What happened???

[Voolf]

For me it is life moving forward. Family, work, daily chores, now small child. all of that leaves me with very little time for myself. And that very little time I would rather invest in drawing a map, than browsing forum, because let's face it... reading stuff here is not very productive (unless we want to learn from each other)

I still occasionally look through some threads, but not very often. I do try to post every map in Finished map section though!
The other thing that personally affected my activity here was... well to put it mildly a slightly bellicose approach of some people in my threads.
I had felt back then that the spirit of guildsman here is somehow gone.

The other thing is that the world is ever changing and everything in it is too. Stagnation is a straight way to death.
I once suggested that the forum (as beautiful as it is) would gain a momentum with some updates and redesign.
I don't remember, was it Redrobes or other admin that said it would require a lot of work to even update vBulletin, not mentioning a total redesign.
There are much more responsive with better functionality and art dedicated forums out there. I am afraid that the forum will be slowly forgotten little by little every year if nothing will change here.
I understand that requires work and most likely money, so I am not judging. It's a mere objective observation.

That being said, people are coming and going. It is a natural flow. There may be an influx of young blood yet to invigorate the Guild. I do hope so.

[Redrobes]

It could have been me that said it but I am repeating what Robbie has said to me. The forum version could be upgraded but I am led to believe that the awards system code was abandoned and there is no similar awards plug in for the next version of vBulletin. So if were ok to abandon the awards then we could upgrade but it seems to me that awards are fairly important part of peoples participation on the forum with challenges and their profile for getting commissions. My personal feeling is that its not the site design that is putting people off. I think people are abandoning the whole internet.

I head to the guild every day and see how things are and tidy stuff up but until this month I have not made a map in several years. So if you were only here to make maps and stopped then maybe there is no need to come here but as an admin I feel like I ought to turn up and make sure all is going fine. I have some ideas in my head where I think I would need to participate / interact more than i am now but until I get a block of free time then that just slides to the right indefinitely. Things just seem to pop up that need attending to and stops me from doing some of the back burner projects that I would like to have a go at. Big systems are just collapsing and leaving a mess and there is not enough time to clear it all up. Peoples expectations about what can be delivered in smaller and smaller timescales is beyond absurd. In the UK at least, but I believe this is a more global trend, fewer and fewer key people are holding up bigger and bigger systems and they are just walking away now, saying f this nonsense, and finding something less stressful to do.

[Gamerprinter]

Well I got more family responsibilities than I used to - since my father's passing. I'm still busy making maps, making 3D illustrations, authorship, editing and publishing work, but am so busy, I seldom post my work in progress here anymore. Also since Robby left as admin, the place has changed - not better or worse necessarily, just different. In fact this might be the first post I've made in about 6 months...

[Voolf]

It could have been me that said it but I am repeating what Robbie has said to me. The forum version could be upgraded but I am led to believe that the awards system code was abandoned and there is no similar awards plug in for the next version of vBulletin. So if were ok to abandon the awards then we could upgrade but it seems to me that awards are fairly important part of peoples participation on the forum with challenges and their profile for getting commissions. My personal feeling is that its not the site design that is putting people off. I think people are abandoning the whole internet.

Ah right! that was one of te main reasons. Indeed, the reward system is an important part of the guild.
I agree that it's not the reason people are leaving the guild. I just though better functionality would invigorate it a bit.

[ebaynetflix]

I have found the decline of forums very sad to be honest as other forms of social media require extensive by-in and I've never seen community form quite as close knit as in forums. Discord chat rooms require intensive amount of time to stay in the know and don't properly catalogue information/conversation. I largely suspect the move from forums to Discords is more about low maintenance, high engagement, and high monetization rather than any actual benefit to the end user.

[wminish]

I have found the decline of forums very sad to be honest as other forms of social media require extensive by-in and I've never seen community form quite as close knit as in forums. Discord chat rooms require intensive amount of time to stay in the know and don't properly catalogue information/conversation. I largely suspect the move from forums to Discords is more about low maintenance, high engagement, and high monetization rather than any actual benefit to the end user.

Well said. In terms of discord, the time required to stay in the know has always been what has prevented me really getting into it. I thought that maybe I was just missing something that was obvious to people who were more familiar with that platform.

[Falconius]

Discord is just a more organized* chatroom, it's not really comparable to an online forum, which is more like an organized open e-mail room, or kind of like its namesake a forum.

[Redrobes]

The issue with a chat room where the chat is live is that a LOT of people need to be interested in a topic to have a variety of people there and willing to chat at a specific moment when you log in. Whereas on a forum the messages are left there in the open ready to collect when you next get there. Particularly where you have a global reach and the timezones mean people are asleep / at work at sections of the day too. We have many people here who comment on threads which are quite old. If you could only see those threads which have been posted to in the last 15 mins then there would be nothing to see most of the time.

[Falconius]

Yeah, the biggest issue I have with Discord is not being able to find old stuff. I'm running an RPG campaign/home game system on Discord and its a huge problem to try and refer back to earlier information in certain channels.

One of my favorite things on the forum is to find my old threads to see what I was thinking on projects or looking through WIP threads of maps I admire, or just looking back on old interesting discussions. Unfortunately none of that activity is useful for increasing the general current activity of the forum.

[waldronate]

Let's just say that it's called Discord for a reason...