Site Direction: Everyone Get in Here

Why hello there

There are a few things that we all need to discuss/ gather opinion on, and a few other things that we need to do re: site staff.

For those of you that are semi-new to the site, we have the Our Site thread, which you may not have seen. The general gist of this is that everyone who is interested is able to share their opinion about our coverage of content. Call this thread a short blast version of that - to be honest, if I thought people would check the "our site" thread I'd be posting this in there, but a new thread is always a good way to engage people and hear opinions on certain things.

Our site content in the past year has been phenomenal, and that's mainly down to Shademp and all of the amazing stuff he does, Tres and his engrossing articles, and Flintlock's Weekly Roundups.

However, something we need to be careful of is stagnation - we have been slow in some sense for a little while now, and I will absolutely take the hit for that. Aaron does a lot forum-wise for activity, and everyone contributes to activity on the forum in a good way by creating threads and keeping the discussion going. I'm not worried about the forum dying, but it has also been a little slow for a while too.

Some Site Contributors have indicated that lack of recognition has resulted in a bit of a lack of motivation/ want to contribute, and this is totally understandable. I want candid discussion about what we can do about this. The following is something I suggested recently:

I said:

I do think some change is needed, but I also think you know as well as I do that the anarchic model is supported or is going to be continuously supported by the majority and it'd be foolish to impose a new strict schedule and hierarchy on people if it's not what the majority of both site staff and member base think is going to be good for the site.

It would be good for the site to have regular content and opinion pieces and news updates, but it's not pleasant for staff who are used to the easy going model to conform to that if they don't want to. And if some people support it and others don't, it could become messy re: tensions about people "not pulling their weight" which we don't have right now because we're laid back about it.

A compromise is a trial period of regularly scheduled content I suppose, but the problem with that is that we have the roundups as evidence that trying to manufacture content - while it might be good for the site - is bad for motivation and enjoyment and engagement of the staff who are writing them. Perhaps I should have been more strict or taken on the job of doing them entirely by myself, but I felt in part that they were your baby and they grew to annoy me so much that I was happy to kind of let them die since nobody enjoyed doing them (and I apologise for that, because they were a great idea).

Another solution is to suggest new rules for site contributors - the exceptions being Fangu, Shademp and Pixel due to contributing in ways that are not writing - that a number of contributions must be made in a given timeframe or they risk losing site contributor status. This will lose some staff but can only really have an overall positive impact, because it motivates people to contribute if they actually want to keep contributing and those who lose the status don't care so are happy to lose it.

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Essentially, we need a shake-up in how we handle our content. I had a date in my head (December 10th) to go through our site staff and contact them like I did before, but I can certainly do this earlier and think we should all have a clear idea in our heads about where we're going, how we want to handle content from here on out, see if anyone's up for writing, see if anyone doesn't want to write anymore etc. before we head into the new year.

As I mentioned, we had the roundups which were great. What they weren't was fun for staff to do - as any staff member who did them (Flint, Tres, Me, Dark and Divine - I think Force did one too) can tell you, they became boring very very quickly. And since it was just general news, it's hardly going to generate a lot of interest even if they look nice and keep the front page updated. We're not getting paid, so the recognition is really the only motivation we have, and if people aren't too interested in the content, motivation just disappears.

If anyone would like to offer suggestions, or comment on any of my suggestions, or even suggest content coverage that you think would engage people, please do.

I think the suggestion you (I think?) made in staff to expand coverage to the whole Final Fantasy series isn't a bad one. There isn't any Compilation news lately, and while Shademp and others sometimes come up with new content in FFVII, this doesn't happen often enough to keep the front page active. The question, of course, is which games we try to cover and how. Publishing translations of all the supplemental material for other games in the series might be a nice first step. We could even expand coverage to Bravely Default if people thought that was a good idea too.

Beyond that, I've been reading everything you guys have posted and trying to come up with something relevant to say and... I've got nothin'. This is why I'm not site staff; I'm afraid I'm just not terribly adept at coming up with original content for a front site, which is why FG has nearly nothing on its blog despite being almost twelve years old.

Okay, probably a stupid question here, but - what is Bravely Default?

Secondly, I like your suggestion, Aaron.

Third, I don't have any ideas of my own currently, but I will sleep on it and see. In the meantime, I'm willing to offer help - if people want to delegate tasks to me I'd be willing to do 'em (assuming I know how, e.g. I understand the idea of programming but I'm absolute shite at it) whenever I have time. Which I'd be willing to make for this.

Bravely Default is a recently released 3DS game by Square Enix that was intended to go back to the roots of the Final Fantasy series. It's generally considered a smashing success in that regard, although I haven't played it because I don't have a 3DS.

While moving to non-FFVII content is something I suggested in the staff thread, it's not something I necessarily would like to do, but the floor is open to see if people are open to the idea. This also isn't the first time someone has suggested we move to non-VII content.

My issue with doing non-VII content is simply that in the case of Bravely Default... if I was someone who checked thelifestream.net every now and again for an update, eagerly awaiting their next article or thing, I'd probably be annoyed if I saw an article that was talking about Bravely Default or random Bravely Default news on its own, but that's just me.

Any translations we produce are always going to have space on the front page and site, no matter what game they come from.

One possibility is that we could use tags for different games and then people could filter out non-FFVII content if they wanted. I'm not sure how easy that would be to implement at site level though. Yop or someone else who's familiar with the site manager software will have to speak to that. I could try to write something for it to make it able to do that if it's in the right language, but I'm probably not a competent programmer enough to pull that off without a hitch yet. *shrug*

Here are some things we can discuss in this thread.

Site focus
I understand that there is not much FFVII/Compilation (I'll just call it "VII" to keep it short) news nowadays. As a fan of the whole series, I don't mind seeing non-VII news on the front page, and have even written some myself. I do think we should always keep VII as our primary focus, though. Without that, we lose our niche. There are plenty of other general FF sites out there that already have a lot more content than us. The difficulty is finding a balance between VII and everything else. What does our audience want? I wish I had access to all the page view statistics instead of having to request them (which I think I've done twice), but my hunch is that they come here mainly for VII stuff. Which brings me to...

Organisation of existing content
A while ago there was some discussion about changing the way we present our articles to highlight the things that visitors are really interested in, like character profiles and opinion pieces (LTD, I'm looking at you). Nothing really came of that discussion, because...

Our front page redesign has stalled
We discussed this very recently, but we still haven't made a decision on what to do with the design or come up with an action plan for it. Are we going to abandon a new design and just make some small changes? Shall we leave things as they are? Or do we want a completely new design? If so, I think we should base it heavily on an existing WordPress theme to minimise our workload.

Site staff roles
Let's say we decide we are going to make at least minor changes to the front page design. Who is going to do it? Fangu has been responsible in the past, but I'm not sure how much she wants to do, or is available to do, right now. As for the rest of us, I know there are upsides to the laissez-faire policy we have at the moment - freedom to post whatever we want, basically - but personally, I know I'd work more if I had a designated area of responsibility and knew that other people were working on theirs at the same time. If we end up with something like that, I think I'd like to be responsible for community events. My CV: I ran the character competition a couple of years ago, I ran the most recent VII community playthrough, I organised the VII race, I started the "Seven" series of articles, I helped organise Friday night IRC hangouts and wrote Sephibot, I organised staff meetings, I always welcomed new members and wished people happy birthdays in my roundups, I pushed us towards using more social networks and took joint responsibility for our Facebook page, and so on and so forth. This could really help with...

Staff motivation
We're not getting paid, and we're not sure how much our work is really wanted or appreciated, so what keeps us motivated? I think one thing that would keep me motivated is if there was a lot more integration between the forums and the front page. When I post an article on the front page I always make sure to post about it here, but it seldom generates any replies beyond "good work, Flint". While that's nice to hear, I wish everyone was more engaged. If I was community manager (insert better title here) I'd make sure they were

Forum structure
I'm aware I might be overreaching here, but isn't it about time we restructured the forums a little? A good target is for each forum to have roughly the same number of posts - on the same order of magnitude, at least. At time of writing, our forum post counts look like this:



The huge outlier is General Discussion. Maybe it's time to look into splitting it up a bit? We could also try to generate some discussion in the other forums by repurposing them, or even closing a couple of them. Do we still need the RP forum? It hasn't been active in a couple of years, save for a couple of spam threads. We should probably decide on our site focus first (see above) and then see if it warrants any changes.

There will probably be more things, but I think that's already a lot.

You might be wondering if we really need to make any changes; why bother going after new members when we can exist to serve our existing user base? It's a legitimate question, but a short-sighted one. I have seen forums like this one die slow deaths in the past when there is nothing driving new memberships. As much as we might all love this place right now, we'll pretty much all leave sooner or later. I bet everyone who has been here a decent length of time can think of at least one member whose posts they used to enjoy but who doesn't come here any more. I also bet we can think of a relatively new member whose arrival has brought something positive to our community. If we want to keep TLS an enjoyable place to be, we need to keep it active. For that we need new members, and for that we need new content I don't think we need scheduled content; we just need to re-establish a team of motivated people who can contribute regularly (we could ask for 4-6 articles a year to keep their staff status, unless they're contributing in other ways) and encourage everyone else to chip in when they can, perhaps by writing occasional articles.

I've been on a site that tried to do the 'sectioned front page' idea, but for one I've never used it, and two I never cared for it since I read / skimmed over all the news (although they usually have >15 news articles a day plus reviews/specials), not just the subsections catered to people with specific interests.

The only real way to steer the site is to use proper statistics, A/B testing, that kinda thing - or basically, start posting general FF news and measure how often those are read vs non-general-FF posts. That's the normal way to go if your goal is to increase / optimize readers, anyway.

But on the other side, optimization in that area turned TV channels like MTV and Discovery Channel into the atrocities they are today - MTV mostly. They've completely shifted from their (highly influential at the time) roots, i.e. music and pop culture, and turned to mostly shitty fake(d) real life soap series revolving about really deranged people. Discovery went from knowledge and scientific documentaries to staged shows about people trying and failing to get rich - really, every episode of every show is like OH NOES WE'RE ALMOST BANKRUPT AND EVERYTHING BREAKS DOWN, whilst disregarding the millions they're earning for having their amateuristic work put on camera.

erm. Yeah. [/rant]

You have my wholehearted support if you want to be "Community Manager", and it's a role I think we need. I'm sure Aaron can create a new User Group quite easily, assuming no one else wants the role.

I was just thinking we could be doing with another community playthrough soon

As for everything else you said, I pretty much agree with all of it. What do people think about "4-6 articles a year to keep their staff status, unless they're contributing in other ways"? This is something that I think is a good idea, but I'm thinking I'll do a quarterly "staff audit" check for 2 or 3 articles or something? I do think it'd be a good way to keep people motivated, even if it does sound a bit dull.

Re: forum sections, I'm okay with getting rid of the RP section, it was a niche forum for a group that really wanted it that since then has left. IDK about splitting up General Chat, I found that splitting it up into smaller sections usually hasn't had the desired effect, and it's hard to categorize threads in there, generally. This is mostly based on experience back on ACF though.

I'm not 100% sure it matters to me what the statistics look like re: which subsections are most active. Why is that important? The threads that have the most activity are always going to be the spam-lite threads where we all chat nonsense to each other (i.e. chit chat containing about 6 pages of chat about bacon and eggs).

I should emphasise that I was trying to start discussions, not put forward perfect solutions. I'd rather hear more ideas than replies to mine, though both are welcome, of course

Lex said:

I'm not 100% sure it matters to me what the statistics look like re: which subsections are most active. Why is that important? The threads that have the most activity are always going to be the spam-lite threads where we all chat nonsense to each other (i.e. chit chat containing about 6 pages of chat about bacon and eggs).

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It's more about presentation than anything else. I think a forum where every section is active looks a lot healthier and makes me want to contribute with new threads. Maybe it's just me.

I don't think that's just you at all, it makes perfect sense. But I also think a lot of it has to do with how you browse a forum, because I never ever ever look at the actual directory unless I'm making a new thread.

Until very recently, I paid no attention whatsoever to how the forum is split into sections. Since I joined I've clicked "New Posts" at the top and middle clicked on all the threads that interest me, responded or not bothered, then repeated the process. That's how I browse every forum I've ever been on actually. It's very very rare that I go to the directory, and I only go there if I'm specifically looking for something. And I never actually pay attention to thread or reply counts, my brain tends to hone in on words I'm looking for.

I'm probably the outlier there though, idk

I start at the index, I've never used the 'new posts' function. Ever. Then again, you can guarantee I'm going to be the contrary fucker.
Flint being a Community Manager sounds like a great idea IMO.
Bearing in mind that EGX is supposed to be moving to Brum, well, there's an obvious area where I can be of use when the time comes and I'm planning to go anyway, so I can probably pitch in at some point with some writing, but it literally would be just text and images and someone would need to do the honours with editing and uploading.

Also I know it was mentioned in Chit Chat and we do goof about in there, but merchandise. I really do think it might be an idea worth discussion if nothing else, we could name the section Wall Market and have an area for Compilation fans to buy and sell memorabilia like the Play Arts figures and so forth.

I honestly want to cover kingdom hearts, as it was the series that inspired me to forum on ff in the first place, when the contents become even more active. It's also a good reason for me to start contributing and the like though I dont know where to begin lulz.

Long post from me

On the subject of covering more non-VII games news, I honestly think we're missing a niche if we don't start including other FF Game news. While I agree it takes top priority and finally we do have something new in the compilation being released soon to talk about don't you think the site would also benefit if we put news about Type-0 or XV on there? There's a lot of people looking up news on this and I like to think that our members are on the ball when it comes to news items about these games, it might drum up some new members on the forums too and hits for the site.


I think it's great that VII and the compilation takes priority that's what I feel the heart of this site will always be and mean. I get excited when Shademp updates a post on something new he's found in the game with the amount of research he does and I enjoyed the most recent article about the VII-X link but eventually guys I think we're going to HAVE to start branching out otherwise it just becomes stagnant and people become disinterested in us as a news site, that's not to say we should branch out into every RPG that SE has out just FF ones. If it helps to see where I'm coming from we're like fourth on the google search engine for Final Fantasy VII forums, but we're not found until hallway through the 3rd page of searching Final Fantasy VII Sites. The forums are very popular, the front page not so much as a source of news of FFVII if you were just to type in those specifics in google.

Of course maybe that's just my way of thinking, maybe taking a poll would be a good idea to see how many members want a branch out from just reporting FFVII related news?

In terms of Site Contributors, absolutely they should received more recognition for what they do and I agree with the suggestions that if they aren't contributing enough in some way that their position should be considered. But I think we need people who want to do it or have the passion and drive to do it. I contributed to something FFVII related once but I know if I was asked now I just would be lacking in time and not really feeling it to do it, I'd be a disappointment at any rate

Finally again on thread and forum area splits, maybe again that's something to poll or discuss in full to see what people think should stay or go in the forum layout, though I think most of us would agree that the RP area has become quite redundant.

This thread commands my presence. And, I am here.

I know I haven't been really active for the past year or so. Ever since the last selection of new SMods, it's been fairly peaceful. Adding the fact that life has become quite mettlesome, I haven't made much of an effort to actually post. I have, however, checked in almost daily to read over threads and discussions here. But, it's probably a good time to change that approach.

As far as the forums go, I don't see anything wrong with the activity levels of each. As you'll find on most sites, the General Discussion forum is usually the most active. There's just too much to talk about. FF news cannot keep up with amount of world news and politics, and other relevant or irrelevant discussion that happens there. That's just a fact.

Cthulhu said:

Re: forum sections, I'm okay with getting rid of the RP section, it was a niche forum for a group that really wanted it that since then has left. IDK about splitting up General Chat, I found that splitting it up into smaller sections usually hasn't had the desired effect, and it's hard to categorize threads in there, generally. This is mostly based on experience back on ACF though.

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Quoted for truth.

Now, I've long supported the coverage of the entire FF series. I had made that suggestion several times in the past, and a great many were opposed to the idea. Usually because they didn't want the site to stray away from FFVII coverage. However, there's only so much news to expect for a title that's now 17 years old. I find that most fans of FFVII are fans of the FF series. Ultimately this is an FFVII site, but I don't see how posting a few FYIs about other titles in the series is going to lead us astray.

Lex said:

As I mentioned, we had the roundups which were great. What they weren't was fun for staff to do - as any staff member who did them (Flint, Tres, Me, I think Force did one too) can tell you, they became boring very very quickly.

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In the spirit of that recognition thing, just want to call attention to the fact that Dark and Divine did a number of those as well.

Lex said:

While moving to non-FFVII content is something I suggested in the staff thread, it's not something I necessarily would like to do, but the floor is open to see if people are open to the idea. This also isn't the first time someone has suggested we move to non-VII content.

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I've been advocating this for years.

Hell, if I'm being honest, my approach to site content has assumed this for years.

Lex said:

My issue with doing non-VII content is simply that in the case of Bravely Default... if I was someone who checked thelifestream.net every now and again for an update, eagerly awaiting their next article or thing, I'd probably be annoyed if I saw an article that was talking about Bravely Default or random Bravely Default news on its own, but that's just me.

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Well, you're weird.

Cthulhu said:

Re: forum sections, I'm okay with getting rid of the RP section, it was a niche forum for a group that really wanted it that since then has left. IDK about splitting up General Chat, I found that splitting it up into smaller sections usually hasn't had the desired effect, and it's hard to categorize threads in there, generally. This is mostly based on experience back on ACF though.

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Splitting it up seems an awful idea to me, especially if the purpose is to give the illusion of increased activity elsewhere around the forum.

Sticking News, Politics, Religion & Debate under Compilation General or some such isn't going to facilitate clarity or a good presentation.

Shub-Niggurath said:

I start at the index, I've never used the 'new posts' function. Ever. Then again, you can guarantee I'm going to be the contrary fucker.

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Same here.

Mage said:

Flint being a Community Manager sounds like a great idea IMO.

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Agreed again.

Rengar said:

I honestly want to cover kingdom hearts, as it was the series that inspired me to forum on ff in the first place, when the contents become even more active. It's also a good reason for me to start contributing and the like though I dont know where to begin lulz.

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Honestly, we're far too late to try being a definitive source for covering KH. We've been beaten to the punch on that years ago by more than one site, and would simply never catch up to what's already been done at this point (I'm speaking mostly of translations).

Thor said:

This thread commands my presence. And, I am here.

I know I haven't been really active for the past year or so. Ever since the last selection of new SMods, it's been fairly peaceful. Adding the fact that life has become quite mettlesome, I haven't made much of an effort to actually post. I have, however, checked in almost daily to read over threads and discussions here. But, it's probably a good time to change that approach.

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Along these lines, I should add that, though I've put out a lot of content over the past year, this is probably where you see things sharply dip off from me. I have no plans for any new articles, though I'll likely still help Shademp out with whatever he gets into.

Road said:

As far as the forums go, I don't see anything wrong with the activity levels of each. As you'll find on most sites, the General Discussion forum is usually the most active. There's just too much to talk about. FF news cannot keep up with amount of world news and politics, and other relevant or irrelevant discussion that happens there. That's just a fact.

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I... would update more often if there was a smooth way to develop new stuff. As it is now, the process is extremely inconvenient (check if test server is up, log into test server, check if test server is more or less up to date with prod server... blahblah). Like on my tumblr blog I just press "Edit HTML" and get wacking. Much more fun. If we had source control = an easier way to roll back php files if shit fails, it would be a hell of a lot easier to do anything. Because 'developing' right now is 30% programming and 70% fiddling with random shit and eh. That's time I'd rather spend grinding Panthers.

As said other places, 2012 was my year. I'm fine with not having the title right now. The stuff I did is getting old and depricated anyway - I'm sure I'll chuckle whenif I see the code again - like, how much I struggled for those few hundred lines.

Also, developing in Eclipse without any type of intellisense is awful and, again, a waste of time. /Tech rant

Sprites said:

On the subject of covering more non-VII games news, I honestly think we're missing a niche if we don't start including other FF Game news. While I agree it takes top priority and finally we do have something new in the compilation being released soon to talk about don't you think the site would also benefit if we put news about Type-0 or XV on there? There's a lot of people looking up news on this and I like to think that our members are on the ball when it comes to news items about these games, it might drum up some new members on the forums too and hits for the site.


I think it's great that VII and the compilation takes priority that's what I feel the heart of this site will always be and mean. I get excited when Shademp updates a post on something new he's found in the game with the amount of research he does and I enjoyed the most recent article about the VII-X link but eventually guys I think we're going to HAVE to start branching out otherwise it just becomes stagnant and people become disinterested in us as a news site

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I misread your post at first and thought it meant 'we'll miss out on our site as a niche if we start branching out' - which is exactly my opinion It's so easy to turn into samey-same and lose control with 'which of the n RPG's are we going to focus on'. We're a high quality VII site, it's what we are and imo, what we should aim to be. Do we really want to increase traffic just for the sake of increasing traffic? There's enough sites out there doing the exact same thing, and... I like keeping things tight. (Yes, Tres. )

The Twilight Mexican said:

In the spirit of that recognition thing, just want to call attention to the fact that Dark and Divine did a number of those as well.

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I honestly find it really sad/horrible that people keep forgetting about Dark and Divine

Re: splitting up General Discussion, I understand your reservations, but it would actually be really easy to achieve. We could put General Gaming on the front page of the forums, for example. It's currently a subsection of GD but would be our second most popular section on its own. Does it really need to be in GD?

Even if we don't make any changes, we could at least go through our list of stickied topics and figure out which ones still need to be stickied. I'm pretty sure this one doesn't, for example.

Splitting it could make it look nice. But I wouldn't know, I either use new posts or latest posts

Since I'm here for pretty much the GD and little else, I'd like to second what Yopy has said about splitting up that area. However, since this is a gaming site, I think general gaming should be more of a feature because it's what everyone has in common and current in their lives.

Regarding the chitchat of 6 pages on bacon and eggs thing. I can we not automatically delete forum posts that are 3-5 or more years old. Srsly, does anyone look at that stuff who isn't a stalker or a psycho? I get it's worth keeping if it's FF related but is it not just wasted space in General Discussion?

That's all I have to add. Oh except to Flint that motivation and recognition are closely tied. Is there a link to appropriate forum thread, comment box, thanks or rating facility on the articles, weekly roundups and stuff? I think feedback like that would motivate and direct the heck out of me.

I don't like deleting old posts. Besides sometimes I go back and look at my old posts for posterity's sake. Plus it would screw up the thanks/post statistics.

I didn't read a lot of this yet because I have to get ready for work; I just wanted to say that

Fangu said:

I honestly find it really sad/horrible that people keep forgetting about Dark and Divine

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So did I previously, and I've just gone and done it myself :/

Sorry Dark, I've updated my post.

Cab said:

Regarding the chitchat of 6 pages on bacon and eggs thing. I can we not automatically delete forum posts that are 3-5 or more years old. Srsly, does anyone look at that stuff who isn't a stalker or a psycho? I get it's worth keeping if it's FF related but is it not just wasted space in General Discussion?
.

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The other day I was searching for an old post of mine, and then there were like 30 odd posts with that specific keyword, anyway I found the post, but then I ended up reading a drama thread from like 4 years ago and getting all angried up about it again. So yeah. Nuke that shit from orbit, it's like keeping old 'loveletters' from a creepy ex

Edit: In light of wot Aaron said, I'm not so bothered about it that I think it should be gotten rid of at the expense of buggering up post/thanks counts and the enjoyment of those who like to reminisce. But obverously there is a load of stuff that needs to be archived - is there a way of automating that? And if so, if for example someone wanted to revive a thread (and it was relavant) could that be done?

RE: site direction, I honestly don't know. If we're trying to attract a whole bunch of new people then yes, we probably need to branch out past FFVII - maybe even gaming in general**? I dunno. But I think I prefer it - in terms of the forum anyway - where we get people who played and loved FFVII and then they come here and if they like it they stick around. Because this place has been pretty good for a very long time now - no major drama or shitfits - I can't say that wouldn't change if we had a huge influx of new people. I dunno, its hard to strike a balance I guess. We don't have 1000's of rules because everything just seems to find its own level, it's probably a lot easier for new people to fit in because there isn't millions of people all clamouring for attention.


**Although if we were to move into general gaming, it should only be people writing about stuff they're actually passionate about, there shouldn't be any obligation to cover everything y'know?

TLDR: I dunno I loik fings just the way they is