Today had me thinking, Chatters is something that I feel quite strongly about, although it is not mine I almost feel it is my baby and for that I worry about it.
Since my return to BYOND I've seen that things have barely changed yet the anti-newbie atmosphere there makes distressed to put it nicely. I can't quite stress enough how important Chatters is to BYOND in general, nearly every major community now has a forum and a chat-room. Both are vital in communication, the forum is great for complicated questions and announcements, but the chatroom should be there to let people meet, discuss game ideas, get quick coding tips or fixes and to be honest thats not whats happening.
I think if this wasn't the case we'd see Tom in there, and all the super oldbies as just a place to hang. But its not the case, what we have is the usual crew talking the usual talk to the detriment of newbies and it just freaks them out.
I've been thinking of ways to get it easier on newbies, and my time on Furcadia comes to mind, which is two points, specific people who help out newbies (e.g. have them alerted when newbies arrive, and have their names highlighted in general conversation) and a newbie specific room that newbies first join and only either the helpers join or it's explained to them how to create a channel, or join another etc.
This is just general musing, of course Chatters is a great program and kudos to Xooxer and everyone else who's contributed to it but just don't let it stagnate into a hormone-fest.
All ideas very welcome, feel free to post about them in your own blogs as opposed to the cramped comment boxes, I'm sure with the members page anyone can find what you've wrote.
ID:165
 May 22 2005, 11:36 am
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May 22 2005, 11:58 am
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Kunark
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I think that's a great idea :)
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Trouble is, there probably aren't enough users for splitting them into sections to be worthwhile or even desirable. Which turns out to be bit of a vicious circle, because new users wouldn't be able to get the help they need because there aren't enough users, so you try to recruit more users, but they're new users as well! And hardly any new users become old users because they're segregated away from everyone else, so they can't talk to anyone, so they get bored and leave. Oops. =)
I say Mertek gets banned, and then we go from there. ;-P | |
Hey, Maz-bot. Although I lack any comments pertaining to your post, I felt obligated to write something here.
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As you've no doubt seen on the Chatters forum, this is one of my favorite subjects to complain about. I think the best solution is Xooxer's "just make your own newbie friendly channel". However that plan has the one major flaw all channels do; when there are ten users on average it's almost impossible to make a channel and keep it active.
This is made worse by the fact that if you moderate you'll end up banning most of those ten. To top it off most people will go straight for the room with the most people, so those ten really do control the flow of Chatters. Setting up a good set of rules for your channel would probably help a lot, that way you can have people not only aware of the rules but have people moderating for you. On the plus side if any channel has a hope of working it's Maztekia. =P | |
I agree. Something needs to be done to clean up the BYOND community, and I can see Chatters as a good place ot start.
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Crispy wrote:
I say Mertek gets banned Crispy, that is GENIUS! | |