+- MFGG Forums (https://forums.mfgg.net)
+-- Forum: MFGG (https://forums.mfgg.net/forumdisplay.php?fid=4)
+--- Forum: Suggestions (https://forums.mfgg.net/forumdisplay.php?fid=11)
+--- Thread: WIP Make the forums active again (/showthread.php?tid=2994)
Pages:
1
2
Make the forums active again - VinnyVideo - 07-28-2023
As you can probably tell, the MFGG forums have not been terribly active lately. Forum activity has declined steadily since 2015, the peak of the MFGG Renaissance. We reached an all-time low in February, when we had a grand total of four (4) new posts for the month. Ouch.
![[Image: MFGGPostsByYear_2011-2023.png?rlkey=ki71...c7h6f&dl=0]](https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/scl/fi/8hyu95matw6ewypc9jady/MFGGPostsByYear_2011-2023.png?rlkey=ki71w1mdjd5ey07cji78c7h6f&dl=0)
Fortunately, July has been a bit more active, and lately we've had a few interesting conversations on the forums.
I wonder if we have an opportunity to make this place a bit more lively again! I've heard a LOT of people express frustration over X Twitter and the direction it's been going. I've seen a lot of discussions about Twitter alternatives, as well as some people sharing nostalgia for the era when independent forums (like MFGG) held a greater influence on the online world. While big social media sites like Twitter aren't necessarily a direct competitor to MFGG - when used wisely, they can even attract new members and traffic to the forums and mainsite - there's no question that centralized, for-profit social networks have taken a bite out of places like MFGG.
Lots of people don't enjoy social media in 2023 - and MFGG should embrace that! You don't need to pay $8 a month for your posts to show up here, and we're never going to sell your personal data to make some guy in Silicon Valley ridiculously wealthy. Forums are far better than the convoluted "fediverse" schemes that some have proposed as a substitute for Twitter. Plus, forums have their own unique vibes - we're the only place on the Internet with an Evening Chill or a BooBerry skin, after all!
Relying solely on the MFGG Discord is also the wrong solution. Discord's lack of searchability - for both regular users and search engines - severely limits its usefulness for sharing games and resources, a task that forums excel at. While some newer users prefer chat-based communications, there's also a significant number of MFGGers who find the asynchronous nature of forums to be more enjoyable. I don't really post on the MFGG Discord, but all evidence I could gather shows the Discord is much less active than it was a couple of years ago.
I'd love to see a return of the kinds of events and competitions we did for so many years. Other than an occasional Game Jam, we haven't done any kind of competition in over three and a half years. That's really sad. It would be awesome to see a Sprite Competition or Drawing Competition on the forums this fall when the next planned Game Jam wraps up.
It would also be nice to see the current staff have a more visible presence on the fourms, or at least promote a new staff member who focused on the forums - it's not a big time commitment to log in to the forums every day or two and occasionally make a post or new topic. Even if you're just a regular member, something as small as getting in the habit of making a forum topic when you play a new game or find a useful resource could go a long way in renewing interest in the MFGG forums.
If the forums stay as inactive as they were in early 2023, it's worth asking whether the forums should be officially archived - having a comatose forum might do more harm than good by making people think that all parts of MFGG are dead.
Maybe promoting the forums is a lost cause - maybe interest in Mario fangaming just ain't what it used to be, or maybe people can't imagine online communication that isn't mobile-first and corporate-owned. I'm certainly not asking anyone to pour an inordinate amount of unpaid labor into becoming the savior of a sleepy Mario fansite, but I still believe the forums are a fundamentally valuable place that deserves more love.
Does anyone else feel the same way? Do you have any ideas for making MFGG - especially the forums - a more vibrant place?
RE: Make the forums active again - kremling - 07-28-2023
Awesome post. I too would love to see life be brought back to the MFGG forums.
I'm part to blame, as it's probably been 1-2 years since I last logged in.
I believe the discord can be useful in some aspects, but discussions seem rather disorganized/chaotic.
I personally prefer there to be topics created and posts within the topics. And I know Discord allows for threads/posts, but it ultimately doesn't seem as intuitive as the forums.
The forum also has more personality. Avatars, signatures, badges, etc.
Now, the hard question, how do we bring interest back to the forums?
I currently have no ideas, however, are there other Nintendo/Sega/etc. IP fan forums that are still thriving? Or have they too, moved to Discord?
RE: Make the forums active again - Myte - 07-29-2023
Would also love to see the forums to be alive again. Been hoping to take part in a drawing competition for the longest time! Last time we still held competitions, I was just starting out to be an artist haha
I visit the forums regularly, just lurking about. I really can't dig into the MFGG discord. I might be too old to understand how the whole thing works
RE: Make the forums active again - VinnyVideo - 07-29-2023
@kremling Yeah, Discord is good for some things - say, discussing a live event like a Nintendo Direct, or leading an event that requires rapid responses. It's fine to use Discord for the things that Discord does well, but I think it's very important that the forums get used for the things that forums do well.
I 100% agree that forums have more personality than Discord or social media sites! We're a community dedicated to a plumber who stomps evil turtles in a world of mushrooms that make him big, after all - we ought to embrace the fun, goofy, random side of MFGG.
Many fansites still have vibrant forums. Just looking at the MFGG affiliates list, Mario Boards, talkhaus, SMBX, Wario Forums, and SMW Central all have some pretty active forums.
@Myte I'd love to see a return of Drawing Competitions. They don't take a lot of time and effort to set up, with a very low bar for entry - anyone who owns a pencil or MSPaint can participate! A Drawing Comp in late August or early September would be a great way to gauge whether there's still interest in doing those.
In my case, I have a full-time job, so I can't always hang out in a chat all day. It's awkward to respond to a chat conversation that happened a couple of days ago, but with a forum, it's easy to jump back into a discussion from earlier in the week.
RE: Make the forums active again - MALMoresoProgram - 07-30-2023
Yeah, I want MFGG forums to be active again.
RE: Make the forums active again - Q-Nova - 07-30-2023
I think this is the fifth or sixth or seventh time this kind of topic popped up here on the MyBB forums. Great posts though, @VinnyVideo, that graph is a real eye-opener. And I'm glad you're making this a discussion on how can we make the forums active again rather than just talk about why they're dying. I'd hate to see the MFGG forums get archived; this place was a lot of fun and I'd like to bring back that vibe (in fact, we kinda are right now). Forums were able to coexist just fine with IRC, AIM, and Skype; so there's no good reason why Discord should be the one that replaces forums! I never even really cared to use Discord in the first place, anyway, especially with all the tracking and data-collection it seems to have.
In addition to the communities Vinny listed, there's also Bell Tree Animal Crossing Forums, Sonic Retro, DK Vine, and PCKF. Those forums are still alive and kicking, even if the latter two may sometimes get quiet. Actually, the last one I listed had a pretty good discussion comparing forums to Discord; some very excellent points made, pointing out what the two types of platforms are good at.
I'd also love to see competitions or even fun events in general make a comeback! Actually, I considered starting up a poll here to see if there was any interest in a competition and what kind we should do. Sprite and drawing competitions have the lowest barrier to entry and yet still allow for some excellent entries. I sometimes think it would be fun to see another Isometric Collaboration; the last one was spectacular! Even something like the Easter Egg Hunt would be fun to see again!
RE: Make the forums active again - WasabiCatto - 07-31-2023
I am up to bring back the competitions
RE: Make the forums active again - kremling - 07-31-2023
@Q-Nova Yeah, I actually mentioned something similar of having a survey in the Discord in order to get feedback on what people dislike about the forums, or what changes would entice them to want to return back.
One thing I mentioned to @VinnyVideo was possibly integrating a social media login to the forums. That way, outsiders that would have joined, but hate creating new accounts could easily join. However, I'm sure there are some caveats.
RE: Make the forums active again - Hyper - 08-28-2023
To whoever is running all of these, best of luck. I doubt competition would bring back activities since we've done that back in 2019, which fell short.
My theory would be something to the convenience of Discord which made forums feel clunky and dated to newer generations. It's not easy to convince them to shift their activities to the forums. Forcing is out of the equation as it seems that many users rather have strong opinions.
RE: Make the forums active again - TonyBalonneViper - 09-07-2023
I liker the forums.
RE: Make the forums active again - OssieTheOstrich - 10-31-2023
The first part of this post is just gonna be about the possibly of increasing the traffic. The second part is just me making a observation.
First part: a pretty random idea for how to possibly bring more traffic (and by extension, activity to the forums); Collaborate with fangaming content creators on places like YouTube and Twitter/X to promote the place and it's various fangames?
Doing promotion of the forums directly instead of the main site has a bit of a advantage; You can see the development and cataloging of current projects as a guest, and play the games when a release comes out without waiting for the site staff to QA it first.
By the way, the guest thing is something the MFGG Discord can't really do (granted you can make spur of the moment Discord account but still).
Second part: The development of lumaSMS (and merging the forums and main site into one cohesive site to submit games and discuss them) would probably be a good idea in the long term. Provided work gets done on it.
RE: Make the forums active again - TonyBalonneViper - 11-02-2023
Maybe.
RE: Make the forums active again - OssieTheOstrich - 07-09-2024
I'm honestly amazed on how the Sonic Retro forums are one of the most active places for discussion on the Sonic series and has no signs of slowing down considering the whole "people are more into things like Discord or IRC" compared to the Mario Fan Games Galaxy (Sonic Retro's forums have new posts and replies in every couple of minutes).
So, I'm not sure if that argument really holds up...?
RE: Make the forums active again - Vitiman - 07-09-2024
In defense of MFGG, Sonic Retro has for nearly 20 years made a name for itself as the destination for Sonic ROM hacking. It's not the only place you can find good hacks or hacking tools, but its wealth of information on the wiki and the forums + all of the budding research done on a daily basis by passionate fans has always meant that it has something going on actively and encourages people to stick around there to find that info out.
In that sense, MFGG kinda dropped the ball. There were so many times we could have capitalized on Mario-related ongoings, tried to keep ourselves relevant as the number one stop for Mario fangaming, but we didn't. Not helping matters was the several-years-long boogeyman that was "Nintendo fangames are a taboo subject", which is only just now seeing major pushback in mainstream circles of the internet. But so it goes...
RE: Make the forums active again - GeneralGuy - 07-10-2024
MFGG forums killed itself back in 2010 when it decided it didn't want the community (See: The Split). Hell, yesterday was MFGG's 23rd Anniversary and not a single post about it.
RE: Make the forums active again - Vitiman - 07-11-2024
(07-10-2024, 12:05 AM)GeneralGuy Wrote: MFGG forums killed itself back in 2010 when it decided it didn't want the community (See: The Split). Hell, yesterday was MFGG's 23rd Anniversary and not a single post about it.
The Split is a very complicated issue and could very easily be argued was not handled extraordinarily well. But with the insight of peering behind the curtain thanks to a post David Caruso shared back in 2019, we can see that MFGG's leadership genuinely did not like how the community was overtaking the fan game purpose of the website. You had people who had largely outgrown Mario fandom sticking around and behaving pretty poorly and - if that wasn't cause for concern enough - it was actively discouraging newer, younger people from joining the community. MFGG from about 2007 to 2010 had increasingly become a place that was anti-newbie (which, in the context of a video game franchise for all ages fandom site, usually meant anti-children) and while I personally think there is a lot to look back on with MFGG's own homegrown in-jokes and events, I don't even think that was carrying the community anymore. It was a lot of people who grew up on the site, who felt entitled to it (?), and were not reacting positively to being told to be a little more well-behaved. We've had very long, drawn out arguments about this even recently, so I'll stop there with my commentary on The Split. I don't think it was handled well. But I think it had good intentions. Very good intentions.
As for a lack of acknowledgment of MFGG's anniversary, I have good news!
RE: Make the forums active again - Q-Nova - 01-05-2025
Was browsing through the SMBX forums, and found a discussion about trying to revive the forums. It's actually very interesting, there are some excellent points that I've never thought about, like how moving activity to Discord can make the community look dead if a guest only comes across the forums and doesn't bother looking into the Discord server. I remember how before I joined MFGG, I would frequently browse through the main site and forums to check out all the cool stuff that's being shared and discussed. Seeing such stuff contributed to my desire to join in! I don't know if the forums would've had the same impact on me if I was just a lurker today.
I think if the MFGG forums keeps doing events at a good enough frequency, activity will be going strong again. In the past, I've noticed that a few events will occur for a while, activity on the forums is going decently, and then the events stop happening before activity could truly flourish. I've seen this happen quite a few times. Maybe we should do another Isometric Collaboration? Or a competition? It would also be nice if MFGG got back into having good game-design discussions and such that cement us as the number one place for Mario fangaming, as @Vitiman said. Remember when the Developer Discussion was such a treasure trove of information and learning? It certainly was in the phpBB era. The current era started strong in that area, but then dwindled off since, though we still get a good discussion on rare occasion. I think it would be nice if more posts were made in the CFP subforum; that video @Gate shared is so awesome! There must've been more than that!
RE: Make the forums active again - MarioSyndicate - 01-05-2025
We know social sites killed forums and declines to have any integrations outside of logins. If discord could have channels that integrated with forums I get it would revive itself much more. But I'm part of forums that are alive and well, but those has a download section, which helps in my opinion.
RE: Make the forums active again - Nackless - 01-05-2025
It's a shame really that forums are getting more and more quiet. I just started joining as of summer of 2024. First Wario Forums, then Sonic Stadium and finally this one and though Sonic Stadium have had some luck as it's pretty active, Wario Forums is usually getting very little conversations in them. And it's a real shame seeing how full of life it was a few years ago. It's definetely social media that have hindered forums as a whole and I won't debate that which is sad since forums have a lot of adventages over things like Discord, Twitter or Reddit such as being able to discuss topics in more details, being easily arhcivable, the charm factor and being in a community where everyone knows each other (at least, Internet wise) feels, for a lack of a better term, cozy.
I'm not too familiar with MFGG itself, so I don't really know how to make this website specifically more active but in general maybe having popular content creators
of the community reference it more may help. For example, instead of making a subreddit the main place to ask questions, they may prioritize pointing to forums which may result in more people being aware of forums, especially with the younger generations. I would have joined forums much sooner if more people were to give more attention to them but I never bothered because they never really caught my attention. Heck, me joining Wario Forums (which was the first forum I joined and caused me to join other forums) was originally a coincedence. If someone didn't happen to have a problem signing up to it the same day I would have checked the subreddit, I wouldn't have joined any forum site at all.
What also may save forums is the fact that people are starting to get sick of modern social media. I mean, it's hard to go on YouTube these days and not have someone complain about how awful Twitter, Reddit or even YouTube itself is. And I agree, modern social media seem to non-archivable, unengaging reward low effort content a lot. Things that are just ment to be posted then lost in a mass pool of content. But with forums, it's a lot easier to get noticed and have actually engaging conversation.
Sorry for my little rant but I really wanted to get my thoughts out and this felt like the good time and place.
RE: Make the forums active again - littlelum - 01-05-2025
I think it rests on each of us to keep the forums active. After all, the forum's lifeblood of individual members joining in conversations. I know I haven't been very active in conversations lately, so I could definitely be doing better in my part. (Heck, I've probably always been more of a lurker than a talker)