one year later...wickedfire is beginning to suc

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Says who? Of course you can...it just takes a lot more work than a loosely moderated forum.


Oh man.

I walked the walk. I didn't do loosely moderated. It STILL blew up! To the point that people's real lives were affected. Get a user with a group of followers, put a huge stick up that person's butt and all of a sudden leadership shifts. Lord of the Flies happens on the internet daily.
 


Scott, look into the psychology of internet communities. Busy communities have meltdowns. Yes, you can control the tone, but the users...no way.

If you control them, they will leave.
Perhaps I am a moron, but if they cause shit in your forum, show them the door. Of course, I don't give a shit. I hate running forums. The idea of monetizing a forum is horrendous and I have WAY better things to do (another reason why I installed the flag system, so if it goes downhill, it's the community's' fault).

I strongly discourage anyone looking to make money by starting a forum. It's a time waisting venture.
 
Well shit what can we do about it? Just ban everybody who asks a stupid question. But then won't we need to figure out a uniform way of determining whether or not a question is stupid? Or how about we stop worrying about other people and just make some fucking money.

That's up to Jon and the mods and guides who are shaping this site. They may want it open to all, and figure people will gravitate towards those they feel most in line with.

There's always the promotion system in vbulletin. You get access to certain forums after a set amount of posts or rep or whatever.

There are a million ways to segregate a forum. The issue is...is that the way to go?
 
Perhaps I am a moron, but if they cause shit in your forum, show them the door. Of course, I don't give a shit. I hate running forums. The idea of monetizing a forum is horrendous and I have WAY better things to do (another reason why I installed the flag system, so if it goes downhill, it's the community's' fault).

I strongly discourage anyone looking to make money by starting a forum. It's a time waisting venture.

I agree with you 100% on that also. Forums are a resource suck. When I walked away from mine, my revenue for myself increased immensely. My stress levels dropped, I'm more openly bitchy (which is good, I don't have to kiss people's asses anymore), but I'm also having more fun with what I do. I hate running forums and I hate paying for them even more.
 
I walked the walk. I didn't do loosely moderated. It STILL blew up! To the point that people's real lives were affected.
Oh, my bad, you must be operating a huge ass forum. That's like trying to control digg's hexcode posts, a whole different situation. Sorry!!

Theres a downfall to huge forums, admins can easily lose control, even with a team of 100 mods.
 
4,000 women. It seemed like a lot of them had PMS at the same time, or were pregnant, or were going through the change, or were just crabby. They averaged 75 page views per user at it's peak.

After the blow up, it's down to 10. I'm thrilled with that. To me, that's normal...not the insane lunatic forum.
 
No shit, Einstein. I'm in an internet cafe.

Must be the same internet cafe as another banned member :)

How about this idea instead. Instead of this thread being a big fag fest (no offense aden) lets turn it into something constructive. Since you're the one who started it how about you pick a topic that you would like to hear or know about, and whoever has some expertise in the matter can respond with some useful knowledge or experience about it that can actually benefit you and anyone else who reads this thread.

So go ahead, pick a topic that would be of value to you and maybe the rest of the forum.
 
If the quality is so poor, why are you still here?

Rather than bitch about it, make some suggestions. That would at least make this post remotely useful. :)

Laura
 
Oh, and it's a debate forum. Translation - beat the crap out of each other over your parenting choices, the latest political news, welfare, and whatever. Our top thread had 75,000+ page views and close to 100 pages. And it was one big girl fight.

The forum now is closer to what I wanted it to be, it's a lot more intelligent debate and much much less drama. I still will never do another forum. I like making money too much, and there just aren't enough hours in the day.
 
There are a lot of new wickedfire members contributing to this discussion who joined in the past few months or so. What they don't understand is that the so called 'decline' of wickedfire began following ASW which a lot of you newer guys may be unfamilliar with.

ASW (affiliate summit west) was a hyghly hyped affiliate summit that took place in las vegas in the later half of 2006. The expectations were high, and it was unequivocally a major letdown.

Many wickedfire members attended, taking time off work and paying for air travel and lodging to gain further insights as to how to make money online as well as network with other like minded people. But the presentations were uninspiring, and consisted of rehashed material. Many people walked out which usually doesn't happen unless the caliber of material is very poor. (remember they took time off work and payed for travel in order to attend ).

The point is, older members here lost faith in wickedfire following ASW and it has been that way ever since to a degree. Too many posts and threads catering to newbies. No much rehashed material. Noobs need to be hazed; now we're spoonfeeding them.
 
If ANYBODY has any ideas to make WF a better place, email / PM / AIM one of the mods. We'll be happy to give it some thought and maybe it will get implemented. If you notice obvious spammers, REPORT them. When you report a post, an email goes out to every mod.

I'm probably one of the softest mods here. I've personally unbanned a couple people. One deserved it, the other made me look like a fool. I believe in second chances though. Also, IMO n00bs shouldn't be auto-banned. We all started somewhere. I think the community does a good job of putting them in their place and helping where appropriate. If they take it personally and start acting like a complete asstard, then one of us steps up and bans the fucker (ie. Mr. Drucker).

I also believe that some of the "decline" has to do with the influx of new blood. The larger a forum gets, the more diverse. 1 year ago, there were only 600 or so members (in the first month), now there are almost 9000. n00bs are an unfortunate reality if you want a forum to grow. If you want it to be the same 600 members forever, it will eventually die, due to lack of new input. Some n00bs actually prove very quickly they deserve to be here. Some prove they need to be introduced to "Italy" (think of Italy's shape).

Diversity brings a lot of things to light, and for some people, that may mean a drop in quality, for others it may mean fresh ideas. For WF_Former, Wickedfire may have moved in a direction that wasn't to his / her interests. This also happens. You can't please everyone all the time. Again, if you are unhappy with the current situation, talk to us (the mods and admins) about it, and offer some ideas to change / correct any problems that you see.
 
ASW (affiliate summit west) was a hyghly hyped affiliate summit that took place in las vegas in the later half of 2006. The expectations were high, and it was unequivocally a major letdown.

Many wickedfire members attended, taking time off work and paying for air travel and lodging to gain further insights as to how to make money online as well as network with other like minded people. But the presentations were uninspiring, and consisted of rehashed material. Many people walked out which usually doesn't happen unless the caliber of material is very poor. (remember they took time off work and payed for travel in order to attend ).

I'll agree that ASW wasn't all that it could have been, but for me it was enough to meet the other members of WF and do some networking. I got the chance to meet ILC, engaged, Dru Sam, Mike Krongel, Jon, Brandon, Jdog, Smaxor (very briefly), Lerchmo, and many others.

Even if ASW sucked for material, that's not Wickedfire's fault. Wickedfire didn't produce it. So, I don't see how that could be held against the forum.

The point is, older members here lost faith in wickedfire following ASW and it has been that way ever since to a degree. Too many posts and threads catering to newbies. No much rehashed material. Noobs need to be hazed; now we're spoonfeeding them.

So haze the shit out of the n00bs. I don't disagree with your statement. Seems like more and more, I'm replying to n00b posts with, "read the forum" and maybe a couple links to some related posts. Don't feed the n00bies, make them work for it. All the info is already here somewhere. Give them hints, give them links, don't waste your time rewriting the same shit. For example, "What is arbi?" response "Search the forums you fuckin' lazy asshat". Simple.
 
Oh Laura, I feel for you! That has got to be worse, I'm learning from here just how high maintenance men in forums are! (Sorry guys, but you all are still adorable).

I've been preaching that we need more bunnies for awhile now, but jon thinks they're too cute and distracting :)
 
A great model that still exists, and is going strong is The Well. Salon took it over, but The Well (even with all it's insanity in the beginning) is a great model. Incorporating that into a forum structure is something I couldn't manage to do. Someone will though, and it will end up being the perfect mesh of MySpace and forums.
 
So haze the shit out of the n00bs. I don't disagree with your statement. Seems like more and more, I'm replying to n00b posts with, "read the forum" and maybe a couple links to some related posts. Don't feed the n00bies, make them work for it. All the info is already here somewhere. Give them hints, give them links, don't waste your time rewriting the same shit. For example, "What is arbi?" response "Search the forums you fuckin' lazy asshat". Simple.

I'm a softie at heart, but I agree with this.

You all scared me to death when I signed up. I was terrified to post, I was sure I was going to get banned for saying the wrong thing. So I made sure I read everything. I saw Scott's sig, and I knew this place was not forgiving.

Reading all those posts took me a week. I didn't have time to post, I was reading non stop.
 
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