What happened???

[Redrobes]

It could have been me that said it but I am repeating what Robbie has said to me. The forum version could be upgraded but I am led to believe that the awards system code was abandoned and there is no similar awards plug in for the next version of vBulletin. So if were ok to abandon the awards then we could upgrade but it seems to me that awards are fairly important part of peoples participation on the forum with challenges and their profile for getting commissions. My personal feeling is that its not the site design that is putting people off. I think people are abandoning the whole internet.

I head to the guild every day and see how things are and tidy stuff up but until this month I have not made a map in several years. So if you were only here to make maps and stopped then maybe there is no need to come here but as an admin I feel like I ought to turn up and make sure all is going fine. I have some ideas in my head where I think I would need to participate / interact more than i am now but until I get a block of free time then that just slides to the right indefinitely. Things just seem to pop up that need attending to and stops me from doing some of the back burner projects that I would like to have a go at. Big systems are just collapsing and leaving a mess and there is not enough time to clear it all up. Peoples expectations about what can be delivered in smaller and smaller timescales is beyond absurd. In the UK at least, but I believe this is a more global trend, fewer and fewer key people are holding up bigger and bigger systems and they are just walking away now, saying f this nonsense, and finding something less stressful to do.

[Voolf]

It could have been me that said it but I am repeating what Robbie has said to me. The forum version could be upgraded but I am led to believe that the awards system code was abandoned and there is no similar awards plug in for the next version of vBulletin. So if were ok to abandon the awards then we could upgrade but it seems to me that awards are fairly important part of peoples participation on the forum with challenges and their profile for getting commissions. My personal feeling is that its not the site design that is putting people off. I think people are abandoning the whole internet.

Ah right! that was one of te main reasons. Indeed, the reward system is an important part of the guild.
I agree that it's not the reason people are leaving the guild. I just though better functionality would invigorate it a bit.

[ebaynetflix]

I have found the decline of forums very sad to be honest as other forms of social media require extensive by-in and I've never seen community form quite as close knit as in forums. Discord chat rooms require intensive amount of time to stay in the know and don't properly catalogue information/conversation. I largely suspect the move from forums to Discords is more about low maintenance, high engagement, and high monetization rather than any actual benefit to the end user.

[wminish]

I have found the decline of forums very sad to be honest as other forms of social media require extensive by-in and I've never seen community form quite as close knit as in forums. Discord chat rooms require intensive amount of time to stay in the know and don't properly catalogue information/conversation. I largely suspect the move from forums to Discords is more about low maintenance, high engagement, and high monetization rather than any actual benefit to the end user.

Well said. In terms of discord, the time required to stay in the know has always been what has prevented me really getting into it. I thought that maybe I was just missing something that was obvious to people who were more familiar with that platform.

[Falconius]

Discord is just a more organized* chatroom, it's not really comparable to an online forum, which is more like an organized open e-mail room, or kind of like its namesake a forum.