Elatan
Tolkien-Only Member
Vala
Elatan
Posts: 230
|
Post by Elatan on May 3, 2005 1:10:11 GMT -5
Due to my difficulties actually attending meetings I would like to take this / these issue/s here. First, the password issue for the two forums, Trade and Hunts. To put it plain, I find it silly and annoying. I can see no reason whatsoever to have a hunt and trade forum passworded. I heard a rumor about being spammed with reguests ? for what ? for selling and trading ?  Hmm isnt it why it is a trade-forum, you actually want to sell something, offer your proffession for money or free ? As it is now not even the Valar cares to look or post there. Why do I have to fumble around at the AH trying to pick up a Wildvine or the blue bow ill need in 5 levels if someone in my guild have it ( but is going to sell it at AH in a couple days ) It just aint good enough  Since we do not have much interaction as a guild ( mainly due to how WoW is build) could we at least have trade up, or secondbest, try to instead of doing anything to hinder it ? just watch the times each post has been read. Not much eeh. Guess why. ( See my other other thread WouW here in this section ) The Hunt section suffers under mainly the same conditions as Trade. No one looks there and no one expects to find anything there IF they can remember the password. I asked it to be made to make interactions within the guild. I have a hard time attending the friday hunt which often starts with 30-45 mins of "where to go, who will come" so it was tending my own needs. I wanted us to figure out where to go and who to come beforehand instead of wasting precius time ingame. Possibly also arranging hunts at other times. I tried twice with no response at all but thats not the worst, thats the ridicouls low amount of thread read. The ridiculous low interest in it at all. It has become a forum of what HAS been done. Woow I missed that hunt and quest, how inspiring  Could we try look forward instead of back please. So, do you really think we would have any hunt spammed with reguests from outside guild for joining ? No you probably do not and what if we really had a single reguest from a lonely bypasser ? I would welcome and hug him. I, for one, would actually like to coop with him as I most of time (90%) hunt alone. All this is said well aware I am 6-9 hours in front of you but does that mean it has to be even harder cooping with guild both in trade and hunting. I do not only find the password silly, I find it stupid too as there is no real reason at all to have it. |
|
|
|
Post by Shelob on May 3, 2005 4:30:59 GMT -5
I am sorry if I am passing by on Eonwe and Varda here, but Elatan does have very valid points. I have removed the passwords from those boards, however, I'm going to monitor them closely. If they get spammed, the passwords go back up, if not, they remain open.
|
|
Orome
Vala
Vala
Posts: 65
|
Post by Orome on May 3, 2005 4:42:50 GMT -5
I have to agree, I never really was sure why those topics were password protected. If we ever got to the point where we were doing RvR raids against the horde or something that would be a different matter. Orome
|
|
Eonwë
Vala, Council
Vala and proud member of the Valar Guild. A quarter century of Tolkien fun.
Posts: 1,323 
|
Post by Eonwë on May 3, 2005 21:55:54 GMT -5
Disease? I can fix that. *Auros uses Cleanse on Dusksinger.* Better? :} ---------------------------------------------------- I'll answer both of your posts here, Elatan. We have 22 members in the WoW branch. Of these, only 16 are registered on the board. Of those 16, only 8 have more than 10 total posts on this forum. Of those 8, at least 3 don't play regularly on Lothar for their own reasons. So that leaves 5 regular posters, three of which have posted their professions, all 5 of which have posted in the WoW fora altogether, including the two passworded forums. Considering that, I find it hard to blame the password for people not posting there. Also consider out of 92 members of this forum there's only about 18 total with post counts 10 or over. The difference would be even larger had I not done the house cleaning after the sweep. There's never been an inundation of posts, and the greatest concentrations are in the Tolkien and in the MEO RP sections (mostly by about 5 people in that section). The reason for passwords was not a rumor or really something that has happened yet (because it didn't get a chance to happen), but to avoid that happening altogether. I like to implement precautions before it becomes blatantly obvious that we need it. I'm planning for the future, when I expect us to have a busy forum. I want to encourage trade within the Guild so that hopefully we may not need the Auction House or other outside help :} (Silly me, I kinda figured the Valar Guild Trading Forum was for Valar Guild Trading  ) Of course to do that, we have to have enough members willing to get together to do all the big stuff, which means we have to have enough members willing to get together to do the small stuff, which means we need to have members who actually enjoy being around eachother enough to make plans to get together and utilize the GUild weekly questing day. On Hunts: Again, same response on Passwords from the Trading Forum. The most frequent posters (who also play WoW)at a minimum do look at this forum. I don't see any reason to believe the password has caused the lack of posts, as once again only two places have a large concentration of posts anyway. Ther majority of the boards look no different than the Trading and Hunts boards. However, I can somewhat agree here that it's not absolutely necessary. Generally, however, this was as I hoped a temporary measure, waiting until Proboards version 4 came out, as I recall a feature that would allow me to indicate a specific group (or groups) to use certain boards. Assuming they didn't scrap this, that means I can tag all guild members and then only they can access the boards set to only allow them. Would this less involved method be preferable? Or is it safe to assume you wouldn't want this either? We can leave any precautions off if that's what you'd like, and we may get more views, but I don't believe we'll get all that many more posts from Guild members(5 more people posting isn't going to be much more impressive than 3 people alone posting). Now, if you can think of a way to get members to read the Forum without forcing them to, please share :} Perhaps, since your time is different, you would like to organize guild questing for the US Eastern AM/early PM hours? That's about the only way I can see a reason to discuss where we're going before, as not everyone comes in at the "official" time. Just be sure to have someone write up a report for the Weekly questing so we know how you guys are doing. That is a big reason for the "what has been done" : so that people would know we are doing something. It should be inspiring. People should be saying "Wow if I came in at this time I could actually play with Guild members!" I'll leave it there, as I'm sure anything else I could say has been said. Take care. Eonwë |
|
Elatan
Tolkien-Only Member
Vala
Elatan
Posts: 230
|
Post by Elatan on May 4, 2005 10:30:42 GMT -5
We have 22 members in the WoW branch. Of these, only 16 are registered on the board. Of those 16, only 8 have more than 10 total posts on this forum. Of those 8, at least 3 don't play regularly on Lothar for their own reasons. So that leaves 5 regular posters, three of which have posted their professions, all 5 of which have posted in the WoW fora altogether, including the two passworded forums. Considering that, I find it hard to blame the password for people not posting there. The chance of people posting raise accordingly by the chance to read something of interest. I am sorry Eonwe but I really do not see the relevans between the boards total membership and loss of interest in Trade and Hunts. I see a relevans between the total amount people in WoW and of read/written posts in Trade/Hunts versus the other WoW forums combined with the amount of different toons/proffessions 22 players must have. I blame a part of that upon Password. Protection is fine but to get anything to grow from scratch you need to expose it. There is always a risk and always a prize. If you want to live, get healthy and strong, you risk injuries and even in worst case death. Thats probably any parents worst dilemma, the balance between protection and let go. No one walks through life without scratches. Same thing goes with a forum. It is much more simple but the dilemma basicly the same. You can protect it right to death. If you want to try to make it live there is a risk you get scratches. Your assumption about any protection is right. As it is now I prefer open forums. If it ever should begin to attract too many from outside it could be closed. |
|
|
|
Post by Alatar on May 4, 2005 16:35:11 GMT -5
I'll make it real simple about why I am not more active here.
I hate this forum software more than I hate the devil himself.
It makes it SO HARD to find the new messages in the forums I care about that I could just SCREAM.
It has nothing to do with the guild, the server, the game, or anything. I don't read here often, and I post next to never, because I HATE the software.
~ Alatar
|
|
Varda
Vala, Council
Posts: 1,042
|
Post by Varda on May 5, 2005 14:51:09 GMT -5
Aiya! WoW password: The password was originally only intended for the trade forum to prevent outsiders from begging here. It could be that we should wait until it becomes a problem, rather than trying to prevent it. We do have three people to clear spam if needed. But if the beggers would offer something for our wares, this might not be a bad thing. The hunts only needed to be passworded if we had something going for Battlegrounds. This does not seem to be happening yet, and we could run a separate section for Battlegrounds discussions, that is passworded. Otherwise, I see no need for it. I agree with Menelvagor, drop the password for now. On the problem of finding wanted posts, I check the bottom of the page for the ten most recent. That takes the pain out of it for me anyway. I also check the MeO thread to see if anyone posted on a recent date, or at least after me.  If you look at the bottom of where we post, there is a box saying: Check this if you wish to be notified of replies to this topic. Maybe that will help? I'm going to try it out now. Happy hunting! Varda |
|
|
|
Post by Alatar on May 5, 2005 16:17:35 GMT -5
On the problem of finding wanted posts, I check the bottom of the page for the ten most recent. That takes the pain out of it for me anyway. I also check the MeO thread to see if anyone posted on a recent date, or at least after me. If you look at the bottom of where we post, there is a box saying: Check this if you wish to be notified of replies to this topic. Maybe that will help? I'm going to try it out now. Varda, I was not aware of the "10 most recent posts" feature, thank you for pointing it out to me. That is better than what I had previously (which was nothing) but it is still a far cry from vBulletin or phpBB systems that let me see which forums and threads have new posts, and with a single click begin reading where I left off the previous visit. I shall try to make use of what features this software has, though. Thanks again. ~ Alatar |
|
Varda
Vala, Council
Posts: 1,042
|
Post by Varda on May 5, 2005 18:51:48 GMT -5
Woot! The "Notify of replies" did indeed notify me right away in email of a new post and sent the URL and name for the topic.
|
|
Eonwë
Vala, Council
Vala and proud member of the Valar Guild. A quarter century of Tolkien fun.
Posts: 1,323
|
Post by Eonwë on May 7, 2005 14:42:06 GMT -5
The chance of people posting raise accordingly by the chance to read something of interest. I am sorry Eonwe but I really do not see the relevans between the boards total membership and loss of interest in Trade and Hunts. I see a relevans between the total amount people in WoW and of read/written posts in Trade/Hunts versus the other WoW forums combined with the amount of different toons/proffessions 22 players must have. I blame a part of that upon Password. Protection is fine but to get anything to grow from scratch you need to expose it. There is always a risk and always a prize. If you want to live, get healthy and strong, you risk injuries and even in worst case death. Thats probably any parents worst dilemma, the balance between protection and let go. No one walks through life without scratches. Same thing goes with a forum. It is much more simple but the dilemma basicly the same. You can protect it right to death. If you want to try to make it live there is a risk you get scratches. Your assumption about any protection is right. As it is now I prefer open forums. If it ever should begin to attract too many from outside it could be closed. Therin lies the problem, Elatan. It is not a loss of interest. You have to have something before you can lose it. It's a lack of interest. I'll try to be clearer in my explanation. There are not 22 WoW members registered on this board. There are only 16. That means, at the very very best, you will not get more than 16 people posting. However, not even all 16 of these bother to read the boards. Only 8 have posted with any level of frequency (enough to have more than 10 posts, which unbelieveably enough, is enough to be in the top 20). However, it doesn't stop there. Only 5 of the 8 WoW players registered in the WoW branch who post on(and therefore read) these boards with any sort of frequency even play on Lothar right now. So, that means, under normal circumstances, you can only hope for 5 people from the WoW Lothar group to post here. Now, as for how the full forum numbers apply. There are boards here that are much older than anything on the WoW section or the MEO section, and have fewer or equal posts. These boards do not have passwords. In fact, the D2 Trading board has more posts than the WoW Trading board, despite the password on it. This Forum is about 2 years old, and it has never had 22 people posting on it regularly, let alone in one section. The lowest post count in the top 20 posters is 8, and that was achieved by the newest person to join our forums (congrats to him, btw :}). Now that's fine for a 2 year old Forum with little to no exposure to the outside world. However, for a 2 year old Guild Forum that should have a minimum of about 120 members (all from the Valar Guild, so Tolkien-Only and friendly people signing up from elsewhere should push this number up) that's pretty darn low. Now, we stress quality over quantity, but if in 2 years we can't kick that lowest number to at least 50, that's pretty bad. The top 4 posters alone make up about half the posts on this board(3 of them admins). Admins should probably have more posts than most others, but still? The Forum and several of the boards have been plugged (shamelessly) at so many times I couldn't begin to count them all, but among them are the two major guild mails that go out to all members: The sweep and the Games Page Update e-mail. So my question would be what Alatar at least for his part answers: why don't members post here more? Why are we not all registered here? "I didn't know" seems a long stretch for anyone who's responded to either of those two mails in the last couple of years. Also, we did bring this up at a meeting a while back as you asked. As I recall, only one person had strong feelings against the passwords. Others either had no comment (majority) or spoke for them. If you think removing passwords will help, I'm game, but I think the bigger question is not "Why aren't there 22 WoW members posting" as I've answered that, but "Why aren't there 22 WoW members registered," or to go one step further, "Why aren't there 120 Valar Guild members registered?" or even at its simplest "Why aren't the 16 registered WoW members posting?" Nothing I've seen has led me to believe the answer is "the password." ----------------------------- Alatar: Supposedly version 4 is going to have some better search features, but we have to wait for it to actually be applied to the boards outside of their main board. I hope what Varda's shown you will hold you over at least until then. Another note, however, is you want to make sure you're logged in so you see the top 10 posts in all boards. ------------------------------- Anyway, I've made this post longer than I set out to. Take care all. Great fun in Uldaman last night. Eonwë |
|
Hmm isnt it why it is a trade-forum, you actually want to sell something, offer your proffession for money or free ?
Could we try look forward instead of back please. 
) Of course to do that, we have to have enough members willing to get together to do all the big stuff, which means we have to have enough members willing to get together to do the small stuff, which means we need to have members who actually enjoy being around eachother enough to make plans to get together and utilize the GUild weekly questing day.
