Alright now i have slightly more time to make a better response. First of all, when I read you're idea I think it is great, to get a website up and what not. But on top of that. We need to change more then just that. I started thinking once I saw another one of those topics "zfgc is not zfgc anymore"
I started thinking of reasons why. Many people made comments like "Change comes and goes, get used to it", "It will never be the same". Ive even made comments like those myself
many times in the past.
But is it the truth? Can we really never be anything like we used to be? I think we can, and it isn't so out of reach either. One of the main points that came to me is the fact that ever since we first began to divorce ourselves from the concept of a common goal (OoT2d) or a purpose, we've been trying hard to make ourselves
"well rounded" We've tried so hard to make ourselves look and sound professional and "proper" that it becomes to tight around here. Anybody who was around in even the early days of InvisionFree, or better yet, EzBord knows how loose we used to be.
Was it ever a problem? Of course not! We still had mature staff, and they screwed around lots, and made stupid funny posts. But they could be serious when they needed to. Community speak used to be a cool well rounded hangout. But now we've made it so you can only post important personal issues there, forcing us to make other bord slike off topic, and then we just got trigger happy, and made a whole bunch of other forums that we never needed back in the day. Ask yourself, if making these new bords were supposed to benefit us, why are we still nothing compared to how we used to be in the older days?
We need to stop making ourselves think that in order to have a good time here we need to be serious. Some of the best forums ever have a comical tone to them, rather then professionalism. Who are we trying to appeal to? The president? The Royal family? We don't even need to accommodate general gaming crowds. As much as I love bords such as "debates, entertainment, general gaming, literature, techie talk, etc. What are they for? Sure it makes us more well-rounded. But the fact is, we are Zelda Fan Game Central, and all we need to accommodate is Zelda fans, and people interested in Zelda talk, and creating Zelda fan games, graphics, music, etc.
Don't tell me that removing a forum such as spam is going to hurt us. Because the fact is. it was never needed until we tried to mature the forum and take it too seriously. The forums used to be so much more relaxed int he old days, and you could joke around, with stupid comments all the time like Wallnut, Mammy, DJ, and others always did. Were we like a circus back then? Out of controll? No! We were a tighter unit then we have ever been since. Somehow we got it in our heads that we were being so childish, and we needed to act like Congress men at all times, and needed to mature. So what did we do? The staff suddenly got over-serious, and we slowly took the spirit out of zfgc. I think partially because of the move to gamers advanced, and dsr. We needed to sound professional, to the point where it wasn't even fun anymore. The whole time I was a mod, every time Ive been a mod, I Always felt pressured to put on this "face" as if I was about to have a meeting with the president. If i ever sent you a mod related PM for missbehaving you will know, I sounded like some kind of robot, programmed to say things a certain way, with certain punctuation and words. It was never like that in the old days of zfgc.
Really, we only needed retarded pointless forums like "spam" because we needed to balance out our forum, because without it we would be way too uptight. So what is the cure? Everyone needs to sit back in their chairs. Listen to something melodic. (I recomend one of the following:
"Steve Vai - For the love of god",
"John Petricci - Wishfull Thinking",
"Steve Vai - Tender Surender", Or the song in my sig. Lean back. Unbuckle your belt. Put your hands on you're head. And take some nice relaxing deep breaths. Let your mouth and lips and facial muscles go limp, and then shake your head back and forth a few times, and then take a deep breath in, then decompress. Let out a long, loud deep sigh of relief, projected into some kind of weird noise. Then take two fingers on each hand, put them to you're temples and rub in a clockwise motion a few times. Rub your eyes. Open your mouth and stick you tongue as far out as you can. Rub your hands vertically down across your face, and then shake it out like you do when you get those chills now and then. Now you are done.
Now that we have that out of the way. Everyone is feeling relaxed. Lets think about this idea possum proposed very seriously. First of all:
The Website: Think about how this could benefit us? Just picture it right now, with a nice green Zelda themed layout, and resources for pretty much anything you would ever need. Graphics, Engins, Music, etc. We could have sections on the forum, where the members could submit resources, and it would say "Submitted by:" on the site. Eventually as we grow, and fan gaming becomes more popular, we could have reviews of the games, and "top rated", "top downloaded", sections, and News sections, about up and comming games, and events like z3, big graphics competitions, or release dates. You could find user submitted tutorials on graphics, music, mapping, coding, etc. And if we ever got a big community project underway, it would be a huge benefit for the community, we would hold competitions for all t he graphics and music, and so forth.
The Forum: The forum should be re planned out. And we should get rid of all those bords we don't seriously need like off topic, spam, debates, entertainment, general gaming, etc. And replace them with bords we've never had that would benefit the whole thing, such as "community project sections, user submitted tutorials, sections, etc. That would basically be a frame for the website, and accommodate all t he stuff on it.
Eventually the site would be a big thing, and have tons of members, and recognition, and when we hold big events like z3, it got lots of attention from people all over the net.
We need to start putting time into making this place comfortable for zfgc members, not making it a general area for any random hanging out. We gotta give it a purpose again, a goal, and bring it back to its roots. We gotta stop being so uptight and have fun with it again. I think possums proposal is exactly the type of things we need to be considering right now because at the moment we are not going anywhere with this site, and we are just "floating along", and not going anywhere. Where will we be a year from now? Nowhere. If we are extremely lucky we would be exactly where we are currently. Which is a stand still.
