sites' now are personality driven and anchored to a site like Youtube or Twitch.

I do want to see you succeed with it Jesse, but it's really hard to make a site like this work these days.

Re: Status of da forums

PostPosted: November 15th, 2015, 2:49 pm
by Yoshi[NX]
Who owns it now? I know Jesse bought it back from fnool, but I remember hyper wanting to buy it from Jesse.

Re: Status of da forums

PostPosted: December 9th, 2015, 12:06 am
by ExoXile
Well the the VGC community is definitely loyal.
We always keep coming back, even in this state.

Hope to see it rise again!

Re: Status of da forums

PostPosted: December 10th, 2015, 12:13 pm
by Sigma
Yoshi[NX] wrote:Who owns it now? I know Jesse bought it back from fnool, but I remember hyper wanting to buy it from Jesse.


It's almost like Jesse is taking a page out of FNool's book, being absent for obscenely long periods of time. I mean, isn't that one of the main reasons Jesse wanted to buy it back from fnool, because fnool found that he didnt have much time to do stuff with the site & whatever?

Re: Status of da forums

PostPosted: December 15th, 2015, 9:24 pm
by Zebro
... it's been better. I check in every now and then, just don't have much to post about really.

Re: Status of da forums

PostPosted: January 16th, 2016, 6:56 pm
by Infyrin
Sigma wrote:
Yoshi[NX] wrote:Who owns it now? I know Jesse bought it back from fnool, but I remember hyper wanting to buy it from Jesse.


It's almost like Jesse is taking a page out of FNool's book, being absent for obscenely long periods of time. I mean, isn't that one of the main reasons Jesse wanted to buy it back from fnool, because fnool found that he didnt have much time to do stuff with the site & whatever?


Jesse Smith has always been absent from periods of time. He'd show up with a tinker here and a tinker there. Take into account the age of the chat rooms, that were practically ancient by modern standards even when fnool had this site. It's unclear why the transition happened but it did.

You have to give credit to Jesse though, he was here when this place got hammered and he put in the effort to get it back running. He could've shrugged and ditched it if he felt like it.

But Jesse Smith is our admin/owner, rightfully so. Granted, it will take presumably months for this site to properly recover from the hack. That's just wonderful of them. What was their reason? I saw the video Jesse uploaded and apparently the reason was "fix your security". Sounds a bit of ambitious work to simply tell someone to fix their security, considering beforehand, it didn't take a rocket scientist to figure that out.

Strato wrote:It's pretty amazing to me how much the web has changed since we were making sites. I remember back in the early days there were thousands of small game sites that all were somewhat relevant. I used to have hundreds of sites bookmarked to go to for game information. Now if I want info on a game, I go to the game's subreddit or maybe Wikia. Most of the independent 'sites' now are personality driven and anchored to a site like Youtube or Twitch.

I do want to see you succeed with it Jesse, but it's really hard to make a site like this work these days.


That's a sad fact, really. The times ARE different. This site thrived during the dot com bubble way before there were hundreds of other ways to reach information regarding video games. Soon as places like Reddit, FB, YouTube and other sources rose and gained ground. It was only a matter of time before VGChat slowly devolved into just a place to discuss video games period and be amazed that it's one of the oldest sites remaining.

This place originally started as a source to find cheat codes and was under the guise of World of Nintendo.

Sure, the veterans who regularly logged in are still here including myself. But, eh. There's only a handful of us that can keep this afloat. I missed the days where I'd see this enormous list of people who were last online just stretch a part of the page. Then looking down at the count and seeing over 80,000+ users who have registered on this site over the years. You could almost guarantee that someone was online ready to talk and view the site.

I don't want to have my doubts, but I sortof am. It's going to take a lot of devoted work to get this back to where it was. It's really Jesse's call on how and where he'll drive it.

Re: Status of da forums

PostPosted: January 26th, 2016, 1:23 pm
by Jesse Smith
Infyrin wrote:It's almost like Jesse is taking a page out of FNool's book, being absent for obscenely long periods of time. I mean, isn't that one of the main reasons Jesse wanted to buy it back from fnool, because fnool found that he didnt have much time to do stuff with the site & whatever?


If I hadn't of got them, nothing would of ever came back. Using social networks is how I had *hoped* to resurrect the forums. I tried two accounts on Pinterest, and once I started posting, both quickly got banned. (And I didn't even post any vgchat.com links!!) There's no content here that's good enough or new enough that would keep the account from getting banned. On Facebook, the only way to get a good page made to promote the forums, would be advertising, and of course there's nothing good enough here that would keep the new members, or nothing to even link to. Heck, 98.6% of new 'members' are just here to SPAM, so approving new members is pretty useless. (Last time I tried approving a few members, of course the SPAM showed up soon after that!)

Infyrin wrote:I missed the days where I'd see this enormous list of people who were last online just stretch a part of the page. Then looking down at the count and seeing over 80,000+ users who have registered on this site over the years. You could almost guarantee that someone was online ready to talk and view the site.


There was at least one time when it was even better. Before that, during the WWWBoard days, when a Zelda game for the Nintendo 64 came out, the Zelda WWWBoard was so active that I had to keep deleting every thing and re-start it from scratch because the fourm kept crashing!! And that was with out QQQQQQQQQQQQQ showing up!!! You had to basically live there and watch some one post replies shortly after making a thread!

Strato wrote:it's really hard to make a site like this work these days.


qft!

Back in the old days there was nearly no competition! It was easy to rank #1 in the search engines! Heck, for one search engine, I simply asked to rank #1 for 'nintendo' and it worked! (That was Infoseek.)

Re: Status of da forums

PostPosted: February 3rd, 2016, 7:14 pm
by KoH
I got $60 if anyone wants to go halfsies.

Edit: Already editing my comments, it's like 2004 again.