Heyo! Sorry for not posting new stuff in a while, but I've been a bit inactive in the art stuff these months (well, except for some stuff for contests which I will show another time). But anyway, here's a little update with some Breaking Bad fanart:
I'm well aware that I am not the most active or the most involved member of this community, in fact I tend to sit on the sidelines in various off-topic threads and post snide remarks because I'm a wannabe cynic, but this particular subject is something I do have a bit of experience with. I'm an administrator of another community which is very similar to subSPUF's current situation, but it wasn't always like this. Rather it used to be large and public, with new members joining every day and went on to become a more closed and secluded community.
The thing about large and open communities is that it will attract a lot of different people, especially if it is advertised. Here's a fact: You will not like some of those people. Ultimately it is what made me very wary about forum-users, because I (initially) administrated the other community with as much friendliness as possible and I had a real sense of duty to make sure problems were resolved, be it technical or emotional problems between users. This essentially spun out of control and ended up having the administrators and moderators act like councillors for everyone and their everyday problems, because here's another fact: The vast majority of the internet population are retarded and can't deal with their own problems, nor can they let a grudge go.
Eventually it boiled down to so much stress on the administrators and moderators, that 70% of them quit their "job" and the community within the span of a year. The rest of us started getting jaded, stopped giving a damn about the community and its problems (because we were bombarded with trivial issues on a daily basis). Essentially, the lack of administration caused a shift in the community, that ended with 80% of the active users to become inactive, leaving only a tight-knit core that's still there today... Much like subSPUF is right now, a tight-knit core of ~25 regular posters. This entire thing happened over the course of 2 years.
That being said, there were quite a few benefits to a public community with no real recruitment policies (Anyone and anything goes).
A: Even if 90% of the people who joined turned out to be clueless, there were several good people, who we would have never gotten into contact with, had our community been secluded. Good people who I still talk to on a daily basis today.
B: Our "services" were packed to the brim on a daily basis. Game servers, Mumble servers, forums etc. All of these were packed with people with a wide range of interests, not to mention our forums got several hundred posts per day. We were definitely getting a bang for our buck in terms of servers and advertisement. Today we've cut down and now run only a single game server, a single Mumble server and our forums.
C: With a large community comes a large range of options. I'm not going to lie, we were actually making a lot of money in monthly donations (We offered donator perks on our game serves in the form of coloured text and other visual goodies, nothing p2w, along with access to hidden donator boards on our forums). Enough to sustain our servers and even do little things outside of it (Weekly events, where we offered games as prizes). It allowed us to try things out and better the community, make it an interesting and fun thing to be a part of. That's not even touching on the many in-houses we held in various team-games, back when we were enough members to actively and regularly square large teams (TF2 Highlander, for example) off against each other.
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I have no strong feelings one way or the other regarding this. I am not as involved with this community, as I am with the other one. I just want to make sure that everyone who voted to keep subSPUF secluded read and understood that SupremeCommander would be moving many of the projects, that currently has a home here, to another place where they can better be advertised and gain attendance/viewership/listeners/whatever.
There are merits for a larger community and there are merits for a smaller one. An open subSPUF doesn't necessarily have to go down the drain, like my old community did (To be fair, the MAIN reason for my old community "dying" as it did, was because the head honcho kinda left without a word for the better part of six months).
I like this site because of the fact that it is the way it is now. The SPUFServer and other projects are largely irrelevant to most of the members here. Nobody will feel slighted if the day to day workings of that are moved elsewhere.
Allowing anyone and everyone to join basically shatters what this has become, a private forum for a large group of friends or near-friends, where we can talk about whatever we please with a minimum of moderation, and I see no reason to do so.
If you and others feel the site needs to grow, then fine, but it should really be done as it has been, people invited specifically by members of the forum (and preferably only ones who have been active at least 6 months or more). Anything else will basically ruin this place.
As much as we may poke fun at it nowadays, let us not forget the horror and headache of the Pootis Poster Invasion.
If there needs to be more direct interaction with the public for the sake of the SPUFServer, I think making something else would be more appropriate. SubSPUF is basically a whole other community from SPUF, just sharing a name. Having an influx of new and possibly undesirable users would ruin this place, and I like it this way.
Idiot Cube reacted to Rammite in REFERENDUM: The Future of SPUFpowered