Wareve said:
I honestly don't think the Forums are what will bring people back though, not without substantial renovation, particularly with integrated Facebook comments under every video and article.
Want to know something interesting though? Videos, articles and pages already have Facebook comments underneath each page.
http://www.escapistmagazine.com/vid...st&utm_medium=index_carousel&utm_campaign=all
http://www.escapistmagazine.com/art...st&utm_medium=index_carousel&utm_campaign=all
http://www.escapistmagazine.com/art...st&utm_medium=index_carousel&utm_campaign=all
Just scroll down and you'll find the Facebook integration somewhere in between all sorts of other junk.
My question would be, though, how inclined are people on an anonymous forum to start using the less-anonymous Facebook for interaction? One drawing point of forums such as these is that they allow for a great amount of anonymity, whereas Facebook is often used in conjunction to people's real lives, they have their real life friends, family and parents on Facebook, people might feel more restricted using Facebook than a relative anonymous Escapist account.
Aside from that, yeah, as it is now, Facebook comments are squished in somewhere on the page, there is no focus on the comments, nothing that invites people to use them.
On the Yahtzee video, there is a whole screen's height ( running 1920x1080 ) worth of junk between the video and the comments. On the other two pages the Facebook comments section is 30% of site in width, squished between a flurry or colorful and distracting images.
Wareve said:
bluegate said:
I feel that the set up of forums such as these are a bit outdated in terms of means of communication. Say what you like about sites such as Reddit, Up Vote and Down Vote systems and sub-threading of comments can be used to great effect to keep conversations concentrated, efficient and more importantly keep people engaged with eachother.
So we can add "Updated Forum Functionality" to the list of upgrades that would make the site more appealing.
On that note, what do you guys think about the importance of Content vs. Community?
Like, if you were to go to The Escapist's owners and pitch to them, would you say they should first focus on creating Content so people will come in the first place, or that they should focus first on updating the profiles/forums/accounts in order to facilitate the growth and sustaining of the community?
Personally I would say that both are important, both content and community. Content is what attracts people to your site, but you should have the appropriate infrastructure to facilitate the people coming in, and by that I don't mean server bandwidth and such, but a decently running, well designed website.
For example, mobile websites have been happening ever since around 2010, know when the Escapist went 'mobile'? 2015 [http://www.escapistmagazine.com/news/view/140536-The-Escapist-Launches-a-New-Mobile-Friendly-Site-Design], and it isn't even a proper mobile website, quite a few bugs and icky parts, the forums are just the same, but squished into your phone's screen, it is very lackluster and a product that I would have expected in 2008, not 2015.
I made some mentions of things I ran into in their forum and even mentioned some things in the Tech Team, but nothing was ever done with it. In the end I just created a custom plugin [http://www.escapistmagazine.com/forums/read/18.932165-The-Escapist-Mobile-Userstyle] that I now personally use on my mobile device to browse the escapist somewhat properly.
Hero of Lime said:
I definitely agree, there needed to be a way to up vote comments you like at least. That way, you could communicate that you are reading people's posts. I see lots of posts I could respond to, but it would likely be more trouble than it's worth. Say if I agree with a post, being able to upvote it would be better than just saying "I agree with you." like you mentioned.
Adding such a system for better feedback would make the forums here so much more fun to peruse.
Seeing how the Tech Team is gone nowadays, such a system could easily be added through a browser plugin, I whipped up a small PoC the other day for funzies, but a plugin would require people to use a browser that supports plugins ( ex. Chrome or Firefox ) and only people having the plugin installed would be able to see and make use of it, so it wholly depends on community participation whether such a system could work out or not at this point.