Re: Comment on comments (or lack of)

Posted by Winterhawk on 2008/8/29 10:43:35

this is a great conversation so far everyone, thank you for sharing your thoughts on the subject. I done some thinking on all the posts in this thread including my own.

I understand Chilly and Thayne's thoughts and they both make good points. The person Thayne is talking about was banned a couple of years ago from HM, but it doesn't make Thayne's point any less valid. Also that person was one of the assholes I was specifically thinking about when I posted last time. When we have a member like that we get problems on both sides both their comments and their response to comments.

I also have to agree that I personally do not like comments on my images that have nothing to do with the image in question. DD was a big one for this. I once got a post with a three stooges picture, 6 smileys, and copy and paste WIKI facts about the pacific ocean on a 3d picture I did of of a hot chick at a beach. I remember when I saw it and thought, what the hell is that, and I deleted the comment.

But with all that said I am not really talking about those types of comments or those types of commentors. I have been told by a number of members that they do not comment anymore because of fear of what the artist will say in retort unless all they have to say is good job or well done and there is only some many times and ways that they have to say those things, so they simply stop saying it.

Another issue is that the site itself has developed a bug somewhere in it's code that we have tried to nail down, have tried to implement multiple hacks and fixes but it still keeps comming back, sometimes it is worse then others but is still a huge pain. I am talking about the "taking you back to where you were bug" that eats hundreds of posts and comments a week. many users have figured out work arounds for this bug, but also a number of them have just stopped commenting due to fustration with this bug.

Also since we seperated the galleries from just the heromorph gallery and the members gallery into the way they are arranged now a lot of users just go to the gallery that they are most interested in. Maybe merging non-members galleries would increase comments and help build the community again as we have too many places for the new user to go this would simplify things and it would also expose the art created to more members. on the downside, the new art posted would fly off of the front page of the gallery faster then ever. The main reason these were seperated was due to the number of posts we were getting per day and a number of the artists here asked for us to do something about it. So to bring them back together would it be worth the effort or would it make things worse.

I would like to make HM a more open and exciting fun community. Where commenting is encouraged by all the members. Where both artists and fans can have discussions about art and how they did it regularly. I would like to see more discussions started. This site means a lot to me personally. Although I did not start it (The great Hubcap did) I have been at the helm of it for most of the time that it has been around. I have put in countless hours coding, hacking, preparing, organizeing and just plain working on this site. I think of it as my home. We have a great bunch of moderators, heralds, artists and members here at the site and we have a huge number of "lurkers" I would love for the lurkers to feel like this place is easy to get involved in and are welcome to do so. I would like to see a community that not only has fan commenting but also fosters their abilty to start to try into the fun and start creating some sort of digital or traditional art to share with all of us here. Heromorph is a great site, but it could be so much more then it is now.

What do you guys think? How do you all want to get there? I would really like to hear from anyone and everyone here.