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Hey guys. I'm thinking about taking some time to work on the site , and I'd like your input on what directions people would like the site to go, what things it does well and how it could do them better, what things it does badly and whether and how those efforts should be salvaged. Please understand that despite the shiny title, PiNG and AKo did not leave me all the keys to the kingdom and major feature additions such as a chat room are probably not within my power. That said, any and all suggestions are welcome, just don't expect miracles.
My thoughts:
I'd like to see the site become more integrated with the rest of the community sites. Our sister fansites all have their own things they do very well, whether it's the endgame discussion over at BG or the server communities over at Alla. To be honest, I've never been active on other sites so if something's going on on BG or PFA or what have you I hear about it hear first. I think it would be great if our front page had, alongside the official news, updates on the major events and goings on in other forums, the FFXI blogosphere, podcasts, etc. And to be clear, it's not my intention to try to duplicate or mirror the content or atmosphere of other sites. More to host a sortof jumping off point to where the action is in the FFXI world.
To the same end, I think we should trim sections and functions that are redundant with what other sites do. Our server forums for example just aren't used by our membership. 90% of the activity there, it seems to me, is from people coming in and remarking on how dead they are, which just gives them a poor impression of the site in general. The dats section is the same. It used to be a lot more active but then another site dedicated to that emerged and it kindof died off. I wasn't really involved in the wiki project and don't really understand its thesis, but imo whatever it was intended to do could be accomplished just as well by working with the existing wiki.
Another thing I'd like to do is to get back to the site's roots as an importer site and encourage more of a multicultural community, but I don't really know how to make the site more accessible to non-english speakers and the tradeoffs to make such a thing work may not be worth the gains. Just something to think about.
Then there are a couple bigger issues beyond minor tweaks and enhancements. One is our status as a premiere site, which lapsed some time ago.. Are we interested in reclaiming this status? As a non-premiere site we are left out of certain activities such as the Premiere Site Summit which broke the first information about mythic weapons as well as what little direct rapport we have with the developers as players. On the other hand, not having that title gives us a little more freedom with our content. We've drawn a hard line, for example, against discussing things such as windower on the basis of premiere site restrictions. I have no intention of letting this become a site for hacks and bots, but there are some tools and programs that I percieve as being in common use among PC players and that presents many valid topics of conversation. I don't see either direction as being more right or beneficial necessarily, it's just a matter of where we want to go together.
The other concern is our moderation style. We’ve kept it very casual in most cases with a team of moderators that operates on their own discretion under a loose set of guidelines. There are some areas of ambiguity in our rules such as what constitutes flaming and quite often people who find themselves on the wrong side of the line often feel like they’re being singled out unfairly. In some cases they’re not entirely wrong simply because we are so generally lax in enforcing the rules that very often posts that are just as bad get by without infraction. Obviously we want to enforce some degree of respect between members so we can’t just drop enforcement on flaming rules, but do we want to go the other way and enforce on a much stricter standard? If so we would want to draw up a clearer set of rules to replace the term “flaming.†In the same vein there’s the subject of trolling which many people will agree is as destructive or moreso than flaming, but is even harder to define since it’s often arguable whether a given post is just meant to get a rise out of someone or is presenting a real argument. Sometimes the answer is both. When do we enforce and under what criteria? Is this something we want a rule about? The purpose of the rules, after all, is to create a civil environment that everyone can enjoy. Users should have as much say in what constitutes acceptable behavior as the forum staff.
Going back to the lax enforcement, it’s been successful in that people can enjoy casual conversations here that are allowed to meander around on topic, but then again sometimes people want to have a serious conversation and such threads are very prone to getting derailed, taken over by tangential topics or just mired down in off topic commentary. Should we enforce OT more strictly? Would we want, perhaps, to have a Serious Business subforum like xkcd has, where we have a higher standard of post quality and more active (and intrusive) moderation?
So that wall of text is what’s been buzzing in my head today. I’d like to hear opinions on any and all of it and I’m sure there’s plenty of other things I didn’t think of. Also, if anyone has any particular skills with art or code or anything else that would be of value to the site they’d like to volunteer, please let me know.
My thoughts:
I'd like to see the site become more integrated with the rest of the community sites. Our sister fansites all have their own things they do very well, whether it's the endgame discussion over at BG or the server communities over at Alla. To be honest, I've never been active on other sites so if something's going on on BG or PFA or what have you I hear about it hear first. I think it would be great if our front page had, alongside the official news, updates on the major events and goings on in other forums, the FFXI blogosphere, podcasts, etc. And to be clear, it's not my intention to try to duplicate or mirror the content or atmosphere of other sites. More to host a sortof jumping off point to where the action is in the FFXI world.
To the same end, I think we should trim sections and functions that are redundant with what other sites do. Our server forums for example just aren't used by our membership. 90% of the activity there, it seems to me, is from people coming in and remarking on how dead they are, which just gives them a poor impression of the site in general. The dats section is the same. It used to be a lot more active but then another site dedicated to that emerged and it kindof died off. I wasn't really involved in the wiki project and don't really understand its thesis, but imo whatever it was intended to do could be accomplished just as well by working with the existing wiki.
Another thing I'd like to do is to get back to the site's roots as an importer site and encourage more of a multicultural community, but I don't really know how to make the site more accessible to non-english speakers and the tradeoffs to make such a thing work may not be worth the gains. Just something to think about.
Then there are a couple bigger issues beyond minor tweaks and enhancements. One is our status as a premiere site, which lapsed some time ago.. Are we interested in reclaiming this status? As a non-premiere site we are left out of certain activities such as the Premiere Site Summit which broke the first information about mythic weapons as well as what little direct rapport we have with the developers as players. On the other hand, not having that title gives us a little more freedom with our content. We've drawn a hard line, for example, against discussing things such as windower on the basis of premiere site restrictions. I have no intention of letting this become a site for hacks and bots, but there are some tools and programs that I percieve as being in common use among PC players and that presents many valid topics of conversation. I don't see either direction as being more right or beneficial necessarily, it's just a matter of where we want to go together.
The other concern is our moderation style. We’ve kept it very casual in most cases with a team of moderators that operates on their own discretion under a loose set of guidelines. There are some areas of ambiguity in our rules such as what constitutes flaming and quite often people who find themselves on the wrong side of the line often feel like they’re being singled out unfairly. In some cases they’re not entirely wrong simply because we are so generally lax in enforcing the rules that very often posts that are just as bad get by without infraction. Obviously we want to enforce some degree of respect between members so we can’t just drop enforcement on flaming rules, but do we want to go the other way and enforce on a much stricter standard? If so we would want to draw up a clearer set of rules to replace the term “flaming.†In the same vein there’s the subject of trolling which many people will agree is as destructive or moreso than flaming, but is even harder to define since it’s often arguable whether a given post is just meant to get a rise out of someone or is presenting a real argument. Sometimes the answer is both. When do we enforce and under what criteria? Is this something we want a rule about? The purpose of the rules, after all, is to create a civil environment that everyone can enjoy. Users should have as much say in what constitutes acceptable behavior as the forum staff.
Going back to the lax enforcement, it’s been successful in that people can enjoy casual conversations here that are allowed to meander around on topic, but then again sometimes people want to have a serious conversation and such threads are very prone to getting derailed, taken over by tangential topics or just mired down in off topic commentary. Should we enforce OT more strictly? Would we want, perhaps, to have a Serious Business subforum like xkcd has, where we have a higher standard of post quality and more active (and intrusive) moderation?
So that wall of text is what’s been buzzing in my head today. I’d like to hear opinions on any and all of it and I’m sure there’s plenty of other things I didn’t think of. Also, if anyone has any particular skills with art or code or anything else that would be of value to the site they’d like to volunteer, please let me know.
No reason to get snappy because someone bumps a 2 year old topic or asks a simple question. Just politely point out what they did "wrong" or just ignore it completely and move on. 
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