Regarding Future Website Redesign Plans

[Shin-AMV]

TACOS

[Pwolf]

First thing I'd like to be redesigned... edit button

[BasharOfTheAges]

If I had the means, and I've really thought about this, I would pay people to work on a redesign.

I may be able to compensate with tacos tho...

HI! I HEARD YOU'RE LOOKING FOR DEWELOPERS!

[CrazyDreamer]

Complaints about having tried to do things before and failed without a solid plan for doing things better are not constructive and may be disregarded. Similarly, complaints about the people involved when we don't know who they are are not constructive and may be disregarded. On the other hand, I do think that the demands for transparency indicate that something in that direction could be done to keep the community happier, and this site is about community, not just indexing, yes?

Things like identification of problems (with code or function), solutions, and a roadmap with milestones are necessary part of project development and management. If those things are being produced anyway, they can be posted, along with updates on progress when milestones are reached. Heck, you could even post any custom code to GitHub; the non-programmers might not understand any of it, but it will let people see progress being made and the computer scientists and information scientists who hang out here might have constructive suggestions, especially if there's a troublesome bug that needs more eyes. (This also makes it easier to have new people take over parts of the project if necessary.)

That being said, given the level of vitriol in this thread thus far, I can see the benefit of keeping the dev team isolated from potential harassment; you'll lower your burnout factor this way. Having a community manager posting announcements and skimming the threads to check for any constructive comments (and firewall the rest of the team from the rest of the comments) is a reasonable way of achieving transparency on the process without subjecting the team to unnecessary stress. This is a common method in environments like MMO development, which seems to have similar community reactions to any announcements of design changes.

[CrackTheSky]

Any sort of redesign at this point requires a complete refocus, as GQ stated. Personally, I'd like to see the catalog and video uploads go away. Focus the site on the forum, contests, and social events. Removing video uploads would remove the need for donations and open more options for the site, as far as where it could go without running into legal trouble (advertising at cons?).

I would hate to see this. Pretty much the only thing this place is useful for (to me) is the catalog and the ability to search for and find videos based on almost any criteria I would want. I still download videos and keep them on my HDD, so I'm probably in the minority as I know most people watch videos via streaming these days, but I love love love that I have unlimited access to over 100,000 individual AMVs that I can search for and find with relative ease, versus trying to find specific videos on YouTube which can be maddening. This website's greatest asset is the fact that there are so many videos on here available for download, a huge portion of which are not available anywhere else. Old videos whose editors have moved on to other things and who never bothered to upload to YouTube can be found on here, and although it may take accidentally stumbling across them to find them at all, the fact that thy're here means that there's some record of them which would be lost if the catalog and uploads were to go away. This, in my opinion, would massively suck.

The community is great too, and I do use this website for that as well, but let's face it, it's practically dead (until a topic like this is brought up, it would seem).

All that said, I'm curious to know the maintenance costs (assuming no failures or issues like we had earlier this year) per year, and how much money we have in reserve. In other words, if nothing were to change, how much longer could the .org survive before it could no longer be maintained financially? I understand if that's information you don't want to or can't share, but it's something I've always wondered about.

[Pwolf]

Any sort of redesign at this point requires a complete refocus, as GQ stated. Personally, I'd like to see the catalog and video uploads go away. Focus the site on the forum, contests, and social events. Removing video uploads would remove the need for donations and open more options for the site, as far as where it could go without running into legal trouble (advertising at cons?).

I would hate to see this.

let me rephrase that:

Personally, I'd like to see the catalog as it is now and video uploads go away.

I think it can be simplified and would love to see integration for video streaming services in lieu of getting rid of video uploads. There are a lot of services out there and youtube is by far the most popular. We should harness that resource rather then push it away.

[Farlo]

the video catalog and golden donut is the soul of the site, the community is the heart. Without the 2 there is no real point.

I love this site, back to the days of the Phorum. But the community just isn't what it used to be. As crackthesky said, its practically dead now days. If it can't be revived, upgrading the site and database will be for nothing.

[Sephirothskr]

-eats popcorn- some of yall need to chill out.

-resumes eating popcorn-

[Pwolf]

the video catalog and golden donut is the soul of the site, the community is the heart. Without the 2 there is no real point.

I love this site, back to the days of the Phorum. But the community just isn't what it used to be. As crackthesky said, its practically dead now days. If it can't be revived, upgrading the site and database will be for nothing.

Personally I would consider the community the soul. The community was alive and thriving way before the donut was introduced. We just had to do things the old fashioned way... you know buy your own damn hosting you damn youngin's!!! *shakes cane* We also burned CD/DVD's and handed them out at cons. Was a lot more sociable back then.

[BasharOfTheAges]

the video catalog and golden donut is the soul of the site, the community is the heart. Without the 2 there is no real point.

Well put.

I've yet to be convinced that the tech being old has anything to do people being here or not. The forums are the way they are because young people don't like forums. No matter what's done to the main site, you're not going to all of a sudden see a sustained spike in forum activity, so everything will seem just as dead. If that's the only metric of perceived success, then I'm sorry, but we're doomed to failure already.