Suggestions

[Barack Obama]

Oh, I didn't know that. When will this next version be applied?

[Petie]

It's not something we've really publicized much yet. It's currently under active development and we don't have an ETA at the moment.

[Fawfulthegreat64]

Oh, that sucks

I found this forum to be a very useful place to seek help and make suggestions, I know in the modern era everything's being replaced with Discord and stuff but idk I don't think Discord is a good replacement for online forum websites. Maybe it's my old-school brain but I still feel like forums are easier to navigate and access in-browser. I know Discord can be accessed in browser but it's not really designed primarily for that and I like everything being traditionally accessed in browser. (I'm just assuming that by "other systems" you likely mean Discord because that's what a lot of sites and communities have been doing lately, and I've struggled to keep up)

Anyway I actually came into this thread with a different suggestion idea. Since the queue is so long and seems to be growing at a faster pace than things are being approved at least on Models Resource, maybe putting a limit to how many pending submissions can be active per user, just temporarily until that number goes down again? Anyone who already has more pending submissions than that number would keep those in queue but not be able to submit any more, and if it was made transparent in an announcement/notice I doubt very many people would be angry about it if it helped the queue be processed faster.

[Petie]

I actually agree - I wish forums weren’t dead and I also don’t think Discord is a proper replacement for them but it is what it is and continuing to maintain this install is holding back what we could otherwise do with the sites so the silver lining is that ditching the forum will make for a better main site experience.

As for your suggestion, I feel like it’s been brought up before but all that would do is kick the problem down the road. Having less submissions in the queue at a time doesn’t make it more manageable - it just makes the number less scary. As it is now, submissions are sorted by date, oldest to newest, and by default prioritize ones with icons. That’s about all the optimization that I think can realistically make a difference on the queue size. What we actually need is more staff but finding people who are both qualified and willing to donate their time is no easy task.

[Aquatically404]

Here to say I prefer forums over Discord, it's a shame to see them die to the hands of Discord. Even though I've joined the server, I still prefer this to be kept alive. Whatever you guys are planning on doing I just hope we still have some form of forums (pun???)

[Petie]

The entire forum will be preserved in a read-only state but it will no longer be utilized moving forward. The plan is to migrate what isn't suitable for Discord over to a wiki that isn't tied into the sites (which means both will be easier to maintain).

[Sir Teatei Moonlight]

it seems difficult to enforce the idea of "anything useful that happens in the discord should also be placed on the wiki so people can actually find it (because discords can't be searched by engines or archived at all)"

[Petie]

The Discord is not replacing the forum - it's a supplement for communication only. The fact is, very little actually happens on the forum these days and anything important that needs to be documented can easily (and more accessibly) be done on a wiki.

[DioShiba]

Suppose I returned at the wrong time to the forums then huh.

I guess I shouldn’t be too surprised.. Many of the users who used to be regulars here splintered off doing their own thing or migrated to other communities. Myself having been maining Newgrounds forums for the past few years.

It sucks because the forums here actually were insanely helpful but I feel like what ended up leading upto this point was a combination of a fee different factors that no one could really agree on and the occasional bits of drama that would happen every now and then and ultimately, priorities changed. Even though discord wasn’t meant to be replacing the forum it did feel like some kind of nail in the coffin because most people are using the discord over the forums anyways… and it’s not even nearly as enjoyable of an experience on there compared to an old fashioned BBS since conversations happen at a faster rate for communities that have a following like TVGR does.

[applecuckoo]

As one of the newbies around here I'd much prefer to use a forum. Maybe we could migrate to something more modern like Discourse?

[Petie]

Do people really think we're closing the forum because we don't want it any more? This isn't about it not being the right software (never mind the fact that moving to Discourse, per your example, would cost a minimum of $100/month which is a senseless expense when we already manage our own servers and can install whatever we want) or Discord being better. It's about the fact that, with very few exceptions, forums are dead. No matter how much we don't want that to be the case, that's just kind of the way things are these days. Counting this post, there have been nine posts today total. Nine. This was once a thriving community and plenty of us will miss that but nothing over the years has managed to bring it back so it's time to move on.

With the new site, we don't want to have to worry about multiple user systems and make most people register for multiple accounts so we're choosing to do away with the forum. Even that isn't a perfect solution as, unless we can figure out some way to reliably tie MediaWiki to our custom user system, multiple accounts will still be required but far less people are likely to want to do anything but browse the wiki so registration isn't nearly as important as it would be on a forum.

To sum it up: Forums died a long time ago and nothing we've done has managed to bring ours back. We're choosing to discontinue our forum in favor of a more streamlined and manageable network of sites providing the content that the vast majority of our visitors actually come here for. It sucks, we agree, but it is what it is and continuing to devote development resources to maintaining a forum getting no more than a dozen posts in a given day just isn't worth it.

[DioShiba]

With all due respect Petie with how you are wording it this does make it sound like the forum is going to be closed eventually.

Usually when forums die that’s what tends to happen.maybe we are misinterpreting this but that’s where a lot of the confusion is stemming from.

Edit: I could talk about the factors on what led to the forums dying over the course of the years but the fact of the matter is I’m pretty sure most of the damage has been done without anything being addressed when these problems began to surface around 2015, probably even before that.

[Petie]

The confusion seems to be about why we're closing it, not that we're doing so, unless I'm missing something here. I'm also not referring to mistakes made specifically here (though I'm sure there were some) - forums kind of died off as a whole (there are exceptions, of course, but they are few and far between at this point).

If the concern is that the forums are going to be deleted though, I can offer at least a small bit of good news there - they won't be. They'll be closed but left online in a read-only state.

[DioShiba]

How is having the forums in a read only state any different from being deleted in regards to it being closed?

I get what you are saying that there is a difference between deleting the forums and leaving them open for those to read for the record. At the same time the latter doesn’t exactly imply anything different from the former when it comes to whether or not the forums are open for those to post.

Thats also being aware you’re not referring to any mistakes in the why they died off, that being brought up is solely my doing but I do feel that there is some relevancy to why it led to the forums dying since, when the community was thriving it was because many of us who have been here from the start were spriters and pixel artists and not just a couple of people who ripped graphics from the games.

[Petie]

I think there's an immediately apparent and significant difference between the forums being closed and being deleted. With deletion, the entire history is lost, some of which may still be valuable from a research or archival perspective whereas leaving it online but read-only at least prevents that loss so they imply entirely different things unless your only concern is being able to post at which point yet, they're the same. That said, the decision to close was made primarily because almost nobody posts and half of what we do here at this point is just clean up spam bots. A lack of posting isn't going to make a huge difference since activity here has all but ceased.

Is it possible that changes made earlier on could have helped keep the forum alive in the long-term? Absolutely. But I'd argue it's also unlikely. With forums as a whole becoming a thing of the past online and an interest in pixel art waning as well, I can't think of anything that would have kept this place up to its old levels of activity indefinitely. This back and forth between us is the most activity we've seen in a while (exaggerating but probably not far from the truth) and I still prefer this method of communication but the vast majority just don't.

If you have ideas for something that can be done to drive activity back here or some significant reason you can see to keep the forums open even after disconnecting them from the sites, I'm all ears.