I ALMOST quit...again

[Nick]

I just wanted to say that I am almost completely ready to give up. The new board will be my last hope, but let's not start to jump into that right now. TMR hasn't 'increased in activity' for a LONG time. The main increases of activity was after the era we had '10 posts a day.' We excelled to 40 posts per day, and later it maximized to the level of 100. Another increasement in activity was reaching 150-300 posts per day. However, most of those posts were made in thread games, and even then we did have some problems. Now we have decreased in activity. Right now we only probably got 40 posts per day, which is where we started at. Well, most people could probably notice something about their board. For example: 'oh, we are starting to make more quality posts.' Fact: I've given up trying to make quality posts in thread games and such, since no matter how much you add into the posts they are still at the level of intelligence they were to begin with. So really our quality level hasn't increased much, but rather, decreased with everything else. Next good non-super-activity improvement: 'great, we are getting more members than usually.' Well, this board doesn't have a current flow of members. Actually it somewhat does, but there is something wrong with that. it relates with the next oh thing: 'oh, my members are starting to pick up and post more' - That is completely wrong. Many of the members have left this site recently, but not recently it was quite a while ago when I started to lose faith in this board. Really, 80 members is a lot. Most of them, however, haven't posted in ages, and some of the top 20 posters have left. another 'oh:' 'my site is getting a lot of traffic lately, that is good though nobody registers, we are still 'trafficked.' Wrong, TMR has been EXTREMELY low on traffic lately. Come on, where does it come from then? It seemed as though Video Game Chat, Game Quest, and the ProBoards support forum brought lots of traffic since my signature has links... Those sites were much more active back then too. So I guess 'the arrival of summer' is decreasing traffic for most everybody on the web. Remember that where do we get our traffic from? It's not just from anywhere, it's from other forums. A lot of times I've seen the '0 guests' thing which is about 80% of the day IMO. So traffic could obviously be the reason for the decrease of activity, but then again, when summer is over, will uor traffic pick up again? Chances are that no, it will stay like this for a while. Also, I cannot believe that 'summer' makes everybody so pissed off. Most members last posted right before summer. Even one of my members is extremely depressed during summer, more than usually which does affect their posting agenda. What is this horrible 'thing' called summer? Is this just the worse summer I've ever had? Video Game Chat was a very active forum about a year ago. When I came there I thought it was the biggest forum alive. But then when summer was over people started to notice a decrease in activity. I kept making stupid posts saying 'is vgc dying?' for no reason. Jesse/super moderators explained that summer brings a lot of activity to forums. So after I created The Mystical Realm, I knew summer was the time for more activity. But I was wrong once again. Summer was the time for de-activity and depression. What a fool I was to create a forum. I had no ideas what problems I would have, and how I would eventually get out of this 'addiction.' I can never leave it since I know that nobody else will manage it the way I did. Some may, but I'll still come back and worry that the site might be dead by now. Whenever I want to quit, something tells me that managing this site is the thing to do. I should have thought of starting out small with the forum and not posting this much, though it makes me feel stupid in many ways to not post at all. now, one of the biggest issues of all: quantity. The majority of posts on this board is made by the top 20 posters, eh? Well, let's just see about that in my next section.

View Top 20 Posters
Perfect Dark 2321 - Pd's post count is altered almost by 1,000 since the delete of the SB.
•¼¾¢• 1836 - It looks like I'm really the main poster here, though I'm sick and tired of posting this much with no progress.
MoJo 1565 - mojo is a very dedicated member at tmr, but we cannot survive with only '1' of him.
Ryyaan 457 - wow over 100 posts in the next posters. Ryyaan posts as often as he can, but remember we only have 4 of them at/above his level.
Anything But Ordinary 187 - wow! another amazing drop in members. ABO said she'd leave for a secret reason I cannot reveal.
King of Realms 186 - another one of my fakes, so really doesn't count.
Wings 165 - wings has been a loyal member but has left for some time and recently returned.
matt#2 90 - matt#2 has left somewhere.
Sonic - he doesn't have time to post he is barely online.
username blocked 43
gamecuber05 41
kmfdm_kid2000 40
Tanika 26
PokemonElite2000 26
Dino 26
BigDave 25
General_Hopper 23
Wisbr Penew 19
gLaMoUr_ChiCk 15
Falco1199 14

[Nick]

Once again I must split my posts because of size. the so called '5k limit' is causing troubles. Oh well. Right now the thing is over 5,000 chars, but the censor thing was barely applied yesterday. So yes, let's continue:

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Guess what? NOBODY REPLIED TO THIS THREAD!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! No, I'm not happy. It's just a way to express GREAT anger. Only 3 posted today. Only 15 posts. This really shows how active this board is. It isn't. At many times I thought this board was unimportant, and now it's unimportant to me. Now I rest. TMR is too much resposibility. If I quit now I am done with this. Once I quit I will have the time of the world. Now, I am happy to leave this place. Not completely, but I won't haul around trying to increase post count - people won't post because of post count. I need to make quality messages around the board, but the only way to do that is to start over. Of course I won't want to start over with this board since it is 'cursed' badly. It already has a bad reputation, not a 'bad reputation' but if people registered and already said they'll never come here agian, they mean it, and the new board fixes everything. It's also easier to start over than from here, the other way around everything must be deleted and the boards need to be reconstructed. I go on with my 'pointful message' to tell of what is wrong with the board, though I know that this board is so low on traffic that only a couple will actually read this. Come and check out my new creations, links.xl640.com/ (oh god! this is so ghey. at first I want to link to a .php file and angelfire acts like it's an image so it's just useless. okay there's a good thing to save in .php because it removes ads, but hopefully this trick will work.)http://www.mysticalrealmchat.cjb.net to see that I have not given up fate on the web. Bye until tomorrow.

[PokemonElite2000]

Must I repeat myself...

Nick, you can't be great in a day, not in a week, not in months, maybe not even in a year. I worked on my website for 2 years. When I first started out, I was happy with the 50 hits per day I was getting. Now? I'm getting around 800 hits per day. So obviously, with a site like that, my board is doing well. Its the same idea, I started out with a website, you started out with a board. I have two years of work to get to that level, so don't expect to reach that in a short amount of time.

What I'm trying to say is, I'm tired of seeing people like you complaining how everything is not going right. I worked on my site for 2 years. Once you gone through the hard work I've been through, then we'll talk.

A lot of people think they can just make something, and it will be great. Wake up people! It takes time and it takes a lot of effort and skill. Nick, you're putting in the effort, but you're obviously not patient at all, and I question your skill running this board. Making a good board does has a strategy behind it, and you're not doing very good at it. Even if you excel at all those points, you may not be "great", so live with it.

I'm not being harsh, I'm being honest.

[Nick]

The problem is that we aren't getting better... which could be a good thing. But it's worse than that. We are getting worse. There were other times when we got about 300 hits on the main page per day, but now when I checked we only averaged 67 hits on the main page. That probably only means about 100 hits on the whole site today, when once the total hits almost neared 1,000. Forget that, let's go on something that makes more sense. Generally we are losing activity fast. We never really had anything good to begin with. We only got the 'highest of tmr' (example: 300 posts per day record) when we mass posted in thread games. Thread games is yet another MAJOR issue with this board. we are just posting to increase post count. If we got rid of all thread games and pointless post, we'd only have about 1000 posts, and if we decrease that 100-300 post rule. We are decreasing by 90% (i think). Think what would happen if I didn't have as much time to post, and one of the frequent posters suddenly left. then days with 0 posts would be common, and only every other day 1-10 posts would come. Then people would forget about this board. Traffic would probably decrease to about 30 hits per day, possibly less.

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And PE2K, Game Quest got 10,000 posts in 2 weeks and the old one got had like 40,000 within the time that TMR was created. And traffic wasn't from planet storm, planet storm just didn't all of a sudden get traffic, it was because k-kid came there, so explain why this is fake. It truely isn't. I always see people that leave but post at other forums. We suck. Nobody is really loyal to this board except for MoJo, really. He is very dedicated to this board. A lot of the people that register only post once int he introducing board. Maybe we don't offer them enough places to post. the introducing board is a very logical place/ explanation to post, maybe we could see what's wrong with that. It's like a wall is covering the forums that makes nobody posts. It's like they are passworded. It seems like the only board that exists to them is the introducing board or something. [/color]

[MoJo]

Hmmm interesting points there. I'm not clever and don't pretent to be so here are my thoughts plane and simple. YOU CAN BE SUCCESSFULL but also a failure at the same time. If you are too pesemistic, guests will think you are forcing people to join or they'll think you hate your own boards and therefore won't bother to join. If you are too optmistic, people will think that you are trying too hard with everything and that if they dont post then they'll get deleted.

Also I think your doing too much on your own, you have 2 admins to help you, but it ain't working becauuse you are not using them. If you asked me or PD to do something we'ed do it no problem, you can even ask Ryyaan for help. I wouldn't recomend Wings because he is too lazy to do anything.

All I can suggest is tell your friends or better still SHOW them TMR and ASK them if they would like to join. If not screw them and ask other people.

[Nick]

Very interesting points MoJo. Instead of flaming me, you thought of something useful...Most of these members never post, so really I could mass delete users to reach about 10 with still only about 200 posts as a loss. So therefore, MoJo me and PD are the main posters. MoJo forgot to state how we compare to other boards. GQ is very active and got 10,000 posts in just 2 weeks. It took us 3 months, and even then we still are barely halfway there. What are we doing wrong? RPG Palace was picking up activity at about the same time The Mystical Realm was created, but they ended with up 40,000 posts and we ended up with 6,000 posts. This is pathetic. The reason RPG Palace was active was not because of planet storm since they just recently started getting active, but rather k-kid's arrival. I still don't understand why they got so active. Why can't we do just the same thing? Where did members like MoJo come from? I don't know. I have tried advertising at Video Game Chat more and more but still nobody as active as him has came to the boards. What are we doing wrong? The problem is that the people who join don't really want to post. But sometimes when we get a good poster they say they left to better places. Even on AIM people don't talk about TMR and act like it's not needed to post here because it sucks so badly. The feel of making your board look stupid makes it feel like it is unimportant. Therefore, I make threads like this but still nothing good comes out of them. I've seen brand new board grow at such at such a high rate that we barely get what they got on their first day.

[Perfect Dark]

Yes, like Gamecuber05 boards. They might have goten 100 in their first day while we got 4. I don't understand what we are doing wrong.

[MoJo]

Ok, Hmmm, how many people 'follow' you, by this I mean if you asked someone to join this board, how many people would accutally do it? This could help build up a loyal following and ask them to post. If the don't then they aren't really loyal are they?

[Nick]

It depends on the total amount of people you asked. If you asked 100 people to join, maybe about 40 or so would join, but only like 5 would post frequently, and probably only 1 or 2 would post a lot. There is a difference though. Look, Chrono reigstered to The Mystical Realm. We thought that he was going to post a lot because he has like 4,000 posts at video game chat. there is something that video game chat that we don't have which could be activity, but i doubt it. I guess there isn't going to be that many loyal people to this board... but gq has a lot of loyal posters that were just from asking. therefore if we look better we need to improve this board, but how? the only thing we could have that was non-activity based would be more forums and redesigning the appearance of the board. starting some intelligent conversations like this one works but it would only work if the board was restarted so that it offers some interesting quality useful discussion to users. Maybe if we had that and gaming forums people would join more. but restarting would be the wisest way IMO, but coolfreepages won't hurry up. Maybe they'll never be up.[/color]

[MoJo]

Hmm, VGC has people there that are from different backgrounds and different places, Ferry is from Norway, I'm English and Chrono is American. Now, here is the thing, we are on different time zones, therefore it is highly unlikely that all 3 of us will be online at one time. So maybe if a wider range of people joined, more english americans and other people, that would kind of increase acctivity.

[Nick]

Times (time zones if you are unfamiliar with posting zones or posting times) of posting does nothing. As long as posting is constant, then it matters much less. My main concern about this board is that people leave this board after they register and refuse to post here and escape by posting at other boards. though that wouldn't be a very good example, I'm just saying that when people are forced to post here they are unhappy and only post in thread gaming areas, but at other forums they act all happy and post everywhere when nobody forces them to post at the other forums. Most people don't contact me on AIM but if they did I know they still wouldn't post if I constantly bugged them to post at tmr. it seems that people ditching TMR and posting at other forums is quite possibly the most annoying thing me or another administrator / owner of this site would feel everyday when nobody cared to post at their forum. I look at other forums and still nobody wants to post at my board... I mean some people may want to post every year, but I just don't understand how something so similar cannot just get a similarity of activity. I don't understand how some boards get a large amount of activity from the forum itself. I don't understand why nobody gives any mercy to post here. Whenever I say nobody posts I'm just saying that few people want to post compared to other boards, so don't annoy me saying that you are posting and that statement was totally incorrect. They often act like this forum never was created. MoJo: In your next reply I want eplanations of why people MIGHT (I'm not going to really make it impossible to answer since everybody has their right not to answer, but I just want results) not want to post here. It just makes me feel unimportant, not myself, but rather my board. I have spent a lot of time posting and ending this takes a long time to happen. Go on now, everybody, see if this can be solved. The only possible solution to this problem would be to get some darn people to register and post frequently on this board. the 'frequently' thing is very very important, we already has a ton of members, and none of them post. It is worse than VIdeo Game Chat not by activity but by ratios.[/color]

[MoJo]

Well there is always the tryed and tested ' if you post I post' method. Basically this means If you post at my forum I'll post at yours. Of course there are draw backs to this, as in, the other person could not have a forum. Thats all my ideas for now, I gotta think of more.

[Nick]

The 'post at mine and i'll post at yours' thing doesn't work very well, if not at all. Maybe a measure of posts would work so say if I wanted to 'trade' posts with MoJo, i'd have to get 10 posts and wait until we both reached that level. Once we both would reach that level we could bump up the requirement, and so on and so forth. However these deals are somewhat hard to make since 10 or so posts at a time would take to long, and it wouldn't really generate anything unless you traded with many people. And we couldn't possibly do this since it is complicated, and does not make a 'big' board. And on so called 'big boards' which are really not much bigger than the so-called The Mystical Realm have administrators that say they are just too busy posting there already or are too busy playing with the administrator options but really could make some time to post at The Mystical Realm. Go idea though MoJo, it's much better than saying nothing like all the other 80 people on this board. Trading with big boards doesn't work. So this idea doesn't work at all. It may for some, but not really for us. I am beginning to believe that people don't post here because it is made on ProBoards. No, that's not correct because I have seen some very - quite successful ProBoards / Suddenlaunch(s/es) that are very active, but the only reason they don't reach the highest is because sometime the admin will go crazy or a war will start. Or possibly that power just isn't demonstrated in the strongest way, maybe meaning the forum slowly died. TMR used to be somewhat active but we died down after a couple small/useless/horrible events that happened here. Another thing is that I could probably find 500 or so ProBoards / Suddelaunches that have less members than us but more of them are online on a daily basis. Too many of the posts are made by the administrators, which is a severe problem. Read above for more discussion about the administration so i don't have to repeat it. It's just than none of our members care, or thought the board had gotten worse...

[MoJo]

Maybe the board has so many posts people think that they have no need to post here?

[MoJo]

Nick said:

Anything But Ordinary 187 - wow! another amazing drop in members. ABO said she'd leave for a secret reason I cannot reveal.

Because I flammed her right, did I *beep* ! I KNOW SHE LEFT BECAUSE OF ME BUT I DIDN'T FLAME HER!