Forums The Forums are not a dumping ground. Don't market them as one. AND: How to fix media and promotion

LW

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Okay. I wanted to make this thread for a while. This is an extension of Fixing the Dumping Ground by TL;DR.

As we all have noticed and seen people notice that this Forum is dead asides from the Promotion Section and posts that would belong there but aren't there we know there is something wrong. I've done extensive research, traveled to Rome, London and back to Vienna to sit down on my chair to find the reason.

Jokes aside.

At the time of writing the Promote Yourself! Section has 20,968 Threads and 31,991 Messages. Subtracting those it means the section has 11023 replies. Sounds better than I thought BUT WAIT It's an old Forum and people used to reply back in the day. So let's look at more recent Data.

Since Oct 1, a total of 265 Threads were posted in that section.
I have created a Google Spreadsheet showing how many replies each post got and whether or not it was a Media Section post. Feel free to experiment around with it.

It has shown though that 75% of posts from October did not get any replies. That's 199 out of 265 posts.
Here's the question: Does this profit anyone? It sure doesn't profit the Forum and Community that so many people just dive in to post stuff there and leave. Though we've been through this.


Instead of covering everything said by TL;DR let's focus on the reason this is like that.
The likeliest reason I can come up with is the way the Forums are marketed. Let's see how the Freedom! Team works to get the Forums out there and where they are linked:

  1. The Dashboard. Fair Point.
  2. Support.TM as a way to get help from people. Fair point.
  3. Discord.
    Discord is the place many new members go. Now how do you show them the Forums?

    Like this.
    upload_2017-11-7_22-24-5.png

    This pisses me off a ton. You only show people posting in a section that's not possible to be moderated reasonably instead of posting threads that serve to feed a discussion, to help people grow their channels or to serve a positive cause. It's like making a flyer for your village and showing the huge stinking garbage dump outside of it on the front page.
  4. Freedom!'s YouTube Channel
    This is done way too few, but just feature the forums on there a bit! I was insanely happy about stuff like you generally running over the Forums for a few minutes, you showing off contests or you just spotlighting a Forum Member who bulk uploaded all the work they've ever done within a few weeks to give to Partners on C.R.I.B.
TL;DR Just show off the Forums in a way they don't look like a huge pile of garbage everyone can go to and place their own excrements on to new members.


On to my last point for this thread, I have a suggestion on making the Promotion Section viewable again.

Once a post with only a video without anything around it is posted, notify the poster they can't only post a video with anything around it and tell them to edit it. If they fail to edit the post take the rights out to delete it. I'd love to support some people in that section though half the posts I see are really low quality, only supplying the pasted title of the video and the video itself. This gets old after a while. So here's a step-by-step way to improve this:
  • Create a full ruleset for the Promotion Section. Rules, not best practices. They've failed you a long time ago.
  • Encourage users to post good threads instead of just a video in edits, if need be removing threads not following it.
  • Feature threads following those Guidelines (Pins, Announcements) and reward users for following them (I'd hand out credits to good Promotion Section Posts myself, but they're rarely more than a copy of the YouTube Description which already is a Link Dump).
  • Add a tiny credit reward (0.05 Credits) for viewing threads there.
I have probably missed a lot of good points I wanted to make but the main thing should be there, it's 11 pm...

Do leave Feedback on what you think of this down below, I'm eager to hear it.
 

Koala_Steamed

Mythic User
The promotion videos weren't supposed to get posted into a separate Freedom! Forums section not sure why that happened. I think the best thing we could do is place video content in the discord promotion section although it probably wont be seen at all. May remove the forum section is discord also and just keep all discussion in the general chat.

As for the promotion section we did have something planned with a separate set of currency where you would have to view/replay to a certain amount of videos before you could post your own. Although we have to be careful with YouTubes guidelines of creating forced views. We could even just rename the section video reviews where that would be more about feedback, people are require to review and give feedback to 5 or so videos before posting their own.

I would like to get the section fixed up so thanks for the feedback
 
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riganthor

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the promotion section has always been a mess of link dumps but yes lately it has gotten only worse, especially now that the discord server took away most people from the forums. I think there should indeed be a few more rules for post on there even if it affects me negatifly but forcing people to watch video's is verry iffy, maybe up the ammounts of credits people need to pay to post in the promotion section and increase the ammount people get for interacting in the promotion section.
 
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LW

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As for the promotion section we did have something planned with a separate set of currency where you would have to view/replay to a certain amount of videos before you could post your own. Although we have to be careful with YouTubes guidelines of creating forced views. We could even just rename the section video reviews where that would be more about feedback, people are require to review and give feedback to 5 or so videos before posting their own.
That is not a good idea. When you have to make your feature to break YouTube's TOS as little as possible it's not a good feature. The cost for posting media makes the media section have a chance at some more quality but it's pretty much only an activity feed for the more active forum members (Mainly members who are active and have enough money to spend to post every new video). So it's the same thing again, just that it's formatted forcefully.

One way to fix this and make the media section better to look at is to not automatically copy metadata off YouTube. This feature makes people able to not write anything new and we all know how the average YouTube description looks. It'll only be a dump of social media links, not a description of the video.

How to solve this?
Give people an empty description textbox. That's it. Impose a character minimum and it'll be better. The point is we need to stop putting up with no efforts which is why the section is unusable.

Here's an example of how most media section descriptions look:
Code:
►New? Subscribe: https://www.youtube.com/user/XYZFREEDOMUSER

►DO YOU COPY: http://www.asylumjam.com/games/doyoucopy/295138

►SEVVERS: http://www.asylumjam.com/games/sevver/294994

►Join the Discord channel! https://discord.gg/163428

►Become a Patron! https://www.patreon.com/FREEDOMUSER

►Contact me here: https://twitter.com/MCNFREEDOM

►Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 3.0

#freedomfamily

I haven't found many posts with actual descriptions yet. This is part of the reason why noone can be asked to look through that section and give feedback. It's not interesting to see posts that have no effort put into them whatsoever, especially when it's 280 a month. That's a little less than ten a day. Nobody got time for that.

If I want to see a channel's videos when they come out I'll subscribe to the channel, not wait to watch the next video dumped onto the Freedom! Forums.