6 replies to this topic

[Matthew]

Website Health

Despite adding several new members to the PureZC moderation team in April, site staff have been sluggish in achieving our community improvement goals. The staff team is committed to nurturing the site, and we want to do more to uphold that commitment.

 

As staff, we wish to acknowledge several issues: 

• For weeks, the SR victory showcase feature went unimplemented.
• The PureZC expo has been left running indefinitely.
• Oft-discussed Discord upgrades, such as quest project forums, have not materialized.
• The Superlatives forum has been left on the front page for months.
• ...and more!

We understand that acknowledgement of these issues is not enough. As a result, site staff have committed to taking immediate action in order to reinvigorate PureZC. The rest of this post will describe our goals for the site, broken into three parts, providing everyone with a concrete understanding of where we’re headed.

 

Immediate Actions

In the first part of our initiative to improve the site, staff will be taking immediate action on the following items -- expect to see these completed by the coming Monday (7/24).

• The Superlatives forum will be archived away from the top of the forum index.
• The Summer Expo has wound down and will be closed accordingly.
• We will pitch a site-run summer quest contest. Expect a forum post to gauge interest; staff will collect feedback on how to shape the contest.

 

Next Steps

For the second part of our initiative to improve the site, staff will follow up on community-backed ideas that never saw the light of day -- expect to see these completed by the end of next month (8/31).

• The Quest Club will begin playing quests.
• Site News will be revitalized.
• New site events will be pitched to the community. Staff hope to explore non-competitive events to foster engagement.
• We will make certain improvements to the Discord server, such as improved user report functionality and the addition of a feedback channel.
• The Summer Quest Contest will be held.

 

Looking Ahead

As the third and final part of our initiative to improve the site, staff will explore more creative changes to PureZC’s operation. Expect to see these points expanded on as we move into fall (or Spring, if you’re upside-down).

• The PureZC Discord server will begin testing Discord’s forum feature, providing users with a space to showcase their quest projects beyond the website.
• We will begin moving away from the traditional Superlatives format, and pivot towards some kind of community awards showcase. More details on that, hopefully, as the end of the year approaches.
• The site’s backend code is not sustainable in the long-term, or near-term quite frankly, and the entire staff team must explore reworking PureZC’s forum bedrock. This includes transitioning into a new forum software.

As staff begin tackling these goals, expect to see more forum posts, providing our perspectives and opportunities for discussion between the community and staff.

 

Thank you for your attention,

- PureZC Staff

[Mani Kanina]

Was this thread meant to be open for replies?

"The PureZC Discord server will begin testing Discord’s forum feature, providing users with a space to showcase their quest projects beyond the website."
"The site’s backend code is not sustainable in the long-term, or near-term quite frankly, and the entire staff team must explore reworking PureZC’s forum bedrock. This includes transitioning into a new forum software."

These are the two points I'm the most worried about, if I'm being honest. Setting up project related spaces in the discord is a good idea, but if that expands further in scope then there is a huge risk of it eating up activity that would otherwise be on the forum board. Which, speaking of, forum boards are somewhat of a dying breed. The discord server is more than active enough, but that does not really translate to the forum as much. A lot of the discussion is happening rapid fire there instead in contrast to here. That's not necessarily a bad thing, but I'd not want to see the forum dying since I think it's a better format for certain kinds of discussion.

The codebase not being sustainable is quite bad. Ideally someone would have made minor updates to it over the years to keep it running, but that seems unlikely. Changing to a new type of software means uprooting everything, which will likely not be easy for a wide variety of reasons. Not that I don't understand the need, but the question of what to change too is likely a sticking point. There's few forum board softwares that are in active development anymore, I can only think of one on top of my head.

I'd recommend *against* going the modern route and going with a WordPress implemented system. They are not ideal for something to install and forget about it, the software auto-updates, and can break plugin compatibility unless you keep track of it all. Not to mention that because it's so wide spread used, it also gets the most wide spread attacks against it.

[Taco Chopper]

I'm going to break rank a little here and give you some responses that may or may not be my viewpoint alone - and not necessarily the moderation team's as a whole.

Was this thread meant to be open for replies?

 Yeah. A common issue has been the lack of transparency and general communication on our end; this is obvious with threads like this one posted by Aslion. The thing with transparency is that it needs to go both ways in my opinion; it's one thing for us to say and apologise for certain things, but it's also important for the community to give feedback on what we've suggested. 
 
The community of the now is a very different one to ten, even twenty years ago. Smaller perhaps, and because of that we might not necessarily need to play by the same hand of site staff of the past - i.e. a strict, rigid enforcer attitude isn't going to work in 2023 even if it may have in 2007, 2013, etc. I also think being proactive and reactive is pivotal now as well - we need to figure out what works for the greater good of the community. Whether that's by trial and error, I'm unsure.

These are the two points I'm the most worried about, if I'm being honest. Setting up project related spaces in the discord is a good idea, but if that expands further in scope then there is a huge risk of it eating up activity that would otherwise be on the forum board. Which, speaking of, forum boards are somewhat of a dying breed. The discord server is more than active enough, but that does not really translate to the forum as much. A lot of the discussion is happening rapid fire there instead in contrast to here. That's not necessarily a bad thing, but I'd not want to see the forum dying since I think it's a better format for certain kinds of discussion.

It'll be interesting to see how the scope of project channels work; I absolutely agree forum boards are a dying breed courtesy of social media, Discord etc. Discussion on Discord being "rapid fire" is something that I also agree with; quest updates might get buried beneath memes, shitposting, general conversation etc as well.

I feel the current quest project system serves a purpose, and it does it well; it's a balancing act in my opinion. It's as much a matter of having the project channel for those bursts of updates/content but still using the quest projects on the site for everything else they do currently. 

The codebase not being sustainable is quite bad. Ideally someone would have made minor updates to it over the years to keep it running, but that seems unlikely. Changing to a new type of software means uprooting everything, which will likely not be easy for a wide variety of reasons. Not that I don't understand the need, but the question of what to change too is likely a sticking point. There's few forum board softwares that are in active development anymore, I can only think of one on top of my head.

I'd recommend *against* going the modern route and going with a WordPress implemented system. They are not ideal for something to install and forget about it, the software auto-updates, and can break plugin compatibility unless you keep track of it all. Not to mention that because it's so wide spread used, it also gets the most wide spread attacks against it.

I already touched on this in a post yesterday, but I'm feeling I'd be in a similar position to you. What forum software would even be in active development in 2023? For what it's worth, I absolutely suspect newer iterations of IPB are locked behind a subscription model, and it'd be hard to believe that any alternatives that would be in development would not be behind a subscription paywall either. That itself would open up a whole other can of worms, with questions like "how do we pay for the website to stay up?", "do we go back to ads?", or as I shudder, "do we introduce a PureZC Gold Plus membership scheme"?

On the contrary, the forums break whenever it's someone's birthday, the mobile version is limited in functionality, you can't post tied winners of contests like Screen Rebirth and SotW on the front page (despite there being an option to declare a winning entry as a tie on the control panel), and I'm sure there's dozens of other bugs, issues and whatnot that others on the moderating team could rattle off of the top of their heads. The big thing to remember too is that David and Russ only just got access to the backend from LtM towards the end of last year; so goodness knows how much work there is to do in that regard.

[David]

Following up with some of the immediate actions that were listed:

• The Superlatives forum has been archived, and is viewable here along with all previous Superlatives.
• As posted here, the Spring 2023 Expo will be archived by Friday, July 28th, to allow for a bit of extra time in case there's some last minute feedback and discussion some members would like to have with the entries. Please let me know if that timeline is not amenable!

 

I also see the larger discussion here regarding a future forum software and backend code transitions. I will elaborate a little more on that in a future post here, as I currently don't have the time to provide a full response (out of the country at the moment), so please bear with me for the moment!

[Mitchfork]

Thanks for the renewed Site News, this one was long overdue I think.

Any updates on the quest club? This was one I was interested in seeing happen.

[Jenny]

I believe the goal is currently to get it up and running proper sometime in the early-mid September range! 

[Taco Chopper]

Yeah, I need to sit down and set everything up behind the scenes. The subforums are finally set up as of this week, waiting to be filled with lovely content like frequently asked questions, how the quest club works, etc.

Might be closer to mid September because of work commitments for me - it depends on whether I'll have a computer with me, or if I'll even have the time to do so. Either way, I'll map out what the Quest Club looks like in due time