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Kelandon

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I've been here 13 years!! OMG And another few years on the icon board, or whatever it was called.

 

Not that I was ever that active—really haven't posted anything more than a few sentences in any one post—but it's correct that other thangs be getting in the way. I decided not to play Avadon 2 and might not play any future Spidweb games—!!!!

 

It just takes up too much time... or my interests have changed... or I'm supa cool now, and wasn't back then—prob that.

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I think a lot of groups have an inherent life cycle. People meet and form some sort of community; they share some history, develop inside jokes. Those very things make that inner group harder to join, thereafter. The circle forms by closing. As years go by, things happen, and the original crew drifts apart.

 

I was never into Blades, and the Blades story must be at least ten years old by now, but I still think that Blades was the story here. It brought a creative community together over something that demanded a lot of time and thought. There was a world to explore. I think that episode gave this community a boost for a decade.

 

I'm not trying to be discouraging if people want to fire things up again. I'm just saying that there's no reason to feel bad if we're less active than we were. I don't think we screwed anything up, at least not in any big way. That's just how it goes.

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I'd like to say that my activity has decreased because real life has gotten in the way. That's true in so far as I don't really play the games anymore. But I still lurk the forums several times a day. I just end up deleting half of my posts halfway in because I realize that my comment is utterly pointless and non-productive.

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I joined about 13 1/2 years ago, fascinated by the BoE community but unable to take my ideas to fruition. My semi-retirement from these forums was partly due to the lack of interest in Blades, my creative work in the end unable to find an audience. It also had to do with the general dry nature of discussion here, most threads being either frivolous or full of arguing over semantics. I still pop in occasionally to see threads like ES's, but when Ghaldring hijacked it I stopped reading that too.

 

I do very much appreciate the hard work of the Baldes community, though, including Jeff Vogel himself who initially sparked my desire to tell stories. I read all the articles, played some of the popular scenarios, and did my best to plan my scenarios, even though bringing them to fruition proved too frustrated within the medium. Jeff and the community gave me the experience and knowledge to eventually realize my real calling was not the creation of games, but simply the telling of a story. I'm working hard on my novels and, although I still have a lot of reading books to do to polish up my style, I'm finding it's exhilarating and satisfying.

 

It is kind of strange that a serious author would take most of his inspiration from video games and neglect the reading of actual books, but, although I have started reading books again, video games are what formed me.

 

I'm rambling again, but returning to the subject of community activity, I really do think the loss of interest in Blades was a huge factor in the decline of message board activity, among the other things mentioned in this thread. A community developed with the intent of creation, and when those with the creative vision moved on to other things, so did the community.

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Books are far from being the only source of feeling-inducing stories.

 

And heh, funny thinking that I've been at these forums for half of its life.

I think a lot of groups have an inherent life cycle. People meet and form some sort of community; they share some history, develop inside jokes. Those very things make that inner group harder to join, thereafter. The circle forms by closing. As years go by, things happen, and the original crew drifts apart.

There's not just one single group. It's been a little more dynamic here. There's the nostalgia that others have of earliest times, those of the mid-times, the current groups, etc.

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Some of that reduced activity probably really is from lower tolerance of abrasive debate, which was rampant in the very early days of Spiderweb. Still, I don't think that's anywhere close to the whole story. There were later times with many long, civil, and usually circular arguments about any number of things. Maybe those have also died down because the community tolerance for circularity is also decreasing.

 

—Alorael, who doesn't think that communities really stop growing up until they die off. The internet is very bad at stasis.

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From a business perspective, I believe the forums are fulfilling their purpose (why Jeff pays the fee) in that it is an easy place for people to find information, help and hints on his games in a family friendly environment. It will of course only serve that purpose as long as critical ones of you find it interesting, which lack of traffic could certainly threaten.

 

I am of course a newb, but I think that somewhere there is a wavy grey line that the thread on "Appreciation of Literature" did not cross and the highjacking of the "What do I do about this girl at work" did cross. The trick is of course how to have the emotionally interesting topics without crossing the line.

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I've been here for 12 years now, although the first several years I only had very intermittent internet access. One thing I noticed is that since everyone's gotten older and mature, the topics and posts have changed accordingly. That combined with life grabbing taking us for it's usual course has somewhat diminshed the posting rate.

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One theory I have is that something starts a group, and some kind of critical mass of people show up who post interesting things. That makes the group interesting, and more people join. At some point, however, the age-blind internet has the scales fall from its eyes. If enough people keep posting about the 1990s as though they were recent, that sends a certain message. At some point, the very activity that makes the group good keeps newer people away. So the group has a vigorous middle age, with lots of activity from the same gang of oldbies, and then it declines, as those few people drift away.

 

It isn't even necessarily the problem that the oldbies are boring and out of touch. It would be just as bad, for closing the group, if the oldbies were awesome. Imagine some bright young kid shows up with a post about this story they liked. Ten years earlier, that would have been one of the interesting posts that fired things up. But now, some oldby comes by and says, Yeah, great story, here's what I wrote about it last year in my Master's thesis." And then some even olderby says, "Yeah, I wrote that story in a foxhole under shellfire during the Zombie Incursion of ought-six! My ol' buddy Zack didn't make it. He was one of the best." So the kid doesn't post so much any more.

 

What this town needs is a boys' band. There should be a forum reserved for new members. Nobody could post there if they had more than 1000 posts.

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It's true that we've ended up with a certain amount of masturbatorily self-reflective content, but I don't think that causes a lack of new content or members -- rather I think it is caused by those things.

 

Looking over the suggestions in this thread, the two that I think have probably had the most impact are the changing landscape of the internet (especially the rise of social networks), and the decline of Blades. The community here has at times produced a lot of debate threads -- but at other times a lot of RPs, or a lot of broad-swath chats, or memes, or creative endeavors, or World-of-Avernum-themed works. The picture varies as you look across the history, diachronically. So I don't think we can pin very much on any single type of content.

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Asking something about the game and being answered wouldn't contribute to the making of a community (more of a knowledge base rather); you've got to have something to discuss and participate in, and there's got to be a lot of variation. Blades must have been great as it supported custom scenarios and Geneforge was terrific about having different creations and factions.

 

There should be a forum reserved for new members. Nobody could post there if they had more than 1000 posts.

 

Oh, yes. Such a forum could give a chance for the quasi-oldbies to boss around the newcomers, without having postcounts of the order of several thousands towering over you *evil grin*

 

I would also suggest putting in a Welcome's and Introductions. The sanity welcome is fine, but a new user who introduces self with a 'Hello' topic is more likely to stay long-term.

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I would also suggest putting in a Welcome's and Introductions. The sanity welcome is fine, but a new user who introduces self with a 'Hello' topic is more likely to stay long-term.

Are they really, though? Most of the forums I've seen with Introduction forums have the same problem (or worse) that SW does with member retention and inactivity.

 

Dikiyoba knows Geneforge brought in a few members, but probably not more than any other non-Blades game did, and it brought in far fewer members than either Blades game did.

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The special thing with Blades was that people were doing something — making their own scenarios. People discussed how to do things, and what things would be good to do. It was creative like writing books, but specific to a Spiderweb product that had a lot of special quirks. There was a core of creative people who had a serious reason for reading and posting here a lot. It was kind of a reactor core, that powered everything else. I mean, the impact of Blades on the boards in general could be quite direct. If it weren't for all his Blades contributions, TM would have been banned before ever becoming a mascot monster. A lot of the wild west spirit whose passing some now lament was supported by Blades, in that Blades kept people from being banned.

 

Hanging out here soon after the Blades era had mostly passed was a bit like joining the army after a war. You could see that the old guys had been through something.

 

AIMHack has been a little bit like that, but I don't think that hammering out AIMHack rules and infrastructure has been nearly as substantial a technical subject as manipulating the Blades engines and editors. The scaling of people involved is also very different. On the one hand an AIMHack campaign needs half a dozen people to keep it up for a dozen sessions, while a BoX scenario took just one person, often working for many dozens of hours. On the other hand, only those six people are ever going to experience that AIMHack campaign, while a good scenario might in principle be played very many times. There was both a need and an incentive for much deeper involvement with Blades than I think there is with AIMHack, and Blades projects weren't as dependent as AIMHack on getting six people to co-ordinate their schedules.

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A lot of the wild west spirit whose passing some now lament was supported by Blades, in that Blades kept people from being banned.

Aside from TM, this wasn't much of a thing, was it? And even TM was banned -- many times -- during the years before his permaban. What really kept people from being banned was the fact that the boards were flooded with 13-year-old boys who had Shakespearean capacities for insult. Standards were very different.

 

Thinking about it some more, I would argue that while Blades was significant for many people here, and was essential to the community forming, it was not quite so essential to the community chugging along. If we take a look at this relic, for example, which provides a broad cross-section of 48 of the most seen names from early 2006 (plus one or two infamous ghosts), I count about 10 who were at least moderately involved with Blades during the time when they posted the most; among the other 38 we find the real social lynchpins of the era, like Marlenny, Dikiyoba, and Alorael. And that was among the highest activity eras we've had. Many of the people who were highly Blades-involved either posted infrequently to begin with (like Luz or Smoo or Nemesis) or stuck around long after the boards had become slower (like Ephesos or *i). I think you'd find the same thing looking at earlier eras, when the biggest threads were community pile-ons, whether flamewar, RP, or Xian Skull.

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Edit: On second thought, I'm fairly certain Lilith portends a future in which people can only communicate with enigmatic images of pants.

 

(aah! sorry! i edited instead of quoted!! the first line of your post is missing. sorry, E!)

Edited by Yossylaean
sorry! :(
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My memory of that relic (which is faint) is that it was a bit outdated even when it was new; many of the people in it were no longer posting that much at the time.

 

Maybe TM really was the only bad egg who got slack because of Blades. At the time it was my impression that various people whose names I now forget were getting away with stuff for some reason, and I figured it was similar.

 

Even in the Blades-did-it theory, the high point of activity wouldn't necessarily be the high water of Blades. Making scenarios was hard work, and not that many people ever really did it. My impression was always that Blades somehow gave the boards a lot of extra juice, but I'm thinking the effect would be somewhat indirect. Like a big house party, where having a handful of people in the kitchen playing guitars and drinking whiskey all night keeps everything going, because if anything dies down somewhere else, people don't just go home; they check out the kitchen.

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I think a lot of the oldbies were able to get away with stuff because they were moderators themselves in the very early days and they were friends with the moderators/administrators in the later days. That only holds for so long, though, and eventually they shaped up or departed — with maybe one or two exceptions (you know who you are).

 

Blades was the reason the community began in the first place, and it was the reason a number of us (um, me) joined later versions of the community, so I think it attracted the first group of oldbies. Come to think of it, part of the iconoclastic tenor of the community started before the Spidweb boards began, because of the often contentious relationship the early BoE community had with Jeff.

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Dikiyoba isn't sure why you think you aren't welcome here, Harehunter.. You are welcome here. Just remember to make relevant posts (because there are dozens and dozens of individual people who read these threads, and if everyone posted very little irrelevant thought they had, SW would become a time-wasting unreadable mess) and you'll have no problems.

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Somewhere there's a distinction between topic drift and topic turbulence; a Reynold's number of relevance, shall we say. The idea is to try to stay laminar.

If we want to stay laminar, we'll have to make our threads more viscous. In with the pitch and lye!

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We could also change the diameter of our threads. I mean, what are we using here? Spiderwebs? Spider thread can't possibly be that thick. We could upgrade to huge steel tubes for our interwebs.

 

(No, I don't know what I'm talking about either.)

Presumably, someone will ultimately have to dig up the Big Book of Spiderweb Thread Schedules. It was last seen in Almaria, and I sure as heck ain't payin' for the toll.

 

(Increasing diameter increases the Reynolds number: higher Reynolds numbers are turbulent, lower ones are laminar, and intermediate numbers are intermediate. The cutoff is different depending on which Reynolds number you're talking about and whom you're asking. i.e. the Reynolds number for a pipe is defined differently than the Reynolds number for other various flow regimes such as a packed bed reactor. I do know what I'm talking about :p )

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Heh.

 

<physics>

Hydrodynamics is governed by a single equation that is fairly simple in form, but horribly hard to solve; its solutions seem to be as complicated as fluid flow really is. A clever trick that goes surprisingly far to make sense of it is to re-express all its terms in purely numerical terms, as multiples of standard units that are judiciously chosen for the problem at hand. So if you've got water flowing in a 3-inch-wide pipe, you take the pipe diameter as your unit of length; and so on. It's not completely trivial, because you also take into account the viscosity of the fluid, and stick it into some of your units. If I remember rightly, I think it may be used to rescale the unit of time.

 

A lot of apparently very different flow patterns become the same, when you re-scale them in these ways. Whether the patterns are really exactly the same up to re-scaling, or not, depends on a few purely numerical ratios among scales. The most important of these ratios is the Reynolds number, which is defined as the product of the salient length scale in the problem and the salient speed scale, divided by the fluid viscosity. Molasses has a much higher viscosity than water, but if you send molasses through a much wider pipe at a much higher speed, you'll see a flow that is surprisingly similar to that of slower water in the narrower pipe, because the Reynolds numbers of the two flows will be the same.

 

The Reynolds number is rarely an exact value, because there's usually some fuzziness in selecting exactly what lengths or speeds to use in it. But it's a ballpark figure that is normally pretty clearly pinned down to within less than a factor of ten. If the Reynolds number is less than 1, you tend to get really boring flows like what you normally see with molasses. What you mostly care about is whether it's up into the thousands or higher, because somewhere in this range there is usually a transition from smooth ('laminar') flow, like a slow river, to turbulent flow, like rapids.

</physics>

 

So in principle there should exist a Spam number that can characterize roughly how spammy a thread is. You could multiply the average length of a post by the speed of topic drift, and divide by how interesting the posts are. A series of long posts on abruptly changing topics that aren't even interesting would be the worst kind of thread, and have a very high Spam number. Short spammy posts aren't as bad, and highly interesting digressions are more acceptable.

 

This is only kind of a joke, actually. Obviously there's no clear way to quantify interest, or even speed of drift, but I think the idea that these are the relevant factors may be worth something.

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A lot of apparently very different flow patterns become the same, when you re-scale them in these ways. Whether the patterns are really exactly the same up to re-scaling, or not, depends on a few purely numerical ratios among scales. The most important of these ratios is the Reynolds number, which is defined as the product of the salient length scale in the problem and the salient speed scale, divided by the fluid viscosity. Molasses has a much higher viscosity than water, but if you send molasses through a much wider pipe at a much higher speed, you'll see a flow that is surprisingly similar to that of slower water in the narrower pipe, because the Reynolds numbers of the two flows will be the same.

 

by the way this has interesting and very important implications for biology, because it means that on a cellular scale water doesn't behave very much like we're used to it behaving. there's a famous article titled Life at Low Reynolds Number about the physics of how single-celled organisms move around. there's some equations and stuff in there but high school level physics should be enough to get the gist of it

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Every so often I try to forget what a Reynolds number is and am normally quite successful until I have some reason to study fluid dynamics again. Unfortunately people bring it up in the strangest posts and I have to relive those moments of pain. I much prefer electrons through copper than fluid through a tube.

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SoT, someone could possibly build an algorithm for the drifting piece. Something along the lines of finding key words in the first post and topic and then rating how many or how few of those key words or their synonyms and antonyms are used in subsequent posts. Obviously that would not work as well on short posts and then would possibly fall off again on long posts, but it could provide a rough estimate of relevance. Interest as you said would be hard to measure, since a fair number of people read all of the posts. You could beef up the likes system so that every reader rated every post, but who wants to rate every post?

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possibly build an algorithm...something along the lines of finding key words in the first post...rating how many or how few of those key words

 

There doesn't seem to be any method of finding out how many times somebody has quoted one your posts, so here's one. Your SW quote-score is a Google-based number which is indicative of how many times your posts have been quoted, and you get it by adding together the individual quote-scores of every forum that SW has had so far.

 

1) Ancient Piper : http://www.google.c...er.ermarian.net (9900 results)

2) UBB Threads : http://www.google.c...ums.ipbhost.com (1440 results)

3) IP Board : http://www.google.c...ums.ipbhost.com (115 results)

 

Total Score : 9900+1440+115 = 11455

 

SoT is a good example of someone who's been around for all of those three forum incarnations, though I'm sure there are quite a few people for whom that's true. Edit : Having too much free time, I automated the process in C# and put in a few names that I could think of. Your results are :

 

Cairo Jim : 160, Triumph : 829, Lilith+Thuryl : 19204, Dikiyoba : 12275, Tyranicus : 4588, Mosquito---Slayer : 114, Harehunter(not Lepus*): 217, Edgwyn : 41, Upon Mars : 225, Randomizer : 9401, House of S : 1089, Jerakeen(not Turtle) : 135, Earth Empires : 279, Excalibur : 3774, Actaeon : 463, Goldenking : 697, Ishad Nha : 190, Scorpius : 27.

 

As expected, Lilith rules. All non-lurkers who aren't on this list are notorious name-changers (you used frequently varying names or with-special-character names for significant durations) and it's two steps below impossible (except Alorael, for whom it really is impossible) to find your scores.

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