What's Missing?

Get creative feedback or just tell us your cat's name. Anything goes here!
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MikeQuell
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What's Missing?

Post by MikeQuell » October 6th, 2014, 7:30 am

Just polling to see how everyone's enjoying the forum. Personally (and I'm probably biased here), I'm loving it. I think it's a great format, even though it's dated, for finding or filtering through different discussions. I think the biggest issue the site is suffering from is quality content.

With that, what do you think we could do to get more traffic through the site and make it more active? I've considered migrating to another forum service that offers more "social" options for "liking" posts and such, but I'm not having much luck finding them. I'm also not even sure if that's something that even interest all of you.

What would make it more likely for you to post or start new threads on the site?

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JackMenhorn
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Re: What's Missing?

Post by JackMenhorn » October 8th, 2014, 8:12 am

I think what you got here is great.

I think any forum needs that critical mass of daily users to encourage other users to come daily and post/comment. As is I only come every 1-2 weeks to see whats up.

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MikeQuell
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Re: What's Missing?

Post by MikeQuell » October 8th, 2014, 12:06 pm

Is our industry and community too small to hit critical mass? What made something like Social Sound Design successful? I didn't use it much but it seemed pretty popular. I assumed it was the voting on questions/answers and the other "social" aspects.

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JackMenhorn
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Re: What's Missing?

Post by JackMenhorn » October 8th, 2014, 5:34 pm

Well it still exists right? http://sound.stackexchange.com/ So the questions are being asked there and not here. Same with reddit: http://www.reddit.com/r/GameAudio/ To be fair; in both cases there are a lot of "how i make bass drop soudn brah?".

I dont think we're too small. Game Audio Forum went strong for a long time. In my opinion just need to let people know the forum exists and that there is something of value here to come back to.

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MikeQuell
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Re: What's Missing?

Post by MikeQuell » October 8th, 2014, 6:29 pm

*Like* ;)

urbansteve
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Re: What's Missing?

Post by urbansteve » October 14th, 2014, 12:11 am

Honestly, I check in from time to time, but don't contribute much because I'm not certain if I'd be on topic being in tv/film and not games.

As for SSD, there was a mass exodus of talented professionals and amazingly active participators when SSD migrated to stackexchange and I miss the old community. Before the stackexhange takeover, the "dude-brah" bass-drop questions were at a minimum because the scope of the site was relatively narrow and off-topic questions were not really tolerated by the group. When SSD was in full swing I would visit the site almost daily, now it's once every 3-4 months.

As a user on SSD, I thought the Q&A format worked well. It was policed by the community at large plus a couple of dedicated moderators. The single, front page format was powerful and direct, allowing you to instantly understand what the site was and dive right in to the content. Tags easily allowed you to find on-topic questions quickly, you could "favorite" a particular question or answer to refer back to later, and if it ever devolved into a flame war (which was rare), the answers were voted down and eventually were either edited by the poster or disappeared off the site. It was a place that I visited daily because I either had a question that I was looking for an answer for, or I had down time and wanted to see if I could contribute.

But to echo Jack, I think that what you have here is a great site, I really like what you're attempting to do here, I just don't know what the secret ingredient that you're missing would be.

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MikeQuell
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Re: What's Missing?

Post by MikeQuell » October 14th, 2014, 11:13 am

urbansteve wrote:The single, front page format was powerful and direct, allowing you to instantly understand what the site was and dive right in to the content.
Ah! I like your feedback and observation on everything being on the front page. There are quite a few clicks to view what's current if you go through the different forums. The easiest way to do what you're expecting is click the different "View..." links underneath the logo banner at the top of the page. Maybe most people don't notice those?

The "favorite" feature on SSD sounds awesome. I've been trying to look into plug-ins for "liking" and favoriting posts but there isn't much support. I'm hoping to stumble across something soon.

Thanks for the feedback! :)

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