Recently, it seems there has been a group of players who are interested in "reviving the forums" and making the platform a more active place. Now, if you know me, you know the forums are my favourite part of the network, since joining in 2018 I thoroughly enjoy engaging with players, discussing suggestions and hearing feedback from the community from crate ideas to events to punishments and rules - as well as providing support and taking part in the forum games. So I am the first person to support the idea of finding ways to encourage new players to be part of the forums and get involved in sharing their opinions and engaging with the wider community.
However, I think it is important to note that the forums was never designed to be as fast-paced of a platform for communication as the Discord for example. While I believe it is great to see players creating threads and commenting their thoughts on topics, the meaning is lost when it comes down to just farming posts and flooding the forums to be listed under the "most posts" section. In my opinion, when this happens, it has the opposite effect of encouraging others to join the forums and instead makes the platform look untidy, off-putting and filled with spam. A major factor in this also has been the new Matrix Rewards system which encourages players to make a daily post on the forums in order to get rewards. However, I think
@Josh/P2 created an immediate and effective solution to this with his "
This is for Rewards" thread. It prevents players creating entirely new threads which usually contribute nothing to discussions and die off quickly, further creating a bad look throughout the sub-forums.
That being said, I am not attempting to discourage anyone from being active on the forums - but, I believe there is a huge difference between being an active user and flooding the forums to rack up a higher post count. Now, from a staff perspective we are much more lenient with the forums and how we go about "punishing" and handling issues throughout threads - this is because it is not our goal to silence players or stop them from sharing thoughts, venting frustrations about rules/punishments/situations they have experienced, however, all we ask in return is that you use common sense and remain respectful. There are constructive ways to use the forums and encourage activity on the platform. Flooding posts every few moments is not one of these ways in my opinion - there is a reason for the cool-down on posting.
I believe the team and Dacon have taken productive steps to encourage the wider community to use the forums. For example: The monthly ELITE title polls have inspired players to share their ideas for custom titles, and offers the opportunity for players to have a say in which titles they would like the chance to win from crates. Whenever there are giveaways taking place, they choose players from both Discord AND the Forums, so players feel inclined to comment under announcement threads for the chance to win keys/cubits.
I bring this up, because around a year ago - before I came back to the staff team, I proposed some suggestions I had, with hopes of incentivising more players to use the forums and create more use for existing features. This was seen by Dacon, and it's clear he took the feedback on board and used it to create ways to have the community engage with the forums. The thread can be found here if you're curious:
https://manacube.com/threads/forums-overhaul-incentives.86593/.
All in all, my point is that there are constructive ways to motivate players to be active on the forums - but making them spam filled and off-putting is not the way to go about it. I'd love to hear if there are any more ways players think the forums could be adapted to make newer players more inclined to get involved in discussions
