Alright, it’s essay time. I mainly stayed quiet over the whole Forum-dying situation, however, I figured I should reveal my voice on it.
To be honest, I’m overall fine with all the new users coming in, and “replacing the old ones”. It allows for a whole new generation of Makecoders. However, a lot of the users in this discussion have made a lot of nice points. I guess I side with them, like @personalnote and many other users, I couldn’t really connect with all the new users, I feel like the forum went from Makecode-Share-Project-Hub to something far off-topic. That’s not a positive thing for something about the game engine forums.
Plus the forum has deteriorated in terms of quality and organization over the years. It lacked the enthusiasm it used to have. I remembered that everybody was looking at the legendary mega collab, Makecode Kart, waiting for someone like @Kiwiphoenix364 and @KWX to give us this new, mind-blowing update. While the collab was never finished, it remained one of the most fondest and greatest things to every step on this forum, and rightfully so. However, I no longer see this, many great collaborations being discontinued, new collaborations that may as well be deemed as hopeless, and the new mind-blowing stuff almost ceasing to exist (like something half-decently cool only pops up once a year). But again we’re not limited to collaborations, we cannot forget about the other projects, it is for some reason so much harder to find NEW and great projects. Sometimes, I feel like huge (official) game jams are our only hope for finding great stuff, and they are rare.
What happened to @Kiwiphoenix364 3d Platformer? @KWX Carrier? @theCobolKid Tiny Soccer Cars? @PixelDoodle The Biggest Smash Bros Game? and so much more? The forums used to be a place of greatness, a place where people could share their passion for coding, no matter whether they use Blocks, JS, or Python. I can’t see it anymore, many Makecoders are close to blind. I left the forums temporarily because of life issues, but now I realize, there is another major factor, it is because my interest in the forums has exponentially decayed. @Unique probably said it best
Now, I’m not remorseless, so I apologize if I offended any of the new users. However, a reminder, the forums are run by us users, but the majority of the users are mostly off-topic with every single thing they post. The way I currently see this situation, more users joining = Forum Vets decreasing, Correlation = causation in this case. They are causing big problems. I feel like Scratch is now better than Makecode, not just because of their game engine, but because of their community as a whole. Like, have you seen what is happening right now?
Example:
Dinocraft:
July 2023
This is going in the right direction, great game, great potential. A well-deserved game-jam-honoree. Fast forward to 2024, and it escalated quickly.
Now, I can accept that whole off-topic posts flying around. After all, as long as a community exists, there will always be people who decide to make off-topic stuff, for some reason. However, the main problem is all these off-topic posts obstructing the great content. If you’re going to make off-topic content, feel free, I’m not a dictator, at least make the off-topic content somewhat beneficial to the forums. Stuff like Chatting Area! Have fun!, and Weekly Topic, are MASTERPIECES at doing this. Everyone loves them, they allow us to bond with each other in a good way, compared to most of the off-topic stuff I see today.
Now, time for the million-dollar question, how can we save these forums? I suppose we continue to create great stuff, no matter what kind of off-topic posts anyone makes. We push it out to the forums for all to see. Get everything back on track. I also took a look at other people’s approaches to this issue, I’ll respond to 2 of them
This sounds like a good idea, but I found some holes in it though. I won’t point all of them out, but the main hole I see is the “dedicated members that had been active on the forum contributing for a while should be a thing though”. It is a broad category, by dedicated, I don’t think it only means people who create high-quality content. Maybe it could mean the people who collected the most badges, the people who liked the most content? It is a broad category, the way I see it (subjective), and every member is dedicated to these forums, even if they post off-topic content. They continue to post stuff, even if they get a warning from the mods. Also the whole separate chat category, only for dedicated members might result in problems, since this may result in a gain of a higher power. More power for the dedicated, less power for the not-as-dedicated users. Giving specific users more power may result in some serious problems since we have no idea what the powerful might do. Maybe they will use it fairly, maybe they will unwarrantedly exercise their power on the lower users. So it is most likely best if there aren’t any separate chat categories, better safe than sorry.
I go more into depth here.
This is not a good idea. First, it is pretty offensive that we have to rely on an entirely different community just to save ours. Second, griffpatch, ggenjie and the chipm0nks weren’t the main reasons that coding communities exploded in popularity. Scratch has over 103,000,000 users, and Griffpatch only has 330k subscribers, so YouTube isn’t the best way to save Makecode. Plus an increase in users may not have much of a benefit at the current time being.
Plus, I feel like @personalnote said it best
And done with my rambling, after so many words and characters, I can finally rest my case.