As a favor for my brother, I'd like to pose a question to the .org: what makes this a great site?
More specifically, I should say that he's a mod over on GameZone, and the site seems to be having issues with activity and attendance lately. So, he asked me to try and get some constructive criticism on what makes the .org a great place to be, since he apparently mentioned to his admin that this site is successful. I've already given him some suggestions myself, but I thought input from the other members would be beneficial.
So, what specific things do you really like about the way this site handles itself?
Please try to give me serious answers, and try to avoid just flaming this site or GameZone (yes, frequent flyer spammers, this means you).
Thanks for anything you can offer.
- Jen
What Makes the .org Great
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dj_ultima_the_great
- Joined: Mon Dec 22, 2003 7:52 pm
- Status: Resident Videogame Editor
- Location: Wisconsin
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Scintilla
- (for EXTREME)
- Joined: Mon Mar 31, 2003 8:47 pm
- Status: Quo
- Location: New Jersey
- Contact:
The site has a huge database of information on our main topic of discussion, and it was instituted at an early enough stage in the fandom's development that it was able to establish itself as THE place to go for AMVs, a centralized hub for the community.
Not only that, but we also provide content. Terabytes of it.
And the staff are generally competent, fair, and approachable.
Not only that, but we also provide content. Terabytes of it.
And the staff are generally competent, fair, and approachable.
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AMV_4000
- Joined: Wed Apr 10, 2002 6:29 am
- Location: USA
- Contact:
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Scintilla
- (for EXTREME)
- Joined: Mon Mar 31, 2003 8:47 pm
- Status: Quo
- Location: New Jersey
- Contact:
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Chicken993_4eva
- Joined: Sat Jan 20, 2007 2:00 pm
- Location: Somewhere overthere.
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BasharOfTheAges
- Just zis guy, you know?
- Joined: Tue Sep 14, 2004 11:32 pm
- Status: Breathing
- Location: Merrimack, NH
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CrackTheSky
- has trust issues
- Joined: Sun Aug 27, 2006 11:01 pm
- Status: Maybe editing?
- Location: Chicago
This place is great because of the people. I might even say that I don't really like this site for the AMVs. Sure, it'd be a cool site if it all it offered was a wealth of videos, but honestly it's the people here that make it. The only reason I'm still here, heck the only reason I'm on the forums at all is because a few people were nice to me and encouraged me; since then I've met a ton of really cool and interesting people on the .org, and made a bunch of friends. Without these people I'd probably have forgotten about the .org by now. But the editors and the regulars here make this site worth visiting, and without a doubt make this site great.
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godix
- a disturbed member
- Joined: Sat Aug 03, 2002 12:13 am
There are hundreds of sites about gaming. There's only a handful of sites about AMVs of those almost all are for a specific creator/studio. Part of the reason the org is successful is that there's no where else to go for general AMV discussions.
Although the very active moderation does a lot to help, strange as that might seem coming from me. On other forums I've seem spam and obvious crap will linger for days until one of the admins see it but around here it just doesn't stay around long enough to stink up the place. OTOH the users are given a fair amount of freedom. Compared of other sites this one is a little overzealous about OT but overall it's fair. So a relatively large and active set of mods is quite helpful.
Although the very active moderation does a lot to help, strange as that might seem coming from me. On other forums I've seem spam and obvious crap will linger for days until one of the admins see it but around here it just doesn't stay around long enough to stink up the place. OTOH the users are given a fair amount of freedom. Compared of other sites this one is a little overzealous about OT but overall it's fair. So a relatively large and active set of mods is quite helpful.
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inthesto
- Beef Basket
- Joined: Sat Mar 13, 2004 10:27 am
- Status: PARTIES
- Location: PARTIES
Off of the top of my head, I think I can argue that the ability to socialize is a giant factor. To illustrate my point, I'll use anecdotal evidence from my own experience:
Long before I even knew what an AMV was, I was a regular poster on the GameFAQs forum, specifically the social forum "Current Events" (henceforth referred to as "CE"). It was (and I believe still is) the most active forum on the entire site, but despite this, I knew just about every screenname that visited on a regular basis. The activity had nothing to do with sheer volume of users - in fact, I doubt there were any more than 100 users who were frequents there - but more to do with how tightly-knit the community was. By the time I started visiting CE on a regular basis, there was already a handful of users who knew each other's personal lives fairly well, and most of it was due to one user posting a daily topic titled "Anyone Up?" All it was was one guy posting about the progress in his gaming and his personal life and asking people to do the same. Naturally, people became close over time - at least, as close as people could be over the internet six or seven years ago.
Of course, social groups don't last forever, and certainly not online ones. People on CE come and go for one reason or another - a new job, moving across the country, or a new kid means you can't pay attention to the internet as much, and by the time you're back in full throttle, all your old friends have vamooshed. Even then, when one social circle on CE disappeared, another one filled in the void, by force of habit, if nothing else. To frame the peroid of time when I was one of "the" guys on CE, the big thing around was Counter-Strike. One dude would host his own private server with eight slots, and the rest of us would go into a feeding frenzy to join before the server filled up. After the games were played and done, we'd go right back to the forum and have an awesome thread about the wacky moments we had and post all the sweet screenshots of some guy getting stuck in the toilet or the entire terrorist team creating a five-man stack. Literally, about ten to fifteen people would fill a thread with over five hundred posts, doing what was effectively nothing more than chilling out online. Later, when Counter-Strike had met the last of its runs, we moved onto other Half-Life mods - Science & Industry, Natural Selection, The Specialists...the list goes on, and god damn did a lot of them suck. But fuck it, we played them because it was how we hung out with online buddies. And of course, the circle of HL mod players eventually filled up and left for better things, but another circle filled in the gap, to do whatever it is they do now (I believe it's fabricate incestuous fiction, but I haven't read anything there for at least two years now).
Now, how does this apply to the Org? It's not immediately obvious, since the Org has lacked a social forum since I've been here - something that used to get on my nerves, since I figured it to be impossible to get "into" an online community without being able to freely talk about what video games I've been playing the past week or what an awesome bike ride I had last night. However, the Org has places for socialization other than its own forums, the two most notable being the IRC channel and the site journals. I know a good portion of the regular Org forum posters can be attributed to one of those two sub-communities, which shouldn't come across as a coincidence. Ever notice how an AMV announcement can rack up an incredible amount of replies in almost no time at all? Chances are, it's either an IRC regular with all of his/her buddies grabbing it hot off the press, or somebody in IRC was impressed enough with the video to pimp it out in the channel. I mean, if you want a sense of how the IRC channel functions as a sub-community, most of us spend hours each day playing online golf with each other.
If that doesn't convince you, then also consider this: As AMV editors, we're very likely to attend anime conventions, just for that surge of seeing our own work on the big screen. What this means is that we're also very likely to run into each other, and interact face to face. Case in point, AWA has an (unofficial) event dedicated to just AMV editors going out and grabbing dinner in one gigantor group. Just sharing a hotel room with somebody for a weekend is a bonding experience that runs deep - and that goes double for every hilarious story you get to tell because of it. Even if the Org doesn't have a real socialization area (although the Donator's Forum is a recent if exclusive remedy), the problem is highly mitigated simply because of the nature of the hobby.
Now, to address the latent question of the inactivity at GameZone's forums, there appears to be another element involved. While GZ looks like it has its own general social forums, I think there's a bigger issue at hand, namely that the site as a whole is so generic in a fiercely competitive arena - just about everybody and their zombie bondage donkey has a website about video games. To contrast, the Org is pretty much the single "authority" on AMVs - other websites are usually just studios sites for off-site hosting and point back to the Org. The only "competitor" would be j00Tube, which can't even hold a candle due to the utter lack of cohesion in its community and its much more generalized focus. On the flip side, while GameFAQs is also in the video game website business, it's also the undisputed heavyweght champion when it comes to getting help in video games. GameFAQs can draw in tons of users solely due to its database of FAQs and guides (and the forum merger with GameSpot doesn't hurt either), a certain percentage of which will stick, just because that's what they do. Now, compare this to Game Zone, a website about video games which probably has very little unqiue about it in the macroscopic sense - it's just not going to draw a whole lot of users. Checking some quick stats, it looks like GZ has had a bit over 6000 users over the course of three years - that's six users a day, not discounting the inevitable legions of people who register, post once, and vanish. In a community that size, even with dedicated social forums, activity just won't be happening all that much. Please note that I'm not really trying to rag on GZ - hell, more active forums aren't always better; just ask a GameFAQs moderator the kind of crap they get to put up with - so much as I am explaining its state as best as I can reason it.
Long before I even knew what an AMV was, I was a regular poster on the GameFAQs forum, specifically the social forum "Current Events" (henceforth referred to as "CE"). It was (and I believe still is) the most active forum on the entire site, but despite this, I knew just about every screenname that visited on a regular basis. The activity had nothing to do with sheer volume of users - in fact, I doubt there were any more than 100 users who were frequents there - but more to do with how tightly-knit the community was. By the time I started visiting CE on a regular basis, there was already a handful of users who knew each other's personal lives fairly well, and most of it was due to one user posting a daily topic titled "Anyone Up?" All it was was one guy posting about the progress in his gaming and his personal life and asking people to do the same. Naturally, people became close over time - at least, as close as people could be over the internet six or seven years ago.
Of course, social groups don't last forever, and certainly not online ones. People on CE come and go for one reason or another - a new job, moving across the country, or a new kid means you can't pay attention to the internet as much, and by the time you're back in full throttle, all your old friends have vamooshed. Even then, when one social circle on CE disappeared, another one filled in the void, by force of habit, if nothing else. To frame the peroid of time when I was one of "the" guys on CE, the big thing around was Counter-Strike. One dude would host his own private server with eight slots, and the rest of us would go into a feeding frenzy to join before the server filled up. After the games were played and done, we'd go right back to the forum and have an awesome thread about the wacky moments we had and post all the sweet screenshots of some guy getting stuck in the toilet or the entire terrorist team creating a five-man stack. Literally, about ten to fifteen people would fill a thread with over five hundred posts, doing what was effectively nothing more than chilling out online. Later, when Counter-Strike had met the last of its runs, we moved onto other Half-Life mods - Science & Industry, Natural Selection, The Specialists...the list goes on, and god damn did a lot of them suck. But fuck it, we played them because it was how we hung out with online buddies. And of course, the circle of HL mod players eventually filled up and left for better things, but another circle filled in the gap, to do whatever it is they do now (I believe it's fabricate incestuous fiction, but I haven't read anything there for at least two years now).
Now, how does this apply to the Org? It's not immediately obvious, since the Org has lacked a social forum since I've been here - something that used to get on my nerves, since I figured it to be impossible to get "into" an online community without being able to freely talk about what video games I've been playing the past week or what an awesome bike ride I had last night. However, the Org has places for socialization other than its own forums, the two most notable being the IRC channel and the site journals. I know a good portion of the regular Org forum posters can be attributed to one of those two sub-communities, which shouldn't come across as a coincidence. Ever notice how an AMV announcement can rack up an incredible amount of replies in almost no time at all? Chances are, it's either an IRC regular with all of his/her buddies grabbing it hot off the press, or somebody in IRC was impressed enough with the video to pimp it out in the channel. I mean, if you want a sense of how the IRC channel functions as a sub-community, most of us spend hours each day playing online golf with each other.
If that doesn't convince you, then also consider this: As AMV editors, we're very likely to attend anime conventions, just for that surge of seeing our own work on the big screen. What this means is that we're also very likely to run into each other, and interact face to face. Case in point, AWA has an (unofficial) event dedicated to just AMV editors going out and grabbing dinner in one gigantor group. Just sharing a hotel room with somebody for a weekend is a bonding experience that runs deep - and that goes double for every hilarious story you get to tell because of it. Even if the Org doesn't have a real socialization area (although the Donator's Forum is a recent if exclusive remedy), the problem is highly mitigated simply because of the nature of the hobby.
Now, to address the latent question of the inactivity at GameZone's forums, there appears to be another element involved. While GZ looks like it has its own general social forums, I think there's a bigger issue at hand, namely that the site as a whole is so generic in a fiercely competitive arena - just about everybody and their zombie bondage donkey has a website about video games. To contrast, the Org is pretty much the single "authority" on AMVs - other websites are usually just studios sites for off-site hosting and point back to the Org. The only "competitor" would be j00Tube, which can't even hold a candle due to the utter lack of cohesion in its community and its much more generalized focus. On the flip side, while GameFAQs is also in the video game website business, it's also the undisputed heavyweght champion when it comes to getting help in video games. GameFAQs can draw in tons of users solely due to its database of FAQs and guides (and the forum merger with GameSpot doesn't hurt either), a certain percentage of which will stick, just because that's what they do. Now, compare this to Game Zone, a website about video games which probably has very little unqiue about it in the macroscopic sense - it's just not going to draw a whole lot of users. Checking some quick stats, it looks like GZ has had a bit over 6000 users over the course of three years - that's six users a day, not discounting the inevitable legions of people who register, post once, and vanish. In a community that size, even with dedicated social forums, activity just won't be happening all that much. Please note that I'm not really trying to rag on GZ - hell, more active forums aren't always better; just ask a GameFAQs moderator the kind of crap they get to put up with - so much as I am explaining its state as best as I can reason it.
Sukunai, Real Canadian Hero wrote:Note to any Muslims present. Abuse a female in my presence, and you are being sent to a hospital emergency ward with life threatening injuries. And no human law will make me change my mind.