You are really starting to piss me off Yama, but i am sure I will forgive you soon enough, im not the grudge type. I read your PM, then read the post I quoted above, which negated any sympathy I had or was feeling before, for the time being.
To be fair, I wrote that reply far before I received a call and had to head out which then lead to a draining afternoon and hence my PM asking you to cut me a break, as I didn't have the time or mindset to deal with such things. But here I am, despite it all, so I might as well give you one last response.
Its time for a history lesson, our lesson begins in 2011 when the gaming forums still existed. We had sub-forums, Nintendo, Sega, Microsoft, Sony, General. Everything had its own place for discussion, it worked well, games had their own topic, game exclusives were in their respective forums and the fan boys of SD had their own special corner to talk about their favorite company. Jump ahead a year to 2012 and the decision was made to do away with that format, so everything was in one place, I was against the idea because I thought it would clutter and scatter the gaming topics and make specific topics harder to find, which naturally it did. But we all got used to it and moved on. Jump ahead again to now, 2013. We have the problem of not enough topics and extended discussion because its all in one place like the original game plan for removing the gaming sub forums originally was set into motion for. See the dilema? We went with the plan from the changes from last year, and now low and behold, we want it to be the other way around. We want More topics, more game/series specific discussion, which the old format provided better than anything.
I really dont know what to say, or how to advise about this any better than I already have. last year we want one thing, now its like we want the old way back but no one even realizes what we want now is essentially what we had before. Its really starting to irritate the crap out of me. Surely everyone realizes this is whats happening? Think about it.
Whats done is done. It would be far too much work to try to bring back the gaming sub-forums, and I wouldnt wish that task to any staff member here. I just want a inch or 2 of recognition that I tried to warn everyone of this and no one would listen, and here we are a year later, and my fears have come true.
I guess at this point having tried both formats, I dont really care which one we use, I can deal with both. But make up your damn mind about it, its annoying as hell having to go through the drastic forum change on a yearly basis, talk of locking topics and merging forums and all that wears down. We dont need to changing the way we talk to each other on here every year, just come up with the best logical idea and stick with it.
This place will pick up more when and if we ever get more shenmue. We cant force a crowd around here, just let things naturally do what they do, we have a dedicated site to a as of now dead franchise/series its gonna be small and niche, our traffic expectations for these forums are a bit higher than whats actually realistic.
I have said my piece about this and I am not arguing about it anymore, if you want me to help come up with a better game plan for this place, cool, I will do my best. But I am not playing into the current ignorance any longer. I'm sorry but thats the truth, as is everything I have said here in this post. I wouldnt make a post this long and detailed if I didnt love this place, I just hope some of you can realize what I am trying to say here, it makes sense.
But what you aren't seeing is there is no problem, everyone voted for it (hence you should be telling the community to make up their mind, not me) and we're continuing in the direction we have been. We got rid of a bunch of forums to have discussion in a single forum , the problem is we were having it in a single thread . We get rid of the thread and now actually utilize the forum . Mission complete.
Listen to this next part carefully and I do mean carefully, please. I did not come up with the idea solely. I received multiple PM's about it over the past month or two. I then took some members suggestions and presented them to the community. The community decided and I acted, for the community. Do not address me anymore in regards to this decision, address all of your piers which is 95% of the site.
I'm going to also present another history lesson. In 2010 this place made 245,000 hits a month, now it makes over 2,000,000+ monthly. It was presented to me because it was dying and when the hosting expired you wouldn't have had a Shenmue Dojo. I took over and now you're still here on a site that prospers despite seemingly dead subject matter.
And yeah, some Shenmue news would be fantastic. We can all agree on that.