Re: Hello! Is anybody Home?

Posted by darth_paul on 2012/7/27 7:22:52

I think that the contests and such died shortly after the last Smack Down event was never completed. If I recall there were a few other contests after that, but not much participation. To me that's where the problems started with the people getting involved, and I'm not pointing fingers at anyone in particular, because I know that the admins tried, but when big fun annual participation events such as that don't get followed through to the end, with no rewards or anything for all the work put in for those who took part in it, of course you are going to start alienating people who are going to go ahead and not want to take part in anything else. Now, I admit that I haven't even entered any other community contests or events other than the Smack Downs. My reasons being either I don't really have the time or I just don't feel as if I'm skilled enough to get involved in something that I know that I can't win. However, things like the Smack Downs where everyone was making comic stories was something that I could do so I was happy to at least join in on that, whether I had a chance of winning or not. Now, all we seem to have to get people involved as a community are a few different forum games that I've gladly participated in, but frankly all I ever see is the same ten regulars playing along, and while they are a fun little diversion for a few minutes, those kinds of things aren't really going to attract new people or bring back old members who have left. As far as comparing this site to Renderosity or DeviantArt or similar sites and following their examples as to things that we can change to get more members and more participation, IMHO I would caution against drastically changing Heromorph into a clone of one of those sites especially DA since that would be a huge undertaking, and I really don't think that anyone would want to come here if it was just a copy of that site with their system of everyone having their own pages and groups and things like that. Maybe a small combo of elements of those site would work. As LP suggested, going more of a Renderosity route and having the "Adult" content as part of the regular galleries but with mandatory "content advisory" thumbnails hiding the sex and/or violence content unless you are a member who chooses to turn on or off the filter would work better, I believe that DA does something similar as well. As far as taking something from DA, well the only thing that I can suggest is their comment system as it works quite well, and comments go directly to your "inbox" so every time you log in you are notified, you don't have to check your personal e-mail or anything. The only thing that I don't like about their comment system is that you can't edit it once you've posted something, so if we could have something similar but allow editing for after we've posted that would be great. I know that they're working on a lot of site updates themselves over there so they might be working on fixing that as well, but I'm not sure. Anyway, I've probably taken this off on another needless tangent, so if I have forgive me as well, but opinions and suggestions were asked for and that's just my two cents.