Champ213

If anything deserves to get their own subforum, then I think it would indeed be "non-vk" Jrock. This has been discussed among staff several times before, specifically for the DL section. We hoped a tagging system would help out, but obviously while people tag uploads as "visual kei", nobody would really tag their files with "non-vk", so there isn't really a good way to sort the forum for jrock outside of vk. I think a decent amount of activity has to come first, then the subforums. So my advice to anyone who wants a special subforum for their specific niche: talk about it! There are places to discuss allmost anything in here. But the person who started this thread and is so passionate about K-Pop that they want a seperate discussion forum for it hasn't posted ONCE in the Global Music Forum in any of the existing K-Pop threads. Why should we think they are more active in a subforum? Show us that you care! Post about your favourite topics! If you know there are other people around with the same interestes, encourage them to join the discussion! If there really is a lot of activity for any certain niche, may it be Kpop, or Anime, or raw trve chinese underground black metal, then creating a seperate forum for it is a much more viable option.

First of all, let me say this: If the staff members didn't care for this place/were not motivated, as some people in here accuse of us, this place wouldn't exist anymore. It would have vanished a long time ago. Secondly, as Ito said, we are not a cooperation. We are a bunch of friends that donate some of their free time to work on this site. For me it's a hobby, a hobby that I have been doing for, I dunno, 5 years now? Since we are not a cooperation, we are not in the business of "hiring & firing" people, ie. hiring new people when they are active, and kick them again as soon as their "perfomance" drops. I am an admin, but I don't want to be the "boss" of a bunch of ever-rotating mods that get "laid off" if their performance has dropped for a month or two. If that's what people expect me to do, then frankly, I don't want this position anymore. I want to work in a team with people I like and trust and have a good time. That is somewhat inefficient, but there is more at issue here than "efficency" and "perfomance". And for better or worse, in the end we have always removed inactive mods, usually quietly, and usually after giving them a good benefit of doubt. Now, let's put some things into perspective. There seems to be a general consensus that activity on the forum is in an overall decline. Some even say that the forum is "dead" or "dying". Objectively, this isn't true. For reference, here are some statistics for monthly new posts and new topics of the last 1.5 years. As you can see, there have always been fluctuations, but there is no general trend towards less activity. I know statistics aren't everything, besides quantity there is also quality, but it's an interesting fact anyway. In these 18 months a lot of stuff has happened. Naturally, in some periods the staff was more active than in other periods. Contests were held, staff members have been added or replaced, the staff invested some good amount of money into a whole new forum software to freshen things up, the forum structure was reorganized and so forth. There doesn't seem to be any direct correlation between staff activity and overall forum activity, neither positive or negative. That's not to say that staff activity is completely irrelevant or that staff members shouldn't be active. But you cannot expect any miracles here from any new staff we may add, or increased activity of existing staff. There are some other issues I want to adress at some later point.

Digital download! That's great! Time to remember my iTunes-password.....

We offered to make Trombe a full mod before, which they declined. We ended up giving them mod powers over the News forum though, because in the end it was the easiest way. That's why the name shows up in the staff list. They didn't want to be an "official mod" though, so to speak. (Unless that has changed by now, in which case we are happy to oblige.) They do have a special rank of "News Broadcast" though. I will add something about the other points later, I'm just home from nightshift, off to bed now.

Actually, it did. We wanted to add a system to allow users to sort/filter the download section better. Eventually that's why the tagging system was introduced. Instead of adding lots of subforums for different genres, genre-description should be added as tag. Clicking on a tag gives you a neat forum-like overview of all uploads of that genre. It seemed like the best of both worlds: topics of less common genres are still posted in the main DL section (instead of being in a barely active subforum that people forget about), but at the same time can be searched and displayed easily. Obviously that wasn't the "upgrade" you had hoped for, since you mentioned that you hate adding tags to posts.

Because: In other words: if a forum is hardly active, people won't bother to check there anymore. If they don't bother to check there, they won't post replies or new topics. What good it is to have "a nice overview" if nobody actually responds to your topics? And as I said, it's not like we haven't tried before. We used to have a LOT more subforums then we do now. When we finally trimmed down the mess of subforums, the feedback was overwhelmingly positive - including yours, by the way. If the Entertainment section needs a split-up the Gaming posts would be the most obvious choice for their own forum. Which in reverse would also clean up the remaining Entertainment section a bit, I guess. Because it's always about what the people want. We don't just want to introduce a major change like this just because we, or a few select users, want it. And the last time this was discussed in public, most of the participating users were actually against splitting up the forums. So we didn't. However, that discussion was two years ago, so t's quite possible that public opinion has changed since then. So I'm more then interested to hear what other people think about this. I'm off to work now (nightshift awaits), but maybe when I'm back there's some more feedback from other users about this. I will also post some of the thoughts/suggestions that were made when the issue was discussed among staff members in recent months.

I will say two things about this: A while ago we reorganized the forum to reduce the number of subforums. Why? Many subforums simply weren't used. For example, I think we did have a subforum for Anime and Manga long time ago - but it had very little activity, so we merged it with the general Entertainment forum. So obviously we are hesisant to create a new spree of subforums that in all likelihood won't be used either. The general Entertainment forum has a decent amount of activity - but now imagine we would split this up into seperate forums for Anime/Manga, Games, Books, etc. Each section would have a lot less activity. Less activity would mean that people won't go through the extra clicks of checking all these subforums individually, slowing down activity even further. As a general rule I think forums should only be split up if they get a lot of activity that makes a split necessary, and each new subfoum should be able to "live on its own" ie. be able to attract enough users to make it active. If I look at the Entertainment section, I don't really see enough anime/manga-related posts to make a viable subforum. As a matter of fact, the majority of posts seem to be videogame-related. So if anything it would the Games that deserver their own subforum. Our past experience has shown that simply creating a subforum for something will not make users post in it. So, let's talk about the forums with the most activity. That would be the News and Downloads forum. Splitting up the DL forum in particular has been discussed by staff members many times. Some are in favour, some are not. Some problems include clear genre seperations and the fear that a "Non-vk" forum would not receive enough activity. There's also the worry that splitting the forum into "vk" and "Non-vk" would also split up the userbase of the forum, reducing their interaction. We hoped that the introduction of the tagging system would help a bit in this regard - if you look for a specific genre, you can click on the tag and get all downloads for that genre - as long as it's tagged correctly. Obviously, adding proper tags is the responsibilty of the uploader. Once a month or so, I go through the list of tags, merge duplicates, delete tags violating our rules etc. but I cannot check every thread that is missing tags, download it, listen to it, and then add the matching tags myself. Overall, the idea to split up the DL forum into subforums is an idea that's still on the table, if enough people really want it.

Well, I for one have no problem with reshuffling the staff team and adding more active people to it. We had several recruitments drives in the past. The main problem: many of those people that we thought would be best suited for the job simply didn't apply. And another recurring problem we had that we recruited mods we thought were good for the job - but after a few weeks they stopped doing stuff, so we had to look for new ones. Let's face it: being a mod is not a glamorous task at all. It's actually very tedious, with most of the work done behind the scenes. For year after year I have been doing the jrock contests at the end of each year, which was a lot of work for relatively little results. There don't really seem to be that many people that want to do that kind of stuff for a longer time. It can also be somewhat of a stressful task. You may have to piss off people. Maybe people you actually like. I know I pissed off a lot of people in all the years as staff here, by repremanding or banning them. Including people I used to get along well before. The fact that you have to go around pissing off people by locking their threads, giving them warning for breaking rules etc. also makes it increasingly difficult to use the site as a normal "user" - people will look at you differently. That is something potential staff members should be aware of - you will get hate for actually enforcing the rules. In my experience many people simply weren't willing to that. They wanted to be part of the community - not punish members from it.

Signature images aren't hosted on the server. People have to upload thier sig images to a filehoster of their choice and hotlink them. So they can't put any strain on our servers. They would only increase loading times insofar as the pics themselves might load slow. The forum as such would load normally, but some signatures images would be missing, if they are hosted on a slow filehost. But a slow-loading signature image from an external filehost wouldn't slow-down overall performance of the forum. Avatar images are hosted locally. But users with an animated avatar aren't really that common, so it's doubtful that they are a cause of lag, or that banning them would increase speed. Also, the slowdowns seem to be really random. In 95% of times, I personally get normal loading times. Only very rarely I experience loading times longer than 10 seconds. Other staff members have experience more common slowdowns. So... it's not easy to pin down probable causes.

I'm guessing the second word means 伝承 (denshou), meaning "Legend" or "lore". So it's 幻夢伝承 = Mugen Denshou = Dream Legend.

^ I like me some good folk, though I must admit, I never paid much attention to Omnia. As for weird bands, I could think of some, though I'm not exactly sure what people would classify "weird". Some people might find a band like weird, but I don't really see them like that. I think a lot of "weirdness" is in the eye of the beholder. I think are kinda weird though. For once, they sing in Basque, which is pretty unusual already. Also, you rarely hear a black/folk metal song that suddenly turns into a Jazz piece. XD

I was a bit of a goth in my late teen years. Nothing wrong with that though. ^ This is 10 years or so ago. Now I look.... normal, I guess? I still like to dress up on occasion though, for carnival or concerts. XD

If you make it to 213, you'll get a cookie.

This is still going on? For what it's worth, these are the rank titles we have so far and the posts you need to get them: n00blet 0 Kiwamu's Bitch 5 Kisaki's Errand Boy 100 Wataru's Punching Bag 300 Gackt's Hair Stylist 500 Hyde's Pimp 700 Kyo's Mattress 1000 Except maybe for the "Bitch" part (which is actually the first special rank we had and the only one I didn't add myself), I don't see how something like "Gackt's Hairstylist" could be considered offensive. The "pimp" maybe, but then again, you can change your title with 400 posts, so you never have to wear that particular title. The ranks are supposed to be get "better" with more posts to encourage active partcipation. That's just natural and something that many online forums do. So obviously the lower ranks are slightly more "degrading", but as I said: they are meant as a joke and not aimed at offending anyone. I never thought they would be an issue - and so far they never have been in all the years we had them. I actually once thought about changing them, but just because I felt they were getting too old - do newer jrock fans actually still get the "Wataru's Punching Bag" reference? But I decided to stick with the current titles, because - as has been pointed out - they are kind of a tradition now. And even if we made new titles, with more updated jrock references, they would most likely be in the same tongue-in-cheek vain that may or may not offend sporadic people. I'm going to close this topic now because I don't think it will lead anywhere. However, if someone is so offended by these titles that their personal happiness is affected by it, drop me a message. I will change it to *Censored* and you will wear that title until you have the 400 posts needed to set your own custom title.

The user titles are related to post count. If you get a certain number of posts, you get a certain title. Alternatively you can set your own title after you reached a certain number of posts, I forgot the exact number, I think 400 or 500. And you can thank me for the weird titles. I wanted to make them jrock-releated and, well.... semi-funny instead of just using the default titles.