WHY ARE THESE FORUMS RELATIVELY INACTIVE?

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The main drawback with mono communities is detached techbros suddenly have this immense responsibility to control information. Or rather who sees what. They are already compromised by company advertising dollars and government support. Even if they weren't they're incredibly underequipped to have any kind of ethical guideline on how best to maintain information like in general! There is some progress with the covid mis-info pushback. But uh, they probably should have thought about that before they made an algorithm designed to spread organically/mysteriously as much as possible.

Idk it's really a mess. Everything is internet infested and cloggy. The wild west internet wasn't the best but at least everything was in neat little islands. If you want an opinion from a human you have to type 'reddit' at the end of your search query to avoid those weird generated articles. it'd be nice to reset to web 1.0 or whatever and just build up from there with the consequences in mind but uh, don't think that's gonna happen. No faith in the tech acceleration anymore.
pianotm
The TM is for Totally Magical.
32347
Okay, we are getting constant spambots, now. What the fuck?
Discord, Reddit, and social media in general can all go die in a fire. Those platforms are actively pro-censorship, too. With all the things going on in the world lately, forums, e-mail, and IRC are still the best forms of online communication, and that's not likely to change for the foreseeable future.
I realize this is a very late reply, but while forums have definitely not been as popular as they once were, there's a big difference between forums and things like floppy drives and CDs (and the other stuff). For example, floppy drives are no longer used with modern computers not just because of their obsolescence but because no motherboard made in the last two decades is even able to have a floppy drive or a CD drive from that era connect to it. Meanwhile, forums are still very usable just like Reddit, Discord, social media, etc because they all are still usable, even if forums don't have as many features.

Heck, the IRC chat protocol is older than HTTP itself, and it's still very much in use. There are still multiple active IRC servers and multiple channels on those servers, and while they're obviously not nearly as active as they used to be compared to stuff like Discord and social media (is Reddit considered to be social media?), I'm confident that they'll be around for quite a while.

I've also noticed there seems to be an increasing amount of backlash towards social media, especially towards Facebook, Twitter, and Reddit, and not just from boomers.

tl;dr: like IRC, forums aren't going anywhere soon.


Never mind sorry, I'm a big dummy and didn't see the clarification. That's what I get for replying late.

author=Runic Cipher
Discord, Reddit, and social media in general can all go die in a fire. Those platforms are actively pro-censorship, too. With all the things going on in the world lately, forums, e-mail, and IRC are still the best forms of online communication, and that's not likely to change for the foreseeable future.
There's also imageboards, though watch your step if you decide to enter that.
Also fun fact: there are still servers that host sites using the Gopher protocol, which is a little older than HTTP, though those are mostly just digital museums kept online for curious wanderers.
LockeZ
I'd really like to get rid of LockeZ. His play style is way too unpredictable. He's always like this too. If he ran a country, he'd just kill and imprison people at random until crime stopped.
5958
The forums would still be just as active as they ever were if people hadn't made a discord server. The discord server is what killed RMN. It's a shame, because I told them that was going to happen, and now it's happened. This website is now totally obsolete and defunct, replaced by a chat room that only has 1% of the functionality, because the staff didn't care enough to stand fast against the tides of popular pressure and preserve it.
I think discord communities are blah but there's like a hundred other reasons why a forum community might turn in-active. It's not exactly like pre-2016 was some RMN boom or anything. People just lose interest or move on to other things or start families whatever. RPG Maker in general is like the lowest relevancy it's ever been. I would like to migrate everything social to the forums, but I don't see the evidence here other than a really basic correlation.
LockeZ
I'd really like to get rid of LockeZ. His play style is way too unpredictable. He's always like this too. If he ran a country, he'd just kill and imprison people at random until crime stopped.
5958
I mean the discord server is incredibly active. It's as active as the forum ever was, just without any of the meaningful content. Saying that people aren't interested in RPG Maker doesn't jive - they just no longer have a place for meaningful, thoughtful discussions about it, because ArcheiaNessiah and Liberty killed the website by creating the discord server.
Again there's a lot of different factors such as would these people use the forums if the discord wasn't there (there are tons of people that left that didn't use discord even). Another potential factor is useability, Internet forums like this are really annoying to use on the phone (mainly due to browsers), I can check and respond to discord convos easily from bed. Like if we have to remove things to make the forums better than maybe the problem is with the forums themselves. I'm not saying these are THE EXACT reasons, but it seems easy to resort to confirmation bias here.

Since forever the biggest problem actually is people not communicating on the gamepages/blogs enough. WIP wanted to remove the forums because the site was built around the games themselves. But then you run into the same issue, if something is a good utlity why force someone to use it? I don't think any admin is going partake in such a social experiment such as removing the Discord, but the harder/longer answer is that the site needs an overhaul. People landing into this site are gonna think they time travelled back to 2010 let's be real. There's reasons why that too isn't feasible (busy staff, not enough resources), but idk I guess best case scenario we get like the same 20 people posting more, maybe.
I mean, we could do a Kickstarter or go fund me to raise money to hire a web designer or web design company to overhaul the website. Make it mobile friendly, modernize the website, improve the search engine optimization to drive more traffic here, etc. I would gladly fund it myself if I had the means, but a fundraiser could go a long way, and it would help band the community together. Just a thought.
To be completely blunt, I was never a fan of the forum software. While I give people like WIP credit for coming up with something original to distance from the other RPG Maker communities, I've found it to be too funky to work around with. Had the forums been your typical phpBB or MyBB installation (with custom features added in, of course), the experience would've been a lot different (and better) for me.

On top of that, the Web site has always been way too slow for my liking. Of course, if you need the funds, then the community can pitch in and get us on a much faster, more secure server.

I agree with LockeZ that it's too late to get rid of the Discord server to save these forums. People aren't suddenly going to post on the forums because their favorite chat room software isn't being promoted anymore. Instead, they'll just flock somewhere else.
Be the activity you want to see.
Forum inactivity is mostly because RMN is a "community" site now -- it's only really useful to the people who have been part of the community forever. itch.io has superseded it as a smallscale hosting space and does everything gamepages do and better, and actually has traffic from people looking to play games, not just develop them. On the other end, RpgmakerWeb is a much more active (and officially supported) forum for technical support and longform discussion of the engines. What reason would someone new to RM have to hang around here when those options are available? Like, even the OP of this thread was only posting here because their registration was delayed on RMweb haha. I don't a web overhaul is likely to bring RM up to par with either of those peers in this space.

Re: discord, it's a lot more attractive for new people just looking to chat/chill and get casual feedback. Especially when we disallow "here's my game" threads when most people are here to talk about their own stuff. Twitter seems to be the best niche for shortform dev updates that don't merit entire blogs, and there's a lot bigger audience there.

Also I don't think Discord "killed" the site any more than the Slack killed it, or the Skype killed it, or the IRC killed it before that. There will always be people who want to chat -- it's just that those types are the majority left now that all other site functionality can be found better elsewhere, and "having a discord" is the only aspect where RM is up to date.
See, and I would personally disagree with most of that, seeing as I only joined this community last year. I had my game posted on itch for over a year and barely got any downloads and almost no feedback, but within a handful of months of joining the community, I got over 1000 downloads, a great review, tons of feedback and support, and I got to know the community a lot better as well. There are some great people here that make it really enjoyable to check in, and I don't even use the discord. Never was attracted to rpgweb, used to use RMRK back in the day, and coming here kind of felt like coming home in a way, because everyone seemed to be so supportive and have a common passion in indie game development. I never found that on itch or any other gaming communities that I've been a part of since RMRK. I think there's a lot of people who could find a warm welcome to a unique community like this.

Having said that, maybe my experience isn't exactly the norm. It's hard to say what experiences other have had.
halibabica
RMN's Official Reviewmonger
16873
I've been making a game mod I can't host here for the last four years. Most of my RMN activity is off the forums, apart from an update to my review queue every three months or so (RPGs are long -.-).

Dunno why I felt the need to share this.
author=LockeZ
because ArcheiaNessiah and Liberty killed the website by creating the discord server.


More than anything, I don't understand why you're all acting like this is some unique betrayal or an isolated incident. Nearly every longstanding online community I've been a part of has moved to Discord or a different platform within the last five years. This is not a situation unique to RMN, and blaming Liberty and Nessy for trying to keep with the times is like yelling at your manager for buying a smartphone when you think the fax machine works just fine.

Yes, I'm sad that the main site is in such a state of disrepair that I can't even reset my password anymore. Heck, I genuinely don't even know if the site will exist this time next year. But RMN is living on in -some- form when many other communities failed to adapt and did not survive. And while yes there are drawbacks and sucky things about these moves, the important takeaway is that RMN still exists.

I miss the internet from the year 2007 as much as any other over-30 in this thread, but we can either endlessly mourn the end of the internet that we grew up with or we can help newer generations of gamedevs, many of whom did not grow up with forums, to succeed.
author=psy_wombats
Forum inactivity is mostly because RMN is a "community" site now -- it's only really useful to the people who have been part of the community forever. itch.io has superseded it as a smallscale hosting space and does everything gamepages do and better, and actually has traffic from people looking to play games, not just develop them.

Gonna ditto Strak and say my itch io numbers are actually lower or about on par with my RMN numbers. I assume mainly cause while Itch io has a lot of traffic it also has a tonnnnnnnn of games which adds to the saturation (though if you spam game jam games they'll get ok traffic). This is all anecdotal but I don't nesscarily use this site solely out of nostalgia attachment or developer kinship there's still a valid use. Even sans all that, the archival aspect alone is worth perserving it.

Again it'd be nice to get actual objective information or at least some kind of survey / opinion tally to figure out what people like about the site, what they use it for or even what would make them use it more whatever, rather than pointing fingers. Though that could be difficult if the site is mostly aided by silent lurkers. I've had this conversation multiple times throughout the years but I earnestly believe this site still has a future one way or another.
I wanna echo what Darken and Strak mentioned. A year after I posted my stuff on RMN, I moved it over to itch.io. My stuff on RMN, have done about twice, and sometimes three times the amount they have on itch.io - I think it's probably because like Darken mentioned, RMN is more focused on rpgmaking than just indie games in general, cause that's what people are looking for when they're searching through the site.

I also found that often, it's a lot easier to create stuff here, but also the forum aspect makes it easier to keep track of, than a blog, or if it was on discord. (when someone asks how to do something in RM2k3, I look through one of the tutorials/utilities or one of the forum threads under the help section, before responding because often one of you guys have said better than I did.)

I also found that, with the archive thread - I haven't done the best job with it - but it's been a lot easier to keep track of on the forums, especially when trying to catch up with old games and requests. It's a lot easier to manage because, it often takes a long time for peeps to see the thread come up on google and eventually interact with it. They'll find the site through google, they'll look through the list, check what's missing and make a request.

Sometimes it takes time, for some of these things to happen and having a forum is sort of an advantage in that aspect?

The only thing I want to add is that, a lot of the stuff I'm doing now, would be a lot harder to do if RMN wasn't here.

EDIT: the one instance that immediately comes to mind is that dude who made that really cool XenoGears battle system about 2 or 3 years ago in one of the more recent rpgmaker engines? I can't remember his name at the moment, but we sort of coached him, he got as far as he could with it, wasn't happy with it and sort of scrapped everything including the youtube that he uploaded of it in action - (we might be able to salvage the video) but at least we have a record of it on the forums. And now if peeps ask if anyone has made a game like Xenogears in one of the rpgmakers, I could probably point to at least 2 or 3 examples on RMN; this is kind of why the forum aspect is important - that information would be much harder to have, if we didn't have RMN.
pianotm
The TM is for Totally Magical.
32347
I will point out that I don't go to itch.io for RPGs. Like...at all. I'll follow you on itch.io but I'll never download from you unless you're not putting your games here. If you're putting your games here, I'll always come here because I'm not looking at your game pages there.

RMN is my preference for RPGs. Even non-RPG Maker games. And a big reason is that most entries are going to be RPGs so there's a lot of other games I'll click into.
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