Exilian
Announcements and Articles: The Gatehouse Quarter => The Welcome Hall - Start Here! => Topic started by: Koobazaur on September 03, 2015, 02:34:13 AM
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Hello folks!
Someone recommended this forums as a nice bunch of chaps so I figured I'd check it out. I see the forums are quite bustling :)
I am a Polish-American, freelance Video Game and Web Developer, occasionally working as a Cinematographer as well. I love traveling, having spent the past decade living all across the US, Poland, Japan, North Ireland, Scotland, India, Costa Rica, among others. Also, I really like biking.
So that's my little spiel! I have released my first indie game 2 years back and getting close to releasing the second, so I might post it in the indie dev forum at another time. Wanna get my bearings around here first.
Koob out!
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Hello there! How have you managed to live in so many places?? Isn't that hell with visas etc.?
I'm dating a Polish girl and we were just in Poland visiting her family last month.
Welcome to the E! :)
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Welcome to Exilian! I think you'll find plenty of interesting things here - please feel free to ask if you have any questions.
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Welcome, lovely to meet you and I hope you stick around :) Do ask if you have any questions at any point about the site and how it works and so on!
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Thanks for the welcome :) This looks like a cool bunch but I am looking through the forums and seems like many are pretty quiet these days :/ Did I miss the haydays ?
Hello there! How have you managed to live in so many places?? Isn't that hell with visas etc.?
Honestly, most of it wasn't really on purpose. I came to US from Poland and moved to a few states because of my parent's work situation. Then my college made me do study abroad, and towards the end I got a scholarship for a school in North Ireland. Then my friend in India invited me to come and stay with him until I get bored and, hey, it was on the way back anyway so why not?
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We've definitely been through high and low patches - which always happens in a community that exists as long as we have, we're seven and a half years old or thereabouts now - and we're far from a high at the moment. I guess we used to rely on game modding for a great deal of our activity, and so we're going through something of a recession as those sections are drying up but we haven't built up so much of a community around our newer focusses on indie games, mythology, boardgames etc. So I'd say we're kinda in a transitional phase at the moment which is making life quite difficult for us; on the other hand the community is in many ways better equipped than it used to be when we were just a modding forum, given we now have our own financial resources and do a yearly convention and suchlike. Basically yes we're in a lull, but it's a transitional lull rather than a permanent slump (and you can help kick us out of it again!) :)
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Jubal - ah that makes sense, the ebbs and flows! I've been part of some other online communities for a good 10 years now as well, so know what you mean. A lot of people also moved to Facebook, Twitter or reddit in lieu of traditional bulletin forums as their primary source of online community interaction I guess.
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Yeah; we've lasted a lot longer than some other much larger sites somehow, I think partly because we have a fairly solid core based around the site being democratically run and with quite a range of interests represented, so the old hands all have more investment in the place than is the case with some of the big old fan sites.
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I would like to make a suggestion to help boost your community. Frankly, as a newcomer, I feel it's extremely fructured. There already are a lot of different boards, an then some have 5-10 sub-boards! But the real problem is that vast majority of them haven't seen any posts in months, if not longer.
I understand it might have made sense back in the day with a bustling community all across, but as it stands, it's just an extra communication barrier that is intimidating to new members. I'd highly suggest archiving all your sub-boards and just keeping the top-level boards. Heck, even merge those - out of the 6 top-level forums in "The Street of the Clerisy" there's only like 2 threads with any posts in the past week. I feel a single "Arts, History and Philosophy" forum would be sufficient for all the needs at the current participation level.
I know it's a huge thing to propose, especially from someone who doesn't know this community, but just thought I'd share my observation.
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Yeah, we've been slowly working on condensing a few bits over the last few months, and I think that's set to continue.
The idea of archiving more of the sub-boards is one I hadn't thought of, that's probably very much worth a look, thanks. I guess it depends on the area too - like in the old modding areas the sub-boards are quite necessary because each one holds a different mod, whereas I guess in, say, Total War discussion we should just archive them.