Forum acitivity way down?

I never noticed until today but I very much agree.

I think part of the problem may be the on again/off again sometimes broken friend feeds. I would tend to find more topics that way.

I don't know about suspect banning and I wouldn't speculate about it.

I do know that there used to be a wiki ban and a separate forum ban. Now there is one one general site ban. I noticed in the bug reports and such that some of the posters who had been wiki banned on the old site ended up being accidentally forum banned as well during the site transition. They were supposed to be grandfathered in, but it didn't sound like it went as planned.

My guess is that's fixed, but I'm going to guess we lost some forum posters as a result of the glitches. You get out of the habit of going somewhere sometimes you lose the will to go back.

Site transitions are rough and this one seems to have had its' share of casualties . I don't have any hard numbers but at least of the people I used to follow, it does feel like ~10%-20% last posted before the new site launched and have not been back.

Maybe there just isn't as much to talk about? We're at the end of a very stagnant console generation and we're right before E3, so releases are barren. I'm not saying the site redesign isn't at fault at all, but that there is likely much more to this than just that. I agree that there needs to be an additional pass on the forums/social aspects of the site.

Hell, that measures up to a forum post. Guy in a kilt taking a leak and......

Maybe they can fit the first ten Forum threads on the FP. Best of all worlds, or the same in all worlds, however you want to see it. To be honest, I like both.

I think this is the opposite for me, I'm actively browsing through the first few pages of the forums now instead of just looking at the ones featured on the home page. I still would prefer if there were forum threads on the home page.

I don't like the way the new forums look, so I've been posting much less than I normally do. It all just looks like a big mess, it's the reason I don't do anything at polygon besides read a few articles. I think yesterday was the first time I posted something in like a month.

I've been doing that more too, often going to page 2. And as before, checking out game specific forums. Perhaps there is some rebound coming back after the new structure they did.

The forums deserve it.

Personally, I check the forums less due to topics no longer being surfaced on the front-page, you're not alone in your thinking.

Not having the forums on the front page has hit the traffic rates for sure. I know I never even bother to go down to the bottom of the homepage anymore because there is nothing there that interests me at all.

Plus I think a lot of people just don't really give enough of a shit to actually go and search out forum topics to reply to. If you noticed before, the threads with the most replies were the ones that stayed on the front page for a while. Once it got knocked off that list for something new the traffic dropped off real quick.

It's kind of sad because the forums were always a huge part of the site and it's pretty much been completely killed off with the new design.

To be perfectly honest, I don't give a shit about the staff twitter feeds or the community headlines that occupy that space now, mainly because I keep up with that by other, much more streamlined means. They way I see it is that if it is really important, so important that it should be front page material, it probably has already been or started on the forums to begin with so it isn't really serving a purpose that the forums didn't.

I like the new site design, but they fucked up big time with forums and community stuff.

Most of the threads being created suck. And with other user-created content being harder to find, most of us have decided to spend our time doing more interesting things like playing video games or taking a bandsaw to our testicles.

I have never agreed with you more.

It could be spring break to. It has drastically reduced traffic on my commute; maybe a similar impact on forums?

These comments pretty much sum up my thoughts too. It's easy enough to find new topics on the forums, but not having my friends' forum posts on the main page is sort of a bummer. And I really wish there was an easy way to track my friends' status updates and blog posts. I'm hopeful these features will be reimplemented at some point, but it still feels to me like we're limping along after the redesign. G'bless the engineers, though. They've got one hell of a workload.

I'm not super active on the forums and I was pretty pissed about the the forum feed on the front page being removed. That was my main way of looking at forums here, but ever since the site change I actually have started looking at way more threads because of it. I actually click on the main forum page now and probably look at a good 15-30 more threads a day because of it.

But yah, I'm probably in the very small minority here on this subject.

Sorry to say, but I think they kinda fucked up removing the latest forum threads from the homepage. You wouldn't think that just one extra click could affect usage very much, but I really think it has. I don't know if they ever mentioned their reasoning for getting rid of it, but I really don't understand why.

Unless they were embarrassed by dumb topics showing up on their pretty homepage?

I made the mistake of putting Call of Duty 4 and Fallout 3 as favorite forums back in 2008 and was never able to figure out how to un-favorite them, so I never actually used the forum feed on the front page and have always clicked on the forum tab, so that hasn't necessarily been an issue.

The issue I do have is that I can't see the recent statuses or blogs of people I follow which has in turn made me less aware whenever @mento writes an interesting blog about... Virtual Mahjong or something that only gets a few comments before being bumped off the first page. It has significantly neutered the blogging community here and needs to be addressed. When will it be addressed? In like 6 months, or whenever they make the site stable and launch Comic Vine and whatnot.

I think there's good reason to believe that forum activity is a little down, but it's far from "way down". It's just still going through an adjustment period, as often happens after any big site redesign. For me, I'd enjoy if forum posts were put back on the front page, and I imagine that will certainly help once it returns.

I'm not certain what has specifically lowered replies to your threads so much, but to be honest, I think your threads have seemed less interesting and of general lower quality as of late. So, that could be part of it for you in particular.

This actually prompted me to search for topics I've created since the site launched, and maybe I'm overreacting. Most of my topics have actually gotten more replies than I remember.

Still, I certainly feel like the overall forum activity is down. I can only speak for myself, but I'm spending a lot less time posting replies to other peoples threads, and that's a little bit of a shame.

Ya not having the forum activity on the bottom I check them way less.

I think this is a combination of things. It's disheartening to spend hours writing something that you think is interesting and thought-provoking just to watch it get swallowed up by threads of people yelling at each other. But I really think it's the fact that, at least for me, we don't get messages if someone comments a blog or user review. I've had to get into the habit of checking my posts just to see if someone has contributed. It makes is difficult for me to engage with the few people that are talking back so that post gets swallowed up that much quicker.

@arbitrarywater: To be fair, most of my blogs only receive a handful of comments and then vanish, more so when I'm talking about Mahjong. But I absolutely see your point.

No-one's been more vocal about the lack of community features with the site's relaunch than I, but I simmered down a little once I figured out the engineers' itinerary was to launch GB, fix all its major stability issues and then move onto Comic Vine and repeat the process. Once all that's over with, I'm sure we'll be getting all these features back and returning to a level of functionality equivalent to the old site. The way I heard them tell it during the beta period, they did claim we'd have everything except for quests and achievement tracking once the dust had settled.

As for forums, I've noticed there isn't really a way to tell if a specific wiki page's forum has any new threads/posts unless they belong to one of the five featured games on the front page. People coalesce around the Off-Topic and General Discussion because there are always threads there, but to find any other new thread you're basically depending on clairvoyance. With the "popular wiki forums" section and notifications currently on the fritz, any thread posted outside that central hub is kind of dead before it even begins.

Yeah I haven't been that active due to the new redesign.

Wait for E3.

that makes sense too.

That's how all blogs work, don't they? The only exception I've seen is my Persona 3 screenshot thing, and that's only because I bump it every day.

@video_game_king: That's been my experience, sure. I mean, to briefly dispense with this whole persecution complex I seem to have acquired all of a sudden, while a blog is generally a better read than the original post of any given thread, the latter is often more conducive to leading a conversation. I could spend a few thousand words on whatever I'm playing right now, but without any open-ended "what do you think about X?" or "have you guys played anything good with Y in it?" type questions they don't really go anywhere comment-wise. I can only imagine it gets even tougher to engender meaningful conversation when your subject material is over 20 years old and only available in Japanese.

Still, I come to this site (secondarily, granted; I need my weekly fill of Vinny goshdarnit) to write and read blogs. The more bloggers there are, the more likely you are to find people who like the same games as you that you can compare notes with, and even more people that are into completely different arenas that are interesting to read about as a complete neophyte. Not to toot our collective horns or anything, but that's kind of important for a site like this that has such a small professional team that cannot possibly cover everything. I'm hoping the site will continue to improve with that necessary community aspect in mind.

I'm pretty sure I have evidence to the contrary on that front.....I got quite a few comments out of stuff like Trip World and Syd of Valis and that crappy N64 Evangelion game. But for the most part, yea, it's hard to predict what's going to get a lot of comments and what's going to fall to the wayside. My only constants are controversy and (more recently) some strange combination of a blind LP and an abridged series. Like a Brief Jaunt, only with greater longevity.

As for the other thing, yea, I'd say we're a community of bloggers if that feature was promoted more. I'd bitch about that, but my pet bitching project is the image system. WHY CAN I ONLY CAPTION ONE IMAGE AT A TIME?!

Yeah, I think part of it is about perception. Most people have noticed that it's down, but sometimes even just a little down can feel like something bigger. I'm guessing that, post for post, forum activity isn't very down. It's probably more of a simple down time in comparison to what we used to consider the norm. Which, as noted before, may be related to the site redesign as much as forum posts being taken off the front page. Forums and sites almost always see a temporary downturn in commentary when redesigns occur, as commentary is often based on the ease with which someone can post a comment. When they have to rethink how they're doing it, that can have a significant impact on how readily someone goes through with a comment. Though, that tends to level off eventually as the new becomes the norm.

So, I wouldn't worry too much and just give it more time. :)

As others have said, the recent site redesign has kinda killed social interaction a bit on the site. I miss seeing threads on the front page, recent blogs, all that stuff. As someone who has used the forums a looooot since the site first launched, it's odd how disconnected I feel now.

I used to only hit the front page and check the top threads in the general forum that were listed on there. It's an extra couple of steps now and I usually don't even think about it except every couple days or so.

I just noticed some cool stuff that made me want to go back and revise this post:

PM's now have timestamps on each post like they used to, which is awesome. Plus, when a new post is made in a PM they are bumped to the top of your inbox correctly. Thanks Top Men!