As you have noticed the community isn't at his best anymore. Especially the part of the TF2 community which is in my opinion the most important part of the community with the most members. People are leaving, saying goodbye taking their friends with them. This will say our community isn't appealing at any way. Also I won't see any improvements anytime soon, not for events, not for our community. Especially when @n0name is going to be inactive very soon!! I have tried to revive our Events Team, but without any success. However my new strategy really kicked of and I had some good plans for some events and even admins attending, the boundaries were so tight there was no good space for us to work. Due to this I also decided to resign from the Event Team as long as nothing changes to make it workable. My question now is... WHAT ARE WE GOING TO DO ABOUT THIS? What I see is a community dying, we are losing members at a fast rate and we don't have anything appealing to attract new players. Events have could be one of them. And things need to change. We need people to do server maintenance. Like adding maps, update plugins, adjust server configs. This doesn't mean we need to hand our complete server over to some people we don't know, but we have people in this community I think are capable enough to handle this. And there is room enough to let these people operate in the right boundaries and keep a backup on hand if something might go wrong. We need something to make our community more attractive. Not only on the TF2 servers but also on our forums. Events are a great way to attract new players, especially we got a large user base on steam. But this event team needs to have a environment they can operate in, even if the configs are all pre-made and just can load it. Also there should be a way to make our forum more appealing, make use of more moderators so there is less "shit" on it. Or even make an activity based system to get extra's? I will leave this one open to our imagination. The thing we got here is a lovely community mainly based on TF2 players. I think I can speak for the majority of our members here if I say. Don't let our community die!! This is a place where we met each other, made friends, had fights, laughed, spent more time with each other than with most of the family and especially we became close to each other. It would be a shame if this ends. My last message is, n0name please face the facts. When a community is growing you simply can't handle it on your own anymore. Don't let FoG die!!!! I will leave this thread closed mainly to prevent a storm of shit and complaints. I think I said my thing and there is no need for any completion. The only thing I expect is a clear answer from @n0name what he thinks and how he sees the near future of our beloved community. If not i will bump this every day.
Regarding the events, I have (after 3 hours of work) finally managed to correctly set up the permissions. With that, event admins can upload new plugins/extensions/configs and remove/move existing ones (which are symlinked to the master installation). For the rest of the servers, I finally need to find some time to throughfully test the web interface to which Downy will have access to (and get the fucking linux permissions working). Side note: why doesn't SSH allow a PATH component to be owned by a different user -.-
Great!! I like to see progress, after all a little work at the start can save a load of work in the end! However, why could this happen so fast when I put it in public, while posting it in the event forums it is left to die and there is no interest in it? Now for the forum part, we really need to make it more appealing to others. What is your vision at forum moderators and can we do something with referrals, (I know that is possible with vBulletin), or even forum activity. Maybe make some benefits over it just like on the server. I think we need to do the best we can to save this and make it an enjoyable place to be. Because in the past 2 days I talked to a lot of people who think it would be a shame if we would fall apart. This is a start but sure not the end of it, there are more changes we need to make to save this thing we got right here. We have a few capable people around here which have been in the community for quite a while now who can take certain jobs from you to make some more time for yourself. Just put a little faith in these members, I am sure you know who I mean!!
1.) Forum I don't plan on hiring any global moderators soon, the main source of shitstorms (DR) is banned and several other related people left too. What I could do is add section-wise moderators (just like for the trading part), which could moderate a certain forum/section only. Referrals are possible, but I think something like that would be also good: vBExperience 4 - vBulletin.org Forum Could be connected to the AP system, so when you post a thread/post (duh), you will be rewarded with AP. 2.) Late answer Tbh, I simply forgot to further reply to that topic after my initial post, plus it got buried in a subforum somewhere.
No global moderators? I totally understand that! It is not doable to manage the whole forum for a moderator. However sections are a great way to go. I think we should have a section to do applications for forum moderator and maybe only make it visible to people who are allready admin? But that's something to discuss. If you agree on that, I could spend some time on it to set it up for you so you only have to review it. I think the system you showed there is great though, however I think we need moderators in each section then to prevent post farming!! I think connecting it to our AP system could help to attract people to our forums. I think we need to explore the possibilities on this. For late answers. If you agree upon it I will mention you next time if I need an answer on a subject. But just no answer in a week gets very frustrating if you try to setup something and you are bound to certain limits. And at last to come back at a post before. You said you need to test the Web interface thoroughly which Downy gets acces to. Is it possible to do this before you go inactive? I think it is quite crucial that we are able to maintain the servers even if you have less time for it. eventually they are the most important part of our community!!
Yea, would be nice if you could work out some sort of concept. For the testing, hopefully I will find some time till easter.